Just stuff i’ve been reading through in between my code runs. Makes some interesting read. Here are some of them.

• A neat site with lots of links and lots of junk news and trivia. Nice site to spend some time.
• Live, Jobs Tells Stanford Grads – I’ve seen a similar talk of his before but this one makes me think that he’s going nuts. Well but thats just me !
• Jackie and the Brain – A neat story about the evolution of an AI being !
• Who Will Google Buy Next? – If you are one of those people who love Google and are interested in what they are going to do next, then check this story. Nevertheless, it gives you lots of links to many other interesting services, free and paid which could be very helpful.
• ScienceMatters@Berkeley, June issue – Not much but if you are scientifically motivated, then watch the issues regularly. The boys at the Big school do post some nice research material here.
• The Simnuke project – Sheer craziness if you ask me but oh well, who isn’t ???
• Why We Need Friendly AI – Nice site with all the Asimov laws. Frankly, i’ve got to confess that i was blown away by the book(I Robot) and there are some other interesting perspectives in this site which are weirdly cool !
• Toll Free 800 Directory provides information about 1-800 numbers, reverse lookup and tracing 1 800 numbers – Well if you are stuck in the US, like I am, this could be a handy reference at times you never expect !
• Cool Fractals @ freaky-fractals.com – Its all about Fractals. I’ve always loved the idea behind them. Nice site.

There has been a lot of talk about how expensive our favorite IDE, VS.NET is right now. Charles assured in one of the replies to the post that the issue is being discussed internally and will be addressed soon. Cool ! Actually, i don’t know what stand to take on this issue. Is your productivity important or the one time benefit of buying VS.NET professional edition ? It really is very confusing …

Anyway, as our quest for a free .NET IDE continues, here’s one to quench that ! Check out Eclipse for .NET ! Infact, i think i picked up this link from one of the replies, but not sure though… Eclipse as most of you would have heard is an awesome product which was developed by IBM and then later opensourced. I have heard quite a lot from fellow Java devs that the IDE is powerful compared to IntelliJ‘s IDE. Well i’m not the judge in either case but i definitely think that the plugin will help all those cribbing for a good IDE with C# support.

Again, #develop as many of you already know, is a very flexible IDE completely written in C# which is opensource and freely available. There is rarely something extra needed apart from #develop and ASP.NET Webmatrix for developing WinForm and WebForm code in .NET. What more do you want ?

And apart from all that, for the most hardcore developer who doesn’t care for IDE features, there is one really cool app to write code in C#. Ofcourse it will not work at all for enterprise level apps but for smaller projects, definitely useful. Check out Textpad. FYI, its got syntax highlighting functionality for C# too .. Download the file here.

Code on …

I guess, this is a pretty decent list of free IDEs to work on .NET right now. I might have missed a lot of other ones here but these are the ones that stand out quite prominently, i should say 🙂

Update : Just found out that the Notepad2 free utility provided at Flo’s freeware site also supports syntax highlighting for C# ! And the best part is that the whole thing is customizable, just like Textpad’s syntax highlight feature 🙂 Cool.

The news of the day : My favourite book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is going to be made into a movie ! And they have a blog too … Too bad they don’t have an RSS subscription yet … Ok, back to business.

• A KB Article that provides a fix for a very common error in ASP.NET. Fix for “Server Application Unavailable” error message if a DLL is loaded in the 0x33A20000 address space and you request an ASP.NET page.
• A very detailed article on Code Access Security (CAS) and Design Patterns.
• Latest Channel 9 Video with Ward Cunningham – How did you come up with the idea for the Wiki ?
• Read about the review of the new book : Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham.
• There is a free online course on security at the microsoft E-learning center. Check out Clinic 2806: Microsoft® Security Guidance Training for Developers. This online clinic provides students with knowledge and skills essential for the creation of applications with enhanced security. Students will learn about the need for implementing security at every stage of the development process and best practices for applying security principles. Students will also learn how to use established threat modeling methodologies and tools with other best practices to minimize vulnerabilities and limit damage from attacks. Finally, students will learn how to implement security features to enhance security for Web applications and Web services that are built by using Microsoft ASP.NET. via Sudhakar Sadasivuni
• IronPython: A fast Python implementation for .NET and Mono. A pretty neat article with lots of benchmarks and some real advice on how to improve the performance in the managed world.
• Design Guidelines Update: Enum Design via BradA
• A nice article on Document-Centric .NET which stresses on the principle “program to an interface, not an implementation”.
• Clemens gives an acronym to SOA. Guess it before you click 😉

