I'm definitely installing this one when I get a chance. http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/briankel/PDC2008-ShowOff-Entry-Clipboard-History-for-Visual-Studio/

Basically it keeps a history of your clipboard items like Office but with one killer twist. "Paste as {Language}". It will take the C# you copied and Paste it as VB. I'm sure it's not 100% but still helps quite a bit.

All of these new C# 4.0 dynamic features require parts of the DLR. Thus it looks like MS is taking the DLR and making it a first class citizen in the CLR. This also I'm guessing will make IronPython and IronRuby first class citizens as well. A huge win for the dynamic languages community. For C# 4.0 it is bittersweet. It means better interoperability when calling things created in IronRuby or IronPython but there are limitations. Below is an excerpt from the C# 4.0 WhitePaper (available here http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/csharpfuture)

Open issues

There are a few limitations and things that might work differently than you would expect.

·         The DLR allows objects to be created from objects that represent classes. However, the current implementation of C# doesn’t have syntax to support this.

·         Dynamic lookup will not be able to find extension methods. Whether extension methods apply or not depends on the static context of the call (i.e. which using clauses occur), and this context information is not currently kept as part of the payload.

·         Anonymous functions (i.e. lambda expressions) cannot appear as arguments to a dynamic method call. The compiler cannot bind (i.e. “understand”) an anonymous function without knowing what type it is converted to.

One consequence of these limitations is that you cannot easily use LINQ queries over dynamic objects:

dynamic collection = …;

var result = collection.Select(e => e + 5);

If the Select method is an extension method, dynamic lookup will not find it. Even if it is an instance method, the above does not compile, because a lambda expression cannot be passed as an argument to a dynamic operation.

There are no plans to address these limitations in C# 4.0.

To me this is a very huge limitation. I can already see that most of my interop with dynamic languages will probably involve collections of some sort. Also this would come into play with collections from Dynamic COM objects. LINQ is so powerful and easy to use, it may end up being a major annoyance to have to move away from it for dynamic typing. I hope they work on this for C# 4.5

While browsing through MSDN blogs I came across this nice little post. http://blogs.msdn.com/dparys/archive/2008/10/28/neue-m-glichkeiten-in-c-4-0.aspx . After translating the page I found that he linked to the new C# 40 page http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/csharpfuture

I played around with VS 2010 last night. I was able to test the dynamic keyword. It works as advertised but the biggest thing one has to realize is using it removes intellisense for that variable. Compiling type safety as well. I hope they'll be able to add some sort of limited intellisense by looking at the last assigned type.

Also on the Dynamic front is DynamicObject. A new base object type that allows for on the fly Property declaration. The DynamicObject uses a PropertyBag (looks like a Dictionary<string,object>). You can declare properties on the fly. Like

public class MyBag : DynamicObject
{
// überschreibt Getter / Setter
} 
dynamic b = new MyBag();
b.Id = 124;
b.Name = "Windows 7"
b.Price = 499.99m;
b.IsAvailable = false;

One thing I was unable to figure out was the optional, default and named parameters. Again the blog provided some answers.

public void InsertCustomer( int customerId,
                          string companyName = "Neue Firma",
                          decimal creditLimit = 2000m )
{
}

InsertCustomer( 1, creditLimit: 2000m );  

InsertCustomer( creditLimit: 2000m, customerId: 1 );

Well I spent most of the day working on some peculiar problems with PICK. Then left to take my girlfriend out for her birthday. Just now catching up on whats gone on today at PDC. Man it seems like it was a huge day.

First off Windows Azure and the new .NET Services. From what I've read so far I can see some compelling uses for the .NET services and sharing content, id's and roles around the web.

The big one that I haven't seen much press on yet is C# 4.0. Looks like we are getting dynamic binding in the language. While this loses compile type safety it gives C# good ground against things like Ruby and PHP.

Named, Optional and Default parameters. Oh how I've been waiting for these since switching to .NET from PHP. I used to take advantage of these features all the time. It annoys me when I can use them in Attributes in C# but not on actual methods. I'm going to love this.

