http://www.kenrawlings.com Tilting at Windmills Since 1970 Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:23:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's been tough doing development in Visual Studio 2008 without ReSharper for the last several months, but as much as I enjoy ReSharper, C# 3.0 trumps it. I've occasionally installed the "Nightly Builds of ReSharper 4.0":http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+4.0+Nightly+Builds, but the sea of red around my LINQ code always resulted in the install ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2008/03/21/resharper-40-good-news-and-a-little-wpf-databinding/ Flex Builder 3 includes improved support for web services, but the process of getting it to consume a WCF service was still a bit trickier than expected. Here are a few pointers: # Flex only supports up through SOAP 1.1, so doing a web service import fails for the defaults Visual ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2008/03/20/consuming-a-wcf-service-from-flex-builder-3/ Google has made the "Android SDK":http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/developers.html publicly available. A few first impressions: * Android development is Java based and is similar to the method used to develop for the "Sidekick":http://sidekick.com: Compiled Java classes are run through a tool that translates them to a custom VM (Android's Davlik VM in this case). * ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2007/11/12/googles-android-sdk-first-impressions/ * I've run every modern version of Windows since NT 3.51 (which ran great including OpenGL 3D graphics on a 90Mhz Pentium with 16 megabytes of RAM believe it or not) but unless something changes radically, I'll be skipping Vista from now on. I ran it at home for over ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2007/10/29/vista-and-scala/ * Slashdot asks "Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?":http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/29/0058246. It's difficult, but with more machines shipping with multiple CPU cores, increasingly neccessary. My natural reaction to multithreaded programming is to run away screaming, but I've recently had very good luck with Eric Sink's "C# implementation of Map with multicore support":http://www.ericsink.com/entries/multicore_map.html. ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2007/06/22/parallel-programming-silverlight-and-the-rss-bandit-parser/ I've been trying to wrap my head around "WPF":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation databinding tonight. It turns out Don Box "wrote a post on the subject":http://pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/archive/2007/05/10/47283.aspx this evening. Due to the power of RSS and news aggregators, I'm benefiting from his post on the same night he wrote it. Having this happen reminds me of ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2007/05/10/every-once-in-a-while-the-internet-still-surprises-me/ I've been experimenting with "Flex 2":http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/, Adobe's "Rich Internet Application":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application library built on "Flash 9":http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/ over the last few months and am impressed. For a very long time Flash was developer unfriendly. That has changed. "Flex Builder":http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/flexbuilder/ is a respectable IDE, and "Actionscript 3":http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/actionscript3_overview.html is based on "JavaScript 2":http://www.mozilla.org/js/language/js20/ ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2007/04/22/flex-silverlight/ I've been "tagged":http://www.gulbransen.net/preaching/2006/01/four_on_the_flo.html by "Dave!":http://www.gulbransen.net/ for the four meme. It would be interesting to see a navigable browser of this meme from its start point. Interesting coincidence: I got tagged just a couple of hours after finishing Mark Pesce's interesting "viewpoint on the implications of global connectedness.":http://www.webearth.org/hyperpeople/ Four Jobs: * Software Engineer * ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2006/01/17/the-four-meme/ If you find that a Managed DirectX application you're developing is taking a very long time to shut down, make sure that you're disposing all the Vertex Buffers (and other pooled device resources) in the reverse order that you created them. I've been working with Managed DirectX seriously for about a ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2005/12/08/directx-resource-disposal/ I'm happy to announce that a new release of "Tachy":http://kenrawlings.com/pages/tachy is now available. The big news for this release is that Tachy now includes debugging support developed by Peter de Laat, including an alpha version of his Visual Studio .NET 2003 Add-in for Tachy. Thanks Peter! Click on the thumbnail ... http://www.kenrawlings.com/archives/2005/08/12/new-tachy-release/