Wowed by the latest beta performance improvements i have installed it. While it is a bit snappier when loading a big solution, Resharper’s auto completion is hopelessly broken in this beta (it crashes a lot throwing a LookupWindow related exception….yeah yeah….i have reported it). I’m anxiously expecting the final release but frankly i am beginning  to think that no matter how great this tool is, some part(s) of it will always be broken (until now the loading time for big solutions was almost unbearable).

The ASP.NET menu control is spiting out some truly crappy markup. It fails to work on IE8 (in standard mode), Safari, Chrome and Opera. Time to replace it with CSS+JS equivalent.

I noticed that the newly released IE8 has a nice accessibility feature. Basically  in the current URL the domain name is “painted” with another color making it very easy to spot.

Little little things :)

Looks like the Silverlight team is on a roll. Silverlight 3 beta is already here

Haxe is a pretty interesting idea. Basically a language who’s compiler can spit out source code in JS/PHP/Flash/C++ . In theory this is very interesting, in practice it looks like you’ll end up writing a “solution” in (at least) 2 languages……the logic in Haxe and the things unsupported by Haxe libraries (like UI toolkit) in “other” language.

Somehow related, Parrot 1.0 is out (slashdotted now).

     Despite what any REST fan would say, from the perspective of a OOP guy, SOAP makes much more sense. The invoked “complexity” of SOAP over REST is simply perceived complexity. If tools “shield” you from SOAP complexity then is SOAP complex ? The reality is that SOAP and REST accomplish the same thing but they operate on different levels . In SOAP case you have objects, methods, exceptions etc. In REST’s case you have a HTTP request and HTTP error codes (and yeah…it’s much nicer to get a SoapException describing the problem than to “remap” different error codes in your head for each request).

    From the perspective of the guy who must expose the service is much simple to “define” complex interactions with SOAP. Even the basic entity interaction (CRUD) is not so simple with REST because you’ll always need to expose multiple ways (with associated parameters) for GET (GetOrderByDate, GetOrderByCustomer, GetOrderByStatus etc). Even worse is exposing business logic errors with HTTP error codes.

So, i think that REST is fine for very simple “interactions” , for everything else go SOAP.

A somehow different fantasy trilogy. Has a few good points but the overall story arc is slightly disappointing  and it would have helped if the writing were a little more “direct”. Loved the conclusion from the last page though.

Unfortunately overall is hard to recommend.

Rise of the Argonauts

This is a game which has been slammed pretty hard in the reviews . Which is a shame because if you can ignore the technical shortcomings (and trust me …at least in the first part of the game this is a bug fest. Frankly i haven’t played another XBOX360 game this buggy)  you’ll discover a pretty good action RPG with very good writing (which is by far the best aspect of the game). It’s the story of Jason searching for the golden fleece.

Silent Hill : Homecoming

I’ve been waiting for another Silent Hill game for a while (especially since the game was launched 6 months late in Europe) and i’m happy to say that i haven’t been disappointed. This is a solid entry in the series with good graphics ( love the white noise graphic filter), pretty good overall story, excellent sound (you need to play this on a 5+1 setup) and the chilling atmosphere that the series is known for.  In short….must play.

It has to be QuakeLive (which basically is the 10 years old Quake 3 Arena). So we have a application which needs to be installed on our machine,  which than downloads a +250 Mb file on the client (the good old “pak” archive)

and is running in a browser window (and in the browser address space). That’s just dumb.

I’ve got a SVN “malformed file” error on one of my repos. Basically i did a commit…and then when i tried to update from another machine, i had this “malformed file” error. The bad thing is that i couldn’t find much info (except for this but it didn’t help). To “fix” it i had to replace the repo with a backup and recommit my changes.