Monday, November 11, 2002

To Switch or Not To Switch, That is The Question From the "Funny as Hell" department: http://www.fandango.net/switched.mov I pose the question: Given that Rotor now runs on MacOS X, if a .NET developer buys a Macintosh does that constitute as 'switching'? Regardless, I would like to see the following 'switch' commercial: [Fade in to a geek standing in the middle of a pure white room.] [Cue music from Apple's "Switch" ad.] Geek: So, I decide to tackle the component object model... you know... COM? And I go out and buy Don Box's "Essential COM". Geek: So, I've read this book like 300 times and I still find COM way too hard. I mean, IUnknown and CoCreateInstance and I'm like, Huh? It takes me like 6 months to get "Hello, World!" to up and running. Why is this so hard? Geek: So, I go and download Service Pack 1 for Windows 2000 and I'm like, "Whoa... what's this NGWS?" I install it, it's up, and I start programming. And, it's like my prayers were answered. Next year, .NET is released to the world. Geek: Big difference! Wow! Geek: We're talking C#, we're talking MC++. We're talking sharing implementations amongst languages! Inheritance between VB.NET and C#. A managed runtime. WinForms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET... it's unbelievable! Geek: Now, I do all of my development in .NET. I don't know what kept me in COM for so long. I guess it was the thrill to say to VB programmers that I programmed in C++ only to watch them shudder in disgust. Geek: My name is John Bristowe and I'm a .NET developer. [Fade out.] 8:48:36 PM    comment []

Give NAnt a Chance Recently, I've had a hard time trying to sell the benefits of automated builds and testing through tools like NAnt and NUnit. Rather than fighting a war with words, I prefer to wager the battle with song: Two, one two three four Ev'rybody's talking about Writing, Checking, Building, Revising, Linking, Compiling This-ing, that-ing, is-g, is-g, is-g. All we are saying is give NAnt a chance All we are saying is give NAnt a chance OK. Enough. In all seriousness, I really like NAnt. It's a C# developer's wet dream. In fact, I'm surprized it hasn't recieved more attention than it has! It's such a great tool for any .NET developer - especially when you consider just how much heavy-lifting this tool does! I mean, it integrates with NUnit and NDoc. Plus, it features an add-on for Visual SourceSafe as well as inline .NET code! Wow. 8:39:32 PM    comment []