About a month after releasing the first beta, Mono released the second beta that includes a c# compiler which is CLI compliant and also supports the same PE system as .NET. What is more interesting is that there are two stacks of APIs one for the Unix and its variants and the other is of the .NET Framework (v 1.1) to support ASP.NET including WebForms, WebServices, among other things. ...

If you have played with both the PDC and the WinHEC build of Longhorn (Build # 4074) and in your small applications if you had a class called SimpleText - that code would now give an exception in the new build with the error “Class not found”. So out of curiosity I asked on the newsgroups what was up with it and found out that Microsoft has consolidated their three classes to handle text to two - which help solve some of the confusion. Filipe Fortes who is the Avalon PM also discusses it in a blog here . ...

There has been a lot of talk recently hearting up the wires in cyberworld on Closures and c#. One of the question that some have asked is what the heck are closures? Well I don’t know what all the excitment is all about, but closures are nothing but what is also called the Anonymous Methods. There now that you know it, go do something productive! BTW, anonymous methods are cool and with the combination of iterators you can go pretty interesting things. Check out the latest msdn article for a quick read. ...

This is part 1 (if you will) of a couple of posts. I am surprised how very little most people know how the GC actually works. If you are reading this and are going to be interviewed by me, this is one of my favourite questions. *grin* This is based on an interesting post I found long ago I think on gotdotnet (sorry I forgot who the author was, I’ll try and google it and see if I can find the link to the original post). ...

Karan (see the Blogs I read section for his weblog) pointed me to this and I think it is pretty cool. IronPython is a new implementation of the Python language targeting the CLR. It compiles python programs into IL that can run on either .NET or Mono (now that is cool). This produces a standard assembly that other code can reference. It would be an interesting exercises to see the IL it produces and see if we can infer anything from that. ...

First of all, if you don’t know what the hell am I talking about, jeez, where have you been buddy? If you do but have not read the book, then please do yourself a favour and do so. You can buy it from here . Once you do finish reading the book, then come back here and we can talk about it. ...

PAG group just released the new library . If you have been playing with the beta of this, you know there is lots of good stuff. A excellent reference to keep near you! Now that this is “public” I will be posting some of the things I find here - watch this space, and till then, read up and enjoy! ...

Miguel Jimenez has a post on how to install Whidbey on the new Longhorn bits. There are some comments on some problems. I myself have not tried this (yet), will be posting my first impressions on the new build and then try this after that - probably this weekend or early next week.

I have been meaning to write something on what are iterators, well actually more on how they work and why is there so much “hype” around them, the only problem being the best excuse we all can fall back to - Time *grin*. After all Java already has them, so is that a big deal that .NET would (when Whidbey is released) have them. Anyways, the point being that Roshan has a decent post on that already - probably a much better job that I would do. ...

There has been a very interesting (imho) multi-part interview with the author of Beyond Software Architecture where he discussing various aspects like the relationship between Architecture, Culture and Goodness. Also goes on to discuss the social role of an architect, conceptual integrity and the importance of domain knowledge. I particularly like the quote … “ An architecture is like a dirt road. The first time a car drives over it, the road looks about the same. By the time the 10,000th car drives over it, though, there will be grooves in the road. As an architecture mature, it gets grooves.”. Some other interesting responses that I personally have learned from over the years and I can relate to are below. ...

From the last time, when DARPA issued the grand challenge, the cameras were there, the million bucks were there (drool), the people were there, the hype were there and the robots were there. So what was missing? Well the Robots followed my example and forgot their “brains” and were half blind and stone dumb! So instead of learning from that and letting the existing teams push on they want to try LAGR. As I say, common sense is not very common! ...

Recently google has been all over the news - online, print and television, atleast here in the US; and why not, with their IPO and everything, lot of people are hoping this would kickstart the recovery of the economy. I have been toying with a few other search engines for a few months now. These have also been highlighted in the media recently alongwith the google hype as a potential threat to google. The engines I have been toying with apart from google are: ...

This reminds me of a few weeks ago when during one of my IM sessions with my buddy Karan I was bashing up Linux (which from those who know is not really me). This lead to (atleast that is what I think) a frantic call from him - all the way across the pond - and we yapped like a pair of teenage girls for close to an hour +. The crux of that debate… err.. discussion we had was Windows vs. Linux. If memory servers correctly (which ain’t a lot *grin*), then this article pretty much sums it up. Here are some of the common OS myths that typically float around in cyberspace: ...