Quote :

Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, “It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my own damned liver.  – Jack Handy

Definitely a very cool perspective huh 😉 Will work for beer !! Ok. Time to check out these bunch of interesting links now…

• There are a series of support webcasts from Microsoft that have been posted recently. Most of them talk about the internal workings of the ASP.NET infrastructure and the general nitty gritties of programming in ASP.NET. Check out the bunch of links that i found below …

• Microsoft ASP.NET Server Controls : Learn about the internal workings of custom ASP.NET server controls such as ViewState, PostBack, Events, and Rendering.

• Microsoft ASP.NET Threading : An in-depth look at the Microsoft ASP.NET threading architecture, and what it means to your Web applications. You will learn how to monitor the ASP.NET ThreadPool in real time, use the real-time ThreadPool information to tweak the machine.config to yield the best performance for your application, and avoid threading trouble when using COM components from ASP.NET (especially when you are upgrading from ASP).

• Microsoft ASP.NET: An Overview of Caching : Hear about the features of the different types of caching that are available in Microsoft ASP.NET, and where to use them. This also includes information that will help you gain a general understanding of how caching can improve performance in Web applications.

• Data Binding in ASP.NET Web Forms : Learn how to retrieve data from different data sources and populate it in data bound controls. You will hear about various ASP.NET Web controls and the binding techniques related to them. You will learn about simple data binding, but the WebCast will focus on complex data binding.

• Microsoft ASP.NET: Side-by-Side Execution with ASP.NET : A brief introduction to the side-by-side concept, which involves running multiple versions of programs and .NET Framework on the same computer. It will then discuss how those concepts apply to ASP.NET applications, both at run time and during their development, including using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET to create Web applications.

• A very useful KB article that details “How to create keys by using Visual C# .NET for use in Forms authentication”. Learn and improve your encryption of form data…

• Inheritance versus composition: Which one should you choose? – by Bill Venners of Artima fame. In his own words, its a comparative look at two fundamental ways to relate classes. A must read.

• The list of presentations done at the EMEA Architects tour 2004 in Helsinki. Very very nice 🙂 Don’t miss this one.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

• This is a new site where there are architecture related articles, links and news. Just seen it. Nothing to comment yet. Check it out.
• Building a Defensive Perimeter Against Malicious User Input – Simple and true.
• The SOA Implementation Framework White Paper. See here.
• A cool article on creating SQL Based RSS Feed !
• A bit old article but found the idea very interesting. Yet to try out the code. Read about Circular Buffer here …
• And Google’s stats show that Win XP, 2K and 98 comprise almost 87% of the OS that are used to access Google worldwide !!! Wow ! But i still can’t beleive that 22% of those people are still using Windows 98 ! hmm ..

Nothing new and you might have already noticed it, but i wanted this link here to stay for future reference.

MS presents the online SQL Server 2000 System Table Map.

Included in this document:

• Log Shipping Tables in the msdb Database map
• SQL Server Agent Tables in the msdb Database map
• Database Maintenance Plan Tables in the msdb Database map
• Replication Tables in the msdb Database map
• Backup Tables in the msdb Database map
• Systems Tables in the Master Database Only map
• Systems Tables in Every Database map
• Replication Tables in Each User Database map
• Replication Tables in Each Distribution Database map

Pretty cool.

On a sidenote, a friend of mine pointed me to a post on a small performance test wrt sorting and filtering of custom collections on 1 million custom objects… Not bad. Not bad at all !