VS2010 and C# will CTP are available in a virtual PC here

Here's a better overview stolen from http://blogs.msdn.com/samng/archive/2008/10/28/microsoft-visual-studio-2010.aspx

1. Dynamic binding. We've introduced a new type, dynamic, which behaves much like object, but allows the operations performed on your object to be bound at runtime instead of compile time.
2. Named and Optional parameters. You can now specify default values for your parameters, allowing them to be optionally specified at the call site. We've also added the ability for your arguments to be passed by name, so that you can specify exactly which arguments you want to give, and refrain from specifying the rest (assuming they're optional).
3. Com interop features. We've done quite a bit of work to improve COM interop. These include:
• No ref for COM calls. For all COM calls that take ref arguments, you can specify an argument without a ref, and the compiler will generate a local for you and generate a ref to that local as the argument.
• No PIA. We have introduced the ability to deploy your applications which use Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs) without referencing the actual PIA at runtime. This allows compiling against them, but not needing to ship them with your application.
• Implicit dynamic for COM types. We now give you the option of turning all objects returned from COM into dynamics so that you can perform late bound calls off of them instead of having to cast the result in order to make it useful.

So today I was tasked with helping a client move an old custom VB6 app to a new Windows 2003 server. The company that created it was asking for an arm and a leg for a simple transfer. After we moved the entire program directory over everything seemed to be fine until we encountered an "ActiveX component can't create object" error. I was perplexed on how to track down the issue. There were not accompanying DLLs or OCX files. I tried Process Explorer to see if I could find any failed openings and the strings contained in the exe.

After some searching on the net I found this lovely page http://www.cryer.co.uk/brian/windows/trbl_nt_axccco.htm . It details on how to use Sysinternals Regmon to track down issues with failed ActiveX creation. Basicall you watch your program for registery key openings and look for any failed opens in the HKCR/Classes path. After running the program and encountering the error I found it.
HCKR\Classes\cdonts

When I saw that come up I immediately knew what to do. cdonts is no longer included with windows server. It is an emailing library using cdo. I've had to install it on new Windows 2003 servers more than once so old ASP classic sites could run. All I needed to do after figuring it out was copy the cdonts.dll over to the C:\windows\system32\ directory and run regsvr32 on it. Everything was golden.

I've been using Sysinternals for years. I'm always amazed at what new ways I can use their utilities to track down issues. Process Explorer has been a godsend for me over the years. After discovering it, removing malware from computers took me less than half the time it used to. It gives me so much information I'm not sure how I got by without it.

The Sysinternals Suite is a must have for any serious windows programmer or administrator. It ranges from programs to monitor network connections to being able to see and suspend individual threads in a program.

The other day I was posed with a problem to implement a "Send as Attachment" feature to an existing application. I thought, well this should be easy I've seen many other do it before. I quoted the work at a few hours, figuring some quick searching would give my my answers. I was wrong.

Sending an email using the default email client is very easy with the mailto: protocol. The problem lies in adding an attachment. Common mail programs like Outlook and Thunderbird do not support the attachment option. So, I started looking at MAPI the native API for doing this. I could not find any .NET wrappers. I did find that there were controls created by MS for VB6. Most of the .NET examples I found used COM interop with the ActiveX controls. But after trying these controls (which look like they were last updated in 98) I found them to not work in XP SP3. I'd get random exceptions and was never able to actually get an email dialog to pop up.

After failing with the ActiveX controls I was out of time. The MAPI native commands may have worked but it would take too long to set up the native calls and test it. After discussing with the client we ended up coming up with a bit hackish but workable solution. I would use the mailto: protocol and then launch explorer with the attachment selected. To them this is a minor annoyance that is acceptable. To me this an unfortunate sign of the times.

Things that were once "easy" for native applications become complicated and buggy for managed. It seems too often that I must make use native calls or old unsuported COM objects to get the job done. While MS has done a great job building up the .NET Framework. It seems that many native API's still remain unwrapped. Furthermore some places I read that the MAPI api is unstable on Vista. It seems that some API's are slipping through the cracks.

