December 2004 Entries

Linked on MSDN

posted @ Friday, December 31, 2004 4:23 PM | Feedback (0)

 

The other day I was playing with Google and did a check to see who is linking to me (this can be done by typing link:[yoursitehere] in Google) and I noticed that MSDN is linking to my blog in their Visual C# Developer Center page! Wow, that’s was amazing, and then I noticed that a good friend and former coworker of mine noticed (okay, I told him about it) and has posted about it on his blog. I feel compelled to create a trackback. To add, for those of you that have followed my posts where I have been using dynamically typed languages with .NET (i.e., IronPython), my first post in the new year will show an example of using Ruby with .NET, oh the fun, I can hardly wait! Wishing everyone a happy new year.

The Future of Software and Artificial Intelligence

posted @ Thursday, December 30, 2004 9:43 AM | Feedback (0)

 

About a week ago I watched the movie I, Robot for the first time, which I thought was overall was a good movie. I can’t help but wonder if we will ever see a situation arise in the future where software attempts to take over our lives, beyond the realm of how we use it today. That may seem like a silly idea, but think about it. How much has software changed in the last 5, 10 or 20 years. Obviously the Internet is playing a huge role in its growth and integration, globally. The marketplace has a huge potential expansion in the areas of human and computer interaction. As more research goes into making software better, more usable, will we see flaws in the system? Absolutely, but this is not to say it will be on such a grand scale as depicted in I, Robot, that was merely Hollywood exaggerating an idea to it’s limits. What do you think?

Unit Testing

posted @ Saturday, December 25, 2004 4:47 PM | Feedback (0)

 

John Lam has a great post about using Python (specifically due to it being a dynamically typed programming language) to perform your unit testing. IronPython is a great addition to allow you to use both the .NET Framework and python modules together. Everyone performs unit testing, right, if not, this is a perfect new year's resolution.

ObjectDock

posted @ Friday, December 17, 2004 1:17 AM | Feedback (0)

 

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted on here; I've been busy offline with the close of my new house which has been taking away from some of my online time lately. Now that the move is over and the cable modem is back online in a new location it's time for me to start posting again. I first saw ObjectDock a while ago and decided to give it a try. Originally, at least for me, it seemed a bit slow and actually crashed on me. I have since given it a second go around and I am rather impressed. There are a ton of downloads available at winCustomize.com that you add to ObjectDock as well. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this tool, it essentially mimics a toolbar commonly found on the Macintosh OS platform, which is animated when you mouse over each individual icon. It's definitely worth checking out, especially since it's free. Here is an image from my screen.

Heartland Developers Conference

posted @ Thursday, December 02, 2004 2:37 PM | Feedback (0)

 

The Heartland Developers Conference is only one day away now! This conference is a gathering from .NET user groups from Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, which is being sponsored by Microsoft, INETA and others. We have two sessions set up: .NET Today and .NET Tomorrow. This conference sold out over a month ago, if you're not able to attend this year next year we will change locations so we can hold more people.