Friday evening i went to see Blind Guardian live.I have been waiting to see BG live for a while and maaaaan....it was AWESOME !!! Great show, good play list (although they didn't played Precious Jerusalem), they played 13 songs in a row without break, lots of headbanging (my neck is still stiff :D). Can't wait for next time....

Actually creating a assembly from source code written in multiple languages is pretty easy. You'll just have to invoke each compiler with the target:netmodule flag (yeah...command line) and link together all netmodules with the assembly linker utility (al.exe)

The "rub" is that not many compilers support the netmodule flag (no Boo support for instance) so if you wanna do it for C#/VB.NET....lucky you.But for others....

There is a lot of noise lately about the TestDriven net breaking the VS Studio Express EULA. Just wanna add my 0.2 eurocents to all this :

- i think that Jamie Casendale has NO RIGHT to do this. Yes...you read this right. I'm with Microsoft on this one. If you look at the "TheServerDise.NET" link above you can read the following gem :

"Jamie Cansdale released a free addin for VS that lets developers run unit
That's bull. TestDriven.NET is NOT free for a professional developer. According to the TestDrive site it can be used freely ONLY "if you are a trial user, student or open source developer". Personally this rubs me the wrong way because TestDriven.NET is simply a quick way to make money on open source projects (NUnit, MbUnit) and this whole Microsoft is bullying me smells like a PR stunt. Jamie Casendale has no right to break the MS EULA. -no matter how hard Microsoft tries to claim, VS Express editions are simply COMMERCIALS (yes...you read it right) for the commercial counterparts. The' re REALLY is no need for them. Hobbist developers can use and extend #Develop without problems.

Note: Parts of this apply to v1.3.4 which will be released new week. DataBlock supports 2 logging methods : - automatic logging of SQL queries (for debugging purposes). This can be enabled/disabled from the config file : <appSettings> <!--log settings--> <add key="LogEnabled" value ="False"/> <add key="LogFilePath" value ="sql.txt"/> </appSettings> or from the Configuration class. Where running from a ASP.NET application make sure the user has rights to write to the specified file. - runtime logging( this will be available in 1.3.4) which allows you to trace sql queries . Here is how to use this Configuration.OnQueryLogging += new QueryLoggingEventHandler(OnLog); protected void OnLog(string data) { //here you can log the query appending the execution context (user name, credentials etc). } Note that the event handler for the QueryLoggingEventHandler is called BEFORE the query will be executed.

First of all....good news.Finally, the latest version of Boo supports generics. !!! Yay.

I'm planing to create a scripting interface for Shopkeeper. Practically will allow you to extend a "virtual page" (which now can contain only static html) by adding script capabilities. The plan is to support multiple languges but, for start, we'll have just Boo support.

So, here's a very simple sample which hosts the Boo interpter which interacts with a static field :

namespace ConsoleApplication4
{
public class Program
{
public static int X;
static void Main(string[] args)
{
X = 78;
Boo.Lang.Interpreter.InteractiveInterpreter ip = new InteractiveInterpreter();
ip.References.Add(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());
ip.Ducky = true;
ip.Eval("ConsoleApplication4.Program.X = 789");
Console.WriteLine(X.ToString());
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}


That's all. Brilliantly simple.

When Visual Studio crashed the 4th time today i really got annoyed. This fragmentation is starting to dry up my creative juice. I can close my eyes on lots of things but this is getting ridiculous. Visual Studio and I are pals( we are together +10h a day. Every day).Yeah....we go back a while ago. Summer of 2000 if i remember correctly. Then Visual Studio became , from a simple name dropped on a CD which contained a bunch of Microsoft IDEs, the one. The SINGLE IDE.

In retrospective stuffing everything in a single IDE it was a bad ideea. I'm sure the complexity skyrocketed. The first version (Visual Studio.NET 2002) was pretty bad...buggy as hell. But hey, i thought, let's give them the benefit of doubt. After all it's the first version and the first version can't be perfect, right ? While VS.NET 2003 patched things a little bit it was still way behind , feature wise, to IDEs like IntelliJ. Visual Studio 2005 added lots of things but things are far from great. I see 2 big problems with Visual Studio :

- you have to pluck the buck every 2-3 years. This is ridiculous. Each version is buggy and incomplete. It is a overall improvement over the last version, but for God's sake, you pay for it every time (for updates). These 2 year updates should be FREE. Think a little ...want to use the ASP.NET designer with a masterpage that contains multiple ContentPlaceholders ? You can't...the frigging thing does not support that NOW. Pay up for next version for this functionality.

- the foundation is a swamp. No, really.... each new feature is added on a foundation full of bugs. They don't have time to iron out all the old bugs but still they keep piling things up. Oracas will add a XAML designer. As with any Microsoft version which is 1.0 i bet that it will be full of bugs. Do you remember the VS.NET 2002 Windows Forms designer and the "white screen of death" ? (which btw is still present in 2005 !!). I'm pretty sure that the XAML designer will have a equivalent to that. Look at their refactoring implementation. Even the most basic thing is not right ....they aren't contextual. Wanna refactor ? Sure....just pull up a big menu and starting racking your brains to see if it works in the current context. If it doesn't you get a useless error message. Nice, eh ?

So, anyway, the future looks bleak. I'm sure Orcas will fix some VS 2005 annoyances while adding a big pile of its own which will be fixed by Visual Studio 2010 which in turn will add.....and so on.
The saddest part is that , with all these, there isn't a VIABLE Visual Studio competitor. (maybe i'm picky but , honestly, i can't call a IDE something that doesn't have an integrated debugger. Very good text editor....yes. But not IDE). We have #Develop (which is really nice but not really up to Visual Studio yet), XDevelop (again...nicely done but not there yet) and....well that's about it. JetBrains dropped their C# IDE. Borland is....well...neah...i'll better not say it aloud.
If someone wants to respond to this by pointing to commercial addins....please save it. You didn't understood anything then.

You REALLY start to appreciate Subversion when you must work with something else (in my case Vault). TortoiseSVN is ,perhaps, the best example why friction free tools simply rule.

Here's some random thoughts on the recently announced Silverlight and associated technologies.
- the CoreCLR is a very nice achievement from a technical standpoint. So now we have CLR, Compact CLR, micro CLR and CoreCLR. The more the merrier i guess.

- DOM manipulation from Silverlight supported languages is GREAT. I was hoping for a JavaScript replacement for a long time and doing development in C# both client and server side was the next logical step. After the Silverlight runtime becomes ubiquitous i think people ( i know i will...) will start ditching Javascript altogether. Also ubiquitous debugging. :)

- death of AJAX ?! Here's some food for thought....if we have the CLR running on both client and server, we will be able to do WebService/WCF services/sockets connections. This is huge. No more Javascript/JSON/raw XML parsing.

- now that , at last, we have a cross platform version of the CLR ported (and supported) by MS to another platform (x86 OSX) will MS bite the bullet and port the entire stack to OSX ? I'm willing to bet my socks that they won't do it.

- speeeeeeeeeed. The chess demo numbers were impressive.

- will Rich Internet Application succeed? Personally i don't think so. I prepared a post about RIA vs smart clients so more on this later.