Managed World

This was just too good to possibly pass up. I was chatting with Chris Williams over messenger about his new endeavor to learn C#. And this is what he had to say:

VB.NET is the girl you go out with in high school because you know you'll get some, even though you're really interested in the prettier girl (C#), who may or may not give it up.

Then you end up stuck with her...

eventually you start to love her, despite her flaws... but you always wonder what it would have been like...

 

Quite a way to compare two programming languages. Leave it to us Geeks to compare languages to girls =P.

If there is one thing that bothers me most about good terminology in computer programming, it is that if they are *too* good they become mere marketing buzz words. Key example: refactoring. I hear EVERYONE use this now even when it has nothing to do with what they are talking about. There are developers I know (thank goodness I don't work with any of them at Fios) where anytime they go in to legacy code to make a change, they refer to it as "refactoring" the code. Kuso! It just bugs the beejeebeez out of me.

Anyways, in that same vein, imagine my "surprise" (insert incredible amount of sarcasm and disdain here) when I found this post by Jim Shore in which he points to a MS guide on doing TDD with Team System. The problem? What they are describing, while having elements *similar* to TDD, is *NOT* TDD. I wouldn't usually mind this. But come on, call a spade a spade. If it's not TDD, don't use the term TDD simply because it's a "buzz word" of the day.

The more scarier possibility is that the author of the article (whoever it was) actually that it *was* TDD. There has been a lot of research and writings produced on the topic of TDD. How can it be so wrong?

Rather than me trying to add value to this whole debate (which I have none), I confer to the wisdom of some of the greats in this arena.

Jim Shore's Response

Ron Jeffries' Response

Uncle Bob's Response (aka Robert C Martin)

Have at it!!

 

Well, I get to enjoy a week in a cabin out in the middle of the woods with my wife. This is going to be very relaxing. No internet, no work, no phone, no nothing. Of course, being the techie that I am (and since it is partly *my* vacation also), I can't help but bring some of my guilty pleasures as well (no, I'm not talking about my wife (COME ON! It's a joke! I keed, I keed (I'm sorry honey =P))).

So, what pleasures of mine am I taking that would cause all my coworkers to make fun of me (get your mind of the gutter perverts!!)? Well, for one, I'm taking my laptop to do some programming on this little RPG diddy I'm messing around with. Two (and the one that got most of the razzing from coworkers), I'm taking my LCD monitor and an adapter to hook my XBox up to it (yup, I'm taking my XBox).

Chilling out in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with nothing but myself, my wife, my laptop, my XBox, and a couple of books. Now THAT'S what I call a vacation. You can tease me all I want, but I'm a geek. And I wear the geek badge with honor. I'M A GEEK AND I LOVE IT. There, you happy?!?!?

Plus, since I won't have internet, I won't be able to check any comments to this point until I'm back which means there's absolutely NO WAY any of you can spoil this for me =P.

So, I'll see you all here in reality when I get back from my week long vacation FROM reality.

See Ya! Wouldn't Want To Be Ya! I'm out!

Yikes, I didn't realize just how pathetic I've been lately with my blog. One blog post a MONTH?!? Geez, perhaps I should have gone to a support group or something.

What has probably been obvious to most of you out there is that I have been posting very infrequently lately. Part of it was because of a serious addiction that was caused by someone else. Another part of it was just my funk I get into every once in a while. You see, a couple of times a year I get into a downer where I don't do anything and totally withdraw into my cave as a hermit. Of course, it doesn't help when the cave you withdraw into has a stash like the one I had in it.

So, now I appear to be coming out of my doldrums which is a good thing. Unfortunately, this latest round lasted a lot longer than it has in the past. Hence, I have lost touch with a bunch of friends that I need to see again in order to start feeling somewhat normal. So, I guess it's time for me to get off my rear and start attending Padnug and Nerd Dinners again (I'm sure it's been somewhat quiet without me since I tend to be the loud one (my volume is directly proportional to my size)).

