http://www.frogware.com/weblog/ A weblog for the .NET community Copyright © 2004 frogware inc. All rights reserved. webmaster@frogware.com en-us 2008-11-21T10:40:58-05:00 hourly 1 1970-01-01T00:00:00-05:00 http://bitworking.org/news/108/Three-orders-of-magnitude At some point in the past rolling out an application to 300,000 people was the pinnacle of engineering excellence. Today it means you passed your second round of funding and can move out of your parents garage. 2007-02-02T09:32:00-05:00 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070125.rmgame0125/BNStory/specialROBmagazine/home/?pageRequested=all That's the number of outcomes that are possible when eight competitors each consider three strategic options. Waterloo's wizards of game theory reduce the number to 1 2007-02-01T09:50:00-05:00 http://www.theopenforce.com/2007/01/disruption_in_t.html Yesterday, I wrote about some examples of disruption. When an industry gets disrupted, there's usually a consistent pattern that emerges 2007-01-30T09:42:00-05:00 http://apparentlymart.livejournal.com/4242.html One of the upcoming features of Microsoft's .NET framework is the System.Query assembly, where you'll find the Language INtegrated Query (LINQ) support. The matching new version of C# has gained lots of new syntactic sugar to make the query bits easier to use. 2007-01-29T10:14:00-05:00 http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnotherWayToReplaceStartRunEnsoLauncher.aspx Stephen Nelson turned me on to Humanized Software's "Enso Launcher" (blog) earlier today, and I've been playing with it all evening. I've been on a quest to replace Start|Run for years (podcast). I've also done a lot of work in UI and UX and these guys are definitely fans of Jef Raskin's Humane Interface for good reason. Not just because Jef was brilliant - but also because they worked directly with him. The Enso Launcher is dedicated to Jef. 2007-01-26T10:00:00-05:00 http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/01/24/whats-new-in-prototype-15.html The Prototype library is fairly compact (about 15K), and decidedly not a kitchen-sink library. It doesn't provide custom widgets or elaborate visual effects. Instead, it just strives to make JavaScript more pleasant to work with. In many ways, Prototype acts like the missing standard library for JavaScript—it provides the functionality that arguably ought to be part of the core language. 2007-01-25T08:53:00-05:00 http://cogito.blogthing.com/2007/01/20/the-google-development-algorithm/ What Google appears to have done is to set up a system which avoids the downsides of starting a company (long hours and risk of bankruptcy) and greatly reduces the required non-technical skills (such as employment law and buttering up VCs), but keeps a fair proportion of the upsides (respect and wealth). Of course you don’t get to keep all the rewards. But as Paul Graham says 2007-01-22T09:33:00-05:00 http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2007/01/17/building-enterprise-services-with-drools-rule-engine.html Weaving complex business logic into application code makes developers deeply responsible for understanding and maintaining that logic, and means that every change in a company's processes requires a recompile and redeploy. Using a rules engine like Drools offers an opportunity to split the rules into their own files, potentially editable by the subject-matter experts instead of developers. 2007-01-18T08:32:00-05:00 http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html See, it seems like there's a good way to design software. A best way, even. And nobody does it. Well, a few people do, but even in those rare instances, I think it's accidental half the time. 2007-01-17T09:38:00-05:00 http://research.sun.com/minds/2006-0928/ Bonwick and Moore have had fun taking the Jeff and Bill Show on the road. "We've never had to sell ZFS. All we've had to do is explain it," Bonwick observes. "And it's fun to watch the dynamics of the room change. We often start out with a room full of crossed arms and a 45-minute time slot. Two hours later everyone's leaning forward in their seats, bug-eyed and asking questions." (ZFS is to filesystems what the iPhone is to phones.) 2007-01-12T08:16:00-05:00 http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/ Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. 2007-01-12T08:15:00-05:00 http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macword/2007/01/keynotereax/index.php What a shocking, stunning, surprising Macworld Expo keynote address Steve Jobs gave today. It was strange and different in so many ways, from the complete lack of new Mac announcements (at Macworld Expo!) to the surprising removal of “Computer” from the company’s name after thirty years. 2007-01-10T10:18:00-05:00 http://cafe.elharo.com/testing/go-ahead-break-the-build/ There’s a philosophy in extreme programing circles that one should never break the build. As soon as the build is broken, everything stops until it can be fixed again.1 Some teams even hand out “dunce caps” to a programmer who breaks the build. 2007-01-10T09:43:00-05:00 http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/compiler_fun There's lots of fun to be had playing around with javac. I've never been real happy with debates about language features, I'd much rather implement them and try them out. For example, over christmas, Rémi Forax did an implementation of the ":=" declaration syntax, along with some other type inferencing touches. 2007-01-09T08:49:00-05:00 http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/08/Xhtml5lib While there unquestionably are a lot of applications of XML for which strict, draconian, error handing is appropriate, there also are a number of use cases for which robust scavenging is required, as is evidenced by the popularity of libraries such as Beautiful Soup and the Universal Feed Parser. 2007-01-09T08:46:00-05:00