Bill Venners has an interesting article on Abstraction and Efficient. He says that Abstraction is a mechanism to understand things. A good analogy he lays out is in Mathematics. Where expressing a solution means we really did understand the problem and not write up some code to try a “special case“. Also states that it is important to generalise and see one particular problem as a example of the class of problems. You can read the article here , Part I (c++ style sweet spot) can be found here and Part II (modern c++ style) here . ...

This utility that can be used to quickly switch the .NET Framework version that the aspx pages are compiled against.I am not sure why you would want to run both the versions of ASP.NET on the same box at the same time as 1.1 is backward compatible to 1.0, but I am sure there are many reasons which make total sense - I just cannot fanthom any at this time. Internally, it uses the command line tool called ASPNET_REGIIS that is included in the Microsoft.NET Framework. ...

If you did not hear, then google recently launched its Personalised Web Search feature which is still not Beta (its on their lab page). Here you can go and setup you interests (essentially your scope) and then you can narrow down your results to only within the context of that scope. Quite interesting when you are looking for something which is also very generic or a completely different topic. ...

Some of you out there have emailed me and expressed interest in knowing a little more on what I do and what is the purpose of this blog and what the heck does it run on? Now I am absolutely amazed that there are people out there reading this. My question to you is, what the heck are you doing reading this, don’t you have work or something to do? Anyways, what can I say, I am a Geek! W00T! Computers is something (probably the only things) I know a little about and have been playing with them ever since I can remember. Computers even today is first a passion, then a hobby and then a career, I am just very happy I am doing something I love doing and getting paid for it. :) ...

I never knew this but if you want to force a debugger to launch (especially useful when writing a Windows Service for example) you can use System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); Now I have not tried this myself (yet), but have others? If so, whats the feedback?

Yipeee! I you are a MSDN Universal subscriber - you can download the version they handed out at WinHEC!

In Longhorn MS is looking to add some laptop-specific features designed to make portable machines easy to use as consumer devices such as portable DVD players. They are also looking to add a separate UI that could be “instantly booted up“ to play movies, music, etc. - hence getting you the the experience more comparable to using consumer electronics devices. For someone like me who is mostly on the road, this would be good, if I can cut down to one “device” (i.e. the laptop) along with the chargers, wires, etc that I carry - my shoulders would certainly thank me. ...

Longhorn Milestone 7.2 (M7.2) bits were handed out at WinHEC. Per Chris sells , the MSDN subscribes should be seeing this soon. You can check out some of the reviews from the WinHEC participants here . I am now rubbing my hands gleefully and eager to get my hands on it - have to wait for it to show up on the subscriber download at MSDN - will need a new HDD then :). Lets see if my small demos for Tiles survives or not - the PDC build, I run out of memory and finally have to reboot. ...

Quite funny check it out if you got the time. :) If you rate the movie, you can get a FREE copy of Visual Basic.NET

In a loosely coupled system (e.g. Service Oriented Architecture i.e. SOA), the dependencies can be either a Real Dependency or an Artificial Dependency. Real dependencies are the services that you need to fulfil your need, this is something that cannot be eliminated or reduced. Artificial dependency on the other hand are the features you need to adhere to in order to consume the services you need. Typically these fall in the categories of platform dependencies, API dependencies, language, etc. Although artificial dependencies cannot be eliminated it can be reduced. ...

A friend’s (Phil Kerkel) laptop recently got infected with HackerDefender which cost him about a day’s worth of work. Now this seems to be harmless, but something like this invading the system is scary, especially when you have all your data and not to mention in most cases a lot of our client’s data! Basically, these guys use the FTP services installed on Windows machines running on high speed networks (such as DSL/Cable, or University campuses) to they can use that fat pipe to distribute copyrighted material such as films, games and software etc. Sometimes these ftp servers are protected by a piece of software called HackerDefender, this software is used to hide files, processes and even ports from the user and investigating parties and is particularly difficult to infiltrate. ...

If you have had enough of Clippy, check this out. Not suitable for those with an aversion to profanity!