Watched Firefly in the last couple of days. Fortunately, at least for me (i would take fantasy over sci fi any day), is not a sci fi flick. Just a great show with a sci fi background..…good actors, good plot, really really funny jokes. Too bad there is only one season (15 episodes). Wholeheartly recommanded.

Serenity is next.

   I wrote a paper about extending the ASP.NET processing pipeline using HttpModules. You can read it here. The SessionCleaner module presented in the paper is part

of a nifty library of http modules i wrote and which i intend to open source soon.

As you probably know Microsoft announced that WinFX + .NET 2.0 = .NET 3.0 . That’s bad because :

– keeping the good  ol’ Microsoft tradition of 1.0 products beeing buggy i’m sure we won’t have “complaints” regarding this.

Do you remember the Windows Forms 1.0 release ? Do you remember the Windows Forms DataGrid showing “error messages”  on invalid operations !?!

I’m pretty sure WinFx will be like this. So the problem is that the .NET Framework updates are few and far between. Imagine you’re starting to

work on a hot new Avalon app and you discover a showstopper bug…well…bummer…..wait another 10 months for .NET 3.0 SP1. Aren’t you happy ?

 

– their place is not in the core .NET Framework. So WinFX is a big and significant piece of functionality on its own right . Why tie it to the framework

when it’s pretty sure that it will evolve differently ? Why delay the next releases of .NET because of WinFX and the other way around. Do you remeber the

whole Sql Server 2005 tied to .NET 2.0 fiasco…..wait for me another 10 months to ship.

 

– .NET 3.0 will be shipped before schedule and it seems it will not contain anything from what we know 3.0 will have (LINQ, C# 3.0 compiler etc).

Also the VS.NET Orcas will not be shipped with .NET 3.0 so we’ll have some brand new APIs to play with but no tools . Bummer.

 

– the next version after .NET 3.0 will be released a short while after 3.0 .Isn’t that cute ?

 

– seems to be strictly a marketing decision. So we have this new WinFX stuff….we can’t wait to ship it with Vista, we don’t want to

ship it alone because were afraid that nobody will care about it….so let’s stuff it into .NET and call it .NET 3.0 . <sarcasm> Just brilliant. </sarcasm>

 

The good part  : it will ship someday . Avalon will be here.

 

My 0.02 $.

Resharper is a wickedly cool addin for VS.NET 2003/ 2005 which really makes you “develop with pleasure”. The most important feature is by far the refactoring one which are way better AND FASTER than the default VS.NET 2005 ones. Unfortunately Resharper also has some annoyances : – his default shortcut keys override the VS.NET ones. I find this really anoying. It will be so hard to put a set of shortcuts which do NOT override the VS.NET ones ? Also , most of the shortcuts are bad……why the heck use Cltr + N for “Find type” ?! – it has some features that are somehow useless (like code templates aka VS.NET code snippets). The even more annoying part is that you can’t disable them. If you type foreach you end up calling the Resharper code template instead of the code snippet. If you want the code snippet you must Cltr + K, Cltr +X and then type the code. It will really help if these code templates could be disabled. – big memory hog. Other than this Resharper really helps with code cranking. Try at least the refractoring features.

This brings back memories of the wasted….err….nights spend playing Heroes 2 and 3 with my brother. The most important thing is that Heroes V stays true to his heritage. Practically the game mechanics are almost the same as Heroes 3. Sure there are lots of changes: the graphic engine, faction changes (do they have to change these in each and every single game ?!), UI etc but the core is the same.  

So if you’re interested in a TBS ….play it.