There are blogs on MSDN popping up that SilverLight 2 is indeed gold and will be public tomorrow Oct 14th. They also announced Silverlight Tools for Eclipse with the promise of cross platform development for Silverlight. I think this is a huge step in the right direction for MS. By giving developers on OS's other than windows to do Silverlight Development in a fairly competent IDE it will give them a better position against Flex.

I have done some playing around in Silverlight 2 and really loved it. I'm just hoping for a Silverlight 2 project to come our way at Sierra Bravo.

I look forward to downloading the public bits and seeing what I can do with the full version.

Well Code Camp 5 is in the bag. It was a large turn out and many great talks. My talk however drew no interest. Oh well, I tried and will try again. I'm thinking of making my post about LINQ and Refactoring into a talk.

The talks I went to:
The Intersection of F# and LINQ
This was a great talk about how F# takes LINQ and adds much more value to it with it's functional nature. The demonstration was a ray tracer that used LINQ to build up all of the reflected pixels. It was quite impressive. Combine it with the Arc talk and I am now very interested in Functional programming.

The Arc Programming Language
I had seen this talk a few days earlier. The speaker was hilarious and did a great job of bringing excitement back to lisp. Arc is a new dialect of Lisp that aims to cut down on parenthesis and add shorthand for common operations. He added objects to Arc with six lines of code, quite impressive.

BOO! A Wrist-Friendly Language for the CLI
BOO! is a another language along the lines of Lisp where it can redefine parts of itself through macros. The difference is it is statically typed like C#. It does offer quite a bit of reduction in code written. The presenter Justin Chase did a good job showing many aspects of the language. I also won a shirt for figuring out that the mystery function was calculating a fibonocci sequence. The code for it was quite cool, a,b = b + a or something like that.

Building MyTube with Microsoft Silverlight 2
Jeff Brand from Microsoft was giving this talk. It was a basic overview on SilverLight, the purpose for it and how to implement a simple youtube interface. I didn't stay for the entire thing, I had to go get ready for my talk.

My talk "Pick/Multivalue 101"
No one that was interested showed. Not that I was surprised but still a bit disappointed.  While giving the talk at my work we had over 15 people show. One of my co-workers showed and the other guy that showed was just looking for a place to sit. So instead we talked about LINQ, customized programming in Linux and a bit about Multivalue

I went to the speakers after party, got to gossip with some people from Magenic. Learned that Justin Chase left Magenic a few weeks ago to work on the Blend team at MS. He's a lucky guy and seemed rather excited for the features they are working on that he can't talk about. I'm sure some of them may come up soon at PDC. I did hear some gossip earlier in the day that SilverLight 2 RTM is going to be released as early as tomorrow (Oct 13th).

Being a developer is one of the luckiest professions in the world. Just take a minute and think about this: How many professions out there are you paid to learn? Seriously, if we wish to succeed we must learn. Many times we need to learn during the project. We are given the opportunity and often encouraged to learn new ways of doing something, come up with innovative ideas, implement new technologies. Many companies offer compensation for developers to get certified, keep up, to learn. I've also found that many of the people I know that went to college for CS came out ill prepared for the real development world.

I was lucky in some ways. I got a job running websites during high school, I was paid to learn and mature as a programming. I wasn't lucky that pay sucked and I had to get food from charity at times. But there was always being able to learn on the job and the outlook that real developers jobs paid very well.

Over the years as I've matured as a developer I've learned quite a lot. I strive to keep on learning, branching out into new areas. I've found that my inner urge to learn is also what has allowed me to succeed. Below are some of my tips to being a successful programmer

Be passionate

The one thing I've seen in every great developer I've ever met is passion. Passion for the job, passion for learning, passion for being challenged. There is no way to improve without having a need for it. If being a developer is just a job, just a way to make money, I'm sorry but you should find something else to do. I've seen many developers that have that attitude and they just don't make it. They make mistakes and never learn from them, they have difficulties completing anything on time, and wind up getting fired quite a bit.

