Sounds like there’s a bit of a negative vibe going around the blogosphere concerning the impending release of a buggy VS.NET 2005. All things considered, this doesn’t surprise me much. VS.NET 2003 shipped with so many bugs that were never fixed. Heck, there wasn’t even a service pack!

I don’t understand why they keep shipping below-par releases of their IDE. I feel as if enterprise developers are left out to dry to better serve Microsoft MVPs doing inane web services demos. None of those MVPs ever demoed a solution with more than 90 projects. I’d wager that noone within Microsoft ever even tried it, considering how badly it works.

My suggestion: don’t ship until you’ve got all the bugs out. It’s such a no-brainer that I can’t believe bloggers need to bring it up.

Now this is a virtualization product to get excited about! VMWare has decided to release a free version of their powerful VMWare workstation product that can run, but not create, virtual machine images.

Since they’ve included the Linux version in this deal, you might be seeing Live CDs with a full virtual machine player installed. In fact, you could distribute your application as a Linux LiveCD that boots your application image in VMWare!

I also imagine that we’ll be seeing VMWare-enabled Linux distribution demos. What better way to try out a different flavour of Linux without installing it?

From Groklaw:

The Australian National Archive has selected OpenDocument XML for long-term storage of government documents. GovTech News also reports that Open Source Victoria has called for all remaining Australian government institutions to follow Massachusetts’ lead in adopting OpenDocument XML…

Wow.

eInk is offering a development kit for its new active matrix electronic paper prototype. For only $3000, you can build yourself an e-book reader with their Linux-based evaluation board.

I think I’ll bite when this drops below $300.

I’ve decided to take the plunge and switch RSS readers. I was using SharpReader at work under Windows and Liferea at home under Linux. Neither reader met my needs very well. I found that SharpReader was a big memory hog and suffered from the general heaviness of most client-side .NET applications. Liferea at home was fast and supported the page-per-blog model, but it was somewhat crashy.

Starting today, I’m using the Sage RSS Reader at home and work for my RSS reading. It’s a firefox plugin, so I can use Adblock to block those annoying feedburner ads in some of the feeds that I read.

Sage is very fast and the integration with Firefox is a big plus for me. I enjoy having tabbed browsing available with the feed items (something not available in SharpReader). Another plus is that it stores the RSS feed list in my bookmarks list, allowing me to use an extension like Syncmarks to keep my feed list synchronized between work and home.

There’s an active wiki for the Sage community where you can find stylesheets for your feed list and GreaseMonkey scripts. Who would have thought that you could use Greasemonkey scripts in your RSS reader?

I’ve decided that after nearly a year of very little activity, it’s time to start looking for a new maintainer for nprof.

nprof is pretty much the only open-source .NET profiler on the map. It has support for multi-threaded, multi-appdomained applications and even has basic support for profiling ASP.NET.

I am sad that I have to move on from the project before it hit 1.0, but it’s clear that my limited time isn’t going to change any time soon. With someone that has time to contribute to it at the helm, I’m certain the 1.0 release will be spectacular.

Contact me either via email or on the nprof-developer mailing list if you are interested.

I took a close look at Edgewall Software’s trac tool today. It’s an integrated bug-tracker, wiki, Subversion repository browser and general project goal management tool, all available in a single web interface. It’s open-source and free for anyone to download.

The tight coupling of all the services seems to be a major win for this tracking tool. All of the components are aware of changes in the other components and can react appropriately. This is apparent in the timeline view that picks out changes from all the modules and puts it into a single project overview.

trac also features an interesting concept for storing its current state – it keeps it in Subversion itself, serialized as XML. This gives you the ability to roll your project back to a previous revision if something goes wrong, as well as giving you direct access to the data itself to modify externally. On top of all this, it’s been designed with a pluggable architecture from the ground up, potentially allowing developers to add custom functionality as necessary.

From what I can tell, they look like they’ve done a lot of work on the new, unreleased version. It’s been a few months since the last release, but this upcoming release should be well worth it.

UPDATE: Fixed the URL.

I accidentally posted my last entry while playing around with mo:Blog. It’s very handy to be able to compose a message offline and post it when you please!

The only missing feature is that I can’t seem to set categories per-post. There is an option to set the category per blog, but that’s a big pain to change every time.

I like Typo (and its XML-RPC backend) more and more every day.

I’ve been looking briefly at the latest C# 3.0 specification and all I can say is that reading some of those LINQ examples hurt my eyes.

Seriously, who wants to read code that looks like this? What does it do?

public void Linq19() {
    List customers = GetCustomerList();

    var customerOrders =
        customers.SelectMany(
            (cust, custIndex) =>
            cust.Orders.Select(o => "Customer #" + (custIndex + 1) +
                                    " has an order with OrderID " + o.OrderID) );

    ObjectDumper.Write(customerOrders);
}

I have the same problem with C# 3.0 that I have with Perl. It’s easy to forget what some of the unfamiliar operators do.

I’m disappointed that they aren’t making use of the yield operator and anonymous functions for this stuff instead. I would prefer to read code like this instead (note that this is using a pseudo C# 2.0-syntax):

ICollection result = Collection< String >.Create(
  delegate() 
  {
    foreach (c in customers)
      foreach (o in c.orders)
        yield "Customer #" + c.ID + " has an order with OrderID " + o.OrderID; 
  }
);

A bunch of examples like this are available here.

I think I’ve got my blog converted over to Typo now. It’s going to be a bit of a pain getting my old article archives up and running, but the tough part was just getting the blog ported over.

I’m not going to worry about importing all my old articles into the new blog. I have some mod_rewrite rules set up to ensure that all the articles are redirected from their many old URLs to their new homes.

I have the old news archive available here, but Google is still the best way to find stuff on here.