What does this mean for any of you out there? Probably absolutely nothing. I'm not going to say that any of my past projects are going to be picked up again or not. After all, I'm a roamer or wanderer. I do some to learn something from it. And as soon as I have learned it, I lose interest and move on to the next project. That's just the way I am. However, I would like to move BooM to VC# Express 2005. Although I have no current plans to revive the articles (it really depends on whether I am going to have the time to do it or not and still live a peaceful life).

I hate stress, and I induce it on myself way too much. So, perhaps if I avoid that this time around, I can go longer without getting burned out. I'm not like some other people I know that can do everything under the sun, meet all their deadlines and commitments, and still find the time to save kittens out of local neighborhood trees (although I'm of the ilk to believe that these people are actually extra-terrestrial beings (aka Aliens) who don't need to sleep and hence have an extra 6-10 hours everyday that *humans* don't have in which to get things done).

Well, hopefully you will actually see some blogging from me now. My blog hasn't died completely yet (although it's come close a couple times). I have no intention of letting it die anytime soon either (which brings up another point: on some of these community sites (like GWB (just for example)), have you noticed how many blogs there are with only one or two posts? Perhaps, that means that I'm actually already ahead of the game in some regards (or maybe it just means that I have more time on my hands to blog than other people do because they are actually responsible human beings)).

l8r (<--- hehe, l337 speak I learned in WoW, =P)

Well, after downloading Beta 2 of Visual C# Express Edition 2005, it didn't take long for me to come across my first annoyance.

The first thing I did was to create a new Console Application to mess around with the new features of the Console class (which happen to be pretty cool darnit). In .NET 2.0 you can now place text anywhere on the Console, change the background and foreground colors, programatically change the cursor position, etc. Basically, you can now achieve Curses-like development (not quite, but sort of) using the new Console class. You can just go ahead and check out Heroic Adventure by Chris Williams to see an example of it in action.

So, what was my annoyance? It was the fact that I wrote some simple code that didn't work:

Console.CursorVisible = false;

Console.Clear();
Console.SetCursorPosition(12, 12);
Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Cyan;
Console.Write("A B C ");
Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red;
Console.Write("1 2 3 ");

Console.Read();

I was eagerly awaiting for this to run to see my new baby in all its beauty and glory (aka Ugly Programmer Art). So, what was I greeted with when I hit F5 to see this baby run in the debugger? Well, I was greeted with a nice and warm "IOException: Handle Is Invalid." Oh baby, that wasn't intuitive. So what the heck was going on here?

I changed the code to do a simple Console.WriteLine() and found that the output in Debug mode was not to the Console window as I expected, but was to this "Quick Console" window in Visual Studio. How nice, huh? So, when running under the debugger, my Console was not the Console I wanted to use.

Luckily, it was an easy fix. What happened (at least for me), is that when VC# Express was installed, there is an IDE option called "Redirect all console output to the Quick Console window" that was checked by default. To fix this, all I did was uncheck this box (Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> General).

What is slightly more annoying is that this is a breaking change if you have legacy Console applications that you wish to debug, I believe. If I recall correctly, this is a new option/feature that was introduced in 2005 and is not present in VS2003 (at least it's not in the same place in my installation at work).

So, even though you created a Console Application, it will not behave like a Console application did in 2003 in Debug mode until you un-check this checkbox. Far from being intuitive I say. I'm just laying this out there in case anyone else comes across this.

Now, onward ho!

As some of you may have heard, Chris Williams announced that he has been named Chairman of the INETA Marketing Website Committee. Basically, this committee will be in charge of managing the content on the new, redesigned, DotNetNuke-based, up-and-coming INETA website (still under development).

Well, to make a long story short, Chris gave me the honor of being one of the members of this committee. I only hope I can live up to the expectations that Chris probably has for everyone on the committee :).

Oh, and if you happen to be an awesome artist and are interested in contributing some of your time and talent to INETA, contact Chris and let him know you're interested :).