Never be afraid to try something new

While sometimes it's hard to break out of things you know that work, learning that things can/cannot be done another way expands your experience and keeps your mind trying to work outside the box.

Keep up with the Joneses

This one can be very hard if you have a full schedule. But trying to keep up with the new technologies will expose you to new ideas, new ways of tackling problems. One cannot grow if one does not see another way.

Pursue certifications

Some people see certifications as a croc. They see that lots of tech schools teach for the test and thats it. I can understand that. I have persued certifications as a professional goal. Going through the MCTS certifications for ASP.NET and Winforms has exposed me to many things I probably wouldn't have known about in .NET. I try to read through the entire training kit books MS puts out for the certifications.

Gaining the certifications are also good for ones ego. Having the goal to set out and earn the certification can keep you discleplined and give you a sense of accomplishment. It's something you can show your bosses and peers that you do indeed know what you're talking about. It gives you more bargaining power when negotiating a raise or looking for a new job. While some may not help you as much as you'd hope, having both real world experience and certifications can be a 1-2 combo.

Microsoft's certification track is the best I've seen. You can start out by getting Technological specific certifications with the MCTS series. You can get just certified in ASP.NET, Windows Applications, Windows Mobile.. and on. Then you can expand on those with Professional certifications with the MCPD's. These ones include application lifecycle components. Professional ways of breaking down an application into logical, component and class diagrams to implementation of architectures and finishing with deployment and maintenance.

Learn new languages

This one can be hard for people that only use one language at work. Learning a new language again helps you get exposed to new ideas and ways of tackling problems.

The hardest thing is actually finding something to do in that language to learn it. I've found that the best way is to have something you implement in every language. Whether it's some tool you've developed or a little game. I had the Al Bhed translator. I originally developed it in PHP to help me out with the game Final Fantasy 10. I then tried doing it in JavaScript, then Java, then C++, XUL (firefox extension) and then in C#.NET Winform. It gave me a common goal in each of the languages and forced me to find out how to do it in each one. They all had their own strengths and weaknesses. PHP's Array functions made some of it very easy to implement, where javascript was a bit clunky. C# wasn't as elegant as the PHP but it was much faster in execution.

Try to find languages that have a different goal than just another application. Languages like F# for example. While it's possible to write every day applications with it, it's real power lies in analyzing and transforming data. Learning it opens up a world of mathmatics in new ways.

Learn new platforms 

Simply this means do not just be a web developer or an application developer. Continuously expanding the platforms you know can increase your understanding of how other people develop. I started out as a web programmer and over the years I've written programs for the commandline, windows services, web services, mobile phones, automated scripts, desktop applications, rich internet apps (flash, silverlight), dynamic web sites and more. I'm currently picking up XNA and trying to learn what programming a game is like. I'm learning a newfound respect for game programmers.

Seek out challenges

If your current job is not challenging you find a way to be challenged. Sometimes even playing around things outside of work is enough. Go to your boss and see if theres ways you can increase your workload, or get into more complex projects. Express an interest in new things. If you are stuck at a job where that is impossible, I recommend it may be time to look elsewhere. Get some certifications and new skills under your belt and start looking. There are some great tech jobs out there, good places to find a place to be challenged are in start ups or smaller custom software companies. Places like where I work at, Sierra Bravo. When I joined I had 6 years experience but still would consider myself a novice programmer. Within the next year I worked on more than 20 projects, on many platforms and felt like I had finally become a professional developer.

Now being on the verge of 4 years later I feel like I'm an accomplished developer, I'm able to start incorporating more advanced concepts in to my projects. I can see a much larger picture. As the years have gone on the scope of the picture I can see has expanded. I once could only see the single web page I was working on. Then I was able to start understanding the system of web pages I would design. I then started graduating onto being able to write a complete web site. That is when I decided that desktop applications were next. The scope expanded to understanding state, threads, and desktop experience. My first applications were cluttered, did not have much for layers. I started to learn more about the concept of breaking out applications into libraries and layers. These days I've graduated to an architect that can take the project proposal. Break it down to sections, logical components and build the applications architecture. Define the database, the data layers, the data objects and the front end. I can incorporate n-tier designs, abstract out business logic to a web service. Write API's that work for websites as well as windows mobile.

