Looks like MS is “making VS Studio Express free as in beer”:http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/04/20/free_visual_studio/ permanently. I wrote up my responses to the free beta “some time back”:https://twasink.net/blog/archives/2004/06/wow_free_visual.html; like I said then, I think this is a really good move for Microsoft, _and_ it’s driven by the quality of the free IDEs for other languages (notably NetBeans and … Continue reading “Wow… Free Visual Studio versions – still”
Looks like MS is “making VS Studio Express free as in beer”:http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/04/20/free_visual_studio/ permanently.
I wrote up my responses to the free beta “some time back”:https://twasink.net/blog/archives/2004/06/wow_free_visual.html; like I said then, I think this is a really good move for Microsoft, _and_ it’s driven by the quality of the free IDEs for other languages (notably NetBeans and Eclipse for Java).
“Joel’s”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ a pretenious schmuck a lot of the time, but he really does tend to know what he’s talking about. His latest article, “The Development Abstraction Layer”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html really hits the nail on the head in oh so many way.
“Joel’s”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ a pretenious schmuck a lot of the time, but he really does tend to know what he’s talking about. His latest article, “The Development Abstraction Layer”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html really hits the nail on the head in oh so many way.
Continue reading “Joel on Development Abstraction”
I’m considering buying one of those thar “MacBook Pros”:http://www.apple.com/au/macbookpro/, but at a base price of AU$3199, it’s a little pricy. Now, Apple has a long-standing reputation of charging premium prices, but seeing as how the MacBook is Intel-based, it should be possible to do some good price comparison. Dell has released the new “Inspiron 9400”:http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspn_9400_au?c=au&l=en, … Continue reading “Has Apple reached price parity for their laptops?”
I’m considering buying one of those thar “MacBook Pros”:http://www.apple.com/au/macbookpro/, but at a base price of AU$3199, it’s a little pricy. Now, Apple has a long-standing reputation of charging premium prices, but seeing as how the MacBook is Intel-based, it should be possible to do some good price comparison.
Dell has released the new “Inspiron 9400”:http://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/inspn_9400_au?c=au&l=en, which is also based on the Intel Core Duo chip. So, we can do a comparison that is better than Apples to Oranges on this.
Continue reading “Has Apple reached price parity for their laptops?”
Catching up on my podcasts this week, I was listening to a presentation by “Ze Frank at PopTech 05”:http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail764.html on the way home today.. Having listened to it, I’m convinced it should have come with a health warning: _”Warning: Listening to this presentation may cause uncontrollable laughter. Do not drive or operate heavy equipment while … Continue reading “Ze Frank at PopTech”
Catching up on my podcasts this week, I was listening to a presentation by “Ze Frank at PopTech 05”:http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail764.html on the way home today.. Having listened to it, I’m convinced it should have come with a health warning: _”Warning: Listening to this presentation may cause uncontrollable laughter. Do not drive or operate heavy equipment while listening to this presentation”_
Martin Fowler just wrote an entry on implicit interfaces. This actually would be very useful, but I think I can see why language designers wouldn’t adopt it (at least, not outright).
Continue reading “Implicit interfaces”
Purely as an experiment, I’m using “FeedBurner”:http://feedburner.com to keep track of the site usage. You don’t have to change your RSS feed: I’m redirecting the old ones through to FeedBurner. As a matter of fact, I suggest you don’t change your feed – that way, if I drop FeedBurner, you will automatically switch back to … Continue reading “An experiment: running with FeedBurner”
Purely as an experiment, I’m using “FeedBurner”:http://feedburner.com to keep track of the site usage.
You don’t have to change your RSS feed: I’m redirecting the old ones through to FeedBurner. As a matter of fact, I suggest you don’t change your feed – that way, if I drop FeedBurner, you will automatically switch back to the old direct link.
In addition: at this time, it’s only the main feed that’s been moved to FeedBurner. The category archives, which have a fairly large following of their own, are not going through FeedBurner – yet. 🙂
Joel’s busy complaining that teaching Java in comp-sci courses makes life too easy for people, because they don’t have to deal with pointers and recursion. News flash for you, Joel: the times have changed, and new tools are available.
Continue reading “A recursive descent into pointless debate”
There’s a common idiom in Java for writing the equals() method. Straight from the classic book, “Effective Java”, it looks like this:
public boolean equals(Object obj) {
if (this ==== obj) { return true; }
if (obj instanceof ThisClass ==== false) { return false; }
ThisClass other = (ThisClass) obj;
return this.importantField1.equals(other.importantField1) && this.importantField2.equals(other.importantField2);
}
When using Hibernate, particularly with lazy proxy classes, it’s important that you stick to this idiom!
Continue reading “Equality for Hibernate”
One issue with generics is how much the generic declaration repeats, particularly with collections. Consider this: bc[java]. Map<Date, List> eventBook = new HashMap<Date, List> How ugly… that repeatition gets very wearying over time. Here’s a few tips to deal with it.
One issue with generics is how much the generic declaration repeats, particularly with collections. Consider this:
bc[java]. Map<Date, List> eventBook = new HashMap<Date, List>
How ugly… that repeatition gets very wearying over time. Here’s a few tips to deal with it.
Continue reading “Generics and code clutter”
If you’re reading the version of this entry on my site, you’ll probably already have noticed the new GoogleAds. This is an experiment I’m trying out to see how effective they are at serving up meaningful ads. This is _not_ an attempt to “monetize” this blog. Heck, monetize isn’t even a real word – it’s … Continue reading “An experiment in GoogleAds”
If you’re reading the version of this entry on my site, you’ll probably already have noticed the new GoogleAds. This is an experiment I’m trying out to see how effective they are at serving up meaningful ads.
This is _not_ an attempt to “monetize” this blog. Heck, monetize isn’t even a real word – it’s just one of those fake “turn a noun into a verb” type businesey words. I don’t expect to make even enough out of it recoup my hosting costs (which would only take one payment per year). Even if I wanted to, this blog doesn’t get enough traffic to make any serious money, I expect.
What this _actually_ is is an attempt to aid the reader who comes here from Google (or other search engines). Search engines referalls account for about 60% of my traffic, and nearly all of the traffic to older articles (that hasn’t come from spam bots, anyway). By targetting ads there, I hope to provide items of interest to those readers.
So, if you see an ad that interests you, feel free to follow it. However, don’t just follow ads because what I’ve written has interested you. 🙂 Do it for your own sake, not mine.
Software is too expensive to build cheaply.... 