May 2005 - Posts
My 200th post. And dedicated to Star Wars. I've seen Revenge of the Sith twice now and I absolutely love it!
I'm kind of a big fan, read little over a dozen books and have seen the old trilogy many, many times. Many times! When The Phantom Menace was released, I bought myself a lightsabre and a blaster and went into a fight with my brother at the movie theater. Result was we both made an appearance on a local tv station, slashing our lightsabres at each other. After that some people recognized us in the street. Being greeted as Jedi Master Dennis. Awesome! ;-)
First, let me tell you that I don't expect the prequels to be the same as the first trilogy. For some reason, people expect exactly the same thing and can't enjoy watching the prequels. Whereas I love just everything in the prequels. Come on, so many lightsabres, so many duels, space battles. If it was just for the opening scroller I'd go see it. Heck, I even didn't hate Jar Jar and loved Yoda in AotC.
And again, I love Revenge of the Sith. I knew Anakin was going to be Vader, and that all Jedi would be killed. But when order 66 was executed, and it was happening before my eyes, I was stunned. My thought was, that his couldn't be happening! And the way Anakin was turned over to the dark side was done really well. He was of course triggered by the vision of Padmé dying and also the fact the he caused the death of a Jedi. For Anakin, there was no way back. The only chance to save the one he loved, was to join Palpatine. The only thing that did not seem right was, that he immediatly slaughtered everyone inside the temple. Even in his talk with Padmé, he said he wanted democracy and help the senate and Palpatine. The fact that on Mustafar he says to Obi-Wan that he has brought peace to his empire points out that he has twisted thoughts of what the or a republic should be, but it's peace he wants. Slaughtering all Padawans and younglings in the temple doesn't bring you that.
One of the scenes I absolutely love, is when Mace Windu is going to arrest Palpatine and Anakin is in the council chamber, with Padmé looking over Coruscant. Everything is very silent with a choir singing in the background and you can see that Anakin's must make a decision and that it's troubling him. I love that part! And then of course it starts. Anakin turns, the Jedi fall and Obi-Wan must fight Anakin. That's some of the fastest blade action I ever saw and it's just great.
This is a movie that I will be seeing many, many times.
May the force be with you all.
In the past, Nikhil Kothari was in my blogroll. Unfortunatly, he was inactive for very long and I removed him from my rss reader. Until I came across a post that was referring to a new tool he created and I was happy to see that in the past few months he was much more active then before. Nikhil Kothari is a lead developer on the ASP.NET team and he knows a thing or two about controls.
He created a tool that integrates into your Internet Explorer and shows you wether your app is in debug mode. It can also hide/show the trace information and even show it in a seperate window. Especially server control developers should take a look at the tool. More information and screenshots can be found at Nikhil's blog. Some visitor als created a version for Firefox.
A while ago there was a discussion about the different versions of Visual Studio.NET and the fact that you could only get one version with your MSDN Enterprise subscription. Just posted on Rob Caron's Team System blog, that every version (Developer, Test, Architect and Suite) will include a 5-user version of Team Foundation server. This is good news, as part of the discussion was about independent developers not getting the Team Foundation server software for free.
There's also some more info on the licensing by Rick LaPlante and on the official site.
A lot of times you hear or read about not touching your database when (technically) unit testing your application. Some reasons were given, but I never really understood why. At most projects, a lot of what we do is shifting around information (data) and always to and from the database.
At the first MAD CodeCamp, Darrell Norton had a presentation about Test Driven Development and testing your database. I've downloaded the presentation and it's a clear presentation, even without comments in it. Good thing is he also included the source code so you can see an implementation of the three possibilities Darrell offers.
If you check the download directory there are a lot more presentations that might be usefull reads.
Update : Roy Osherove has written an article for MSDN concerning unit testing with database acces. Thought I'd add it.
It seems the promised support for Nullable types is not what people expected it to be. What everyone expected was, for example, that we could map database values directly onto .NET variables. In other words, when we have a varchar in SQL-Server that has the value [null], we could just copy it into a string value in .NET.
In your (C#) code, you specifiy a variable as a nullable type by adding a questionmark when declaring the variable. An example is shown below.
But there are some issues.
- According to Paul Wilson, they're not actually implemented into the framework. There is support for them, but they don't really map. When you take a look at the example code below, you can see the declaration of a nullable integer. In the other two lines you see that you still need to check wether the value of the datareader is null or not. You cannot just insert the value of the datareader into the variable as this will throw an exception when it is indeed null.
- Also converting types and binding it to datagrids for example, will not just work.
- Paul also claims that the implementation is done purely by the C# team, and there's no VB.NET support. Frans Bouma had the same issue, but some readers responded with links to the VBTeam weblog and to Panopticon Central where they also discuss the VB.NET & C# issue. So it it is possible in VB.NET, but with the same restictions I just mentioned.
- But there's more to it. David Kean ran some performance tests, an noticed some (minor?) performance issues when using nullable types.
So some support has been implemented, but there are issues that need to be considered before just using these everywhere. And with the 70% code reduction claim for ASP.NET, Microsoft probably didn't use too many nullable types. ;-)
Example
1: int? nullInt;
2: if (dataReader.IsDBNull(index)) { nullInt = null; } 3: else { nullInt = dataReader.GetInt32(index); }
On Gordo's weblog I've just read Microsoft Netherlands has a DVD for download, called the Visual Studio.NET 2005 Beta Experience. A lot of material is on the DVD like a training project that should familiarize developers with designing and developing mobile, smartclient and webapplications for a fictive airline company called WeFly247.
On the DVD are also PowerPoint presentations with spoken content as well as audiofiles with over 50 hours of material.
This seems to be all Dutch material, as I cannot find any information on this package on the Microsoft USA site. If you're Dutch, or want to try the language, you can find the 2.5GB DVD here for download ordering the DVD.