Really it all boils down to is: Have passion for your job, passion to learn new things and keep yourself challenged. Never be afraid to learn new skills. In this day an age a developer needs to know more than just one platform. They need to understand a larger scope to make it.

Ok in the last few years I've had to take over a number of websites written in VB.NET, or I should say written in VB but somehow using .NET. My issue really isn't with VB.NET itself. It's obvious the developers that did these sites (none of them affiliated in any way) came from doing classic ASP and moved onto ASP.NET. The problem is they continued with their classic ASP practices and did not seem to come close to grasping what ASP.NET really was.

Issues I've had:

• None of the sites will compile in Visual Studio
• All of the sites were running in ASP.NET 2.0 but none used master pages. They all used Server-Side Includes (which should be banned) to include common blocks.
  
• No use of controls or classes.
• No use of code-behind
• All SQL is dynamic and full of SQL Injection vulnerabilities
• All used include files which set up global variables and functions to be used in the page lifecycle (one of the main reasons the sites wont compile)
• One of the sites had every folder set up as it's own application in IIS. Their hosting provider has no interface for even seeing this, the developer used to call in to have this set up. More on this site later (refered to as BS1)
  
• Most of the sites only make use of the most basic controls
• One site (BS1) tried to use more advanced controls like Formview but failed miserably. In this instance, used all over the site, the developer made a formview, used an EditTemplate and bound a dataset to the formview. Sounds decent so far right? The issue came in after I made some changes that my data was not being updated in the dataset. Tracking down the issue was very hard to do when you have no "Go to Definition" and there are tons of "Include Files" that are copied and pasted throughout the site. I found that there was a  "Magic" function that did what databinding is supposed to do. It looked for any controls in the formview that matched the exact name of a column and bound the data.
  
• BS1 includes so many functions that recreate .NET functionality that his developer seemed to give up on getting to work within an hour or trying. I want to go home sick everytime a change comes up on this site.

Basically on every one of these sites we have pitched rewrites. Most of them on grounds of security, which is completely true. One of the sites we've had to take down due to rampant SQL Injections. It wont be up until the client decides on which overhaul to rewrite proposal they want to to sign off on.

If the BS1 rewrite ever happens I hope I am not the one to do it. While the site needs it, the business rules and database behind it are majorly complex and in some points completely bonkers. Redesigning the database will be completely out of the question due to the amount of time to migrate that and other business apps the client uses to work with it.

After all of the things I've seen I'm scared of how many classic ASP developers have moved to ASP.NET without taking the time to understand what ASP.NET (or even .NET) is all about. The thing that scares me the most is that it has been 6 years since .NET was released. Some of the sites were even written starting with ASP.NET 2.0. Yet the developers probably used Visual Studio as nothing more than a bloated notepad.

I came from doing site development in PHP 3/4. Classic ASP and PHP 3/4 development were alike in many ways. One would use server side includes to include headers/footers for the page. There would more than likely be a main include script that set up all the functions/classes and global variables to be used on the page. All the HTML was generated with inline code. I can understand moving from an environtment like that to ASP.NET you may start out recreating what you know.

What I don't understand why these developers never felt a need to move beyond that when there is overwhelming evidence that ASP.NET can do so much more. The old way is horrible to maintain, can take a long time to develop and there are much better practices out there. While I was a PHP developer I started using Smarty templates. I loved having templates that abstracted the presentation from the real code. Smarty has become one of the defacto standards in PHP development over the years. It gave me the introduction to using "controls" and "master pages". It made reuse easier and presentation cleaner. To go so long continuing the same bad practices is unfathomable to me.

Another thing that amazes me is ASP.NET actually works with server side includes. The dynamic compiler for the site will included the code and build a DLL for the page. I'm a bit pissy at MS for even allowing this. The included code is compiled into every DLL and whenever a change is made every one of those pages must be recompiled.