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In the wake of a recent announcement by Redmond Mayor Rosemarie Ives that she will not seek another term of office, I was invited to and personally interviewed her two most viable successors: Councilman Jim Robinson and former councilwoman, Holly Plackett . I support both of these fine and experienced candidates in their mayoral campaigns, respect them immensely, value their views on community, and consider them both to be my friends and mentors. But don’t just take it from me! If you live in Redmond, the mayor’s election is of great importance to you and most everyone you know. I strongly encourage you to research and get to know Jim and Holly yourself.*

         
     Jim Robinson                   Holly Plackett

After careful consideration and soul searching, I hereby announce my endorsement of Councilmember Jim Robinson to be the next chief executive and Mayor of the City of Redmond.

As a Planning Commissioner , it is my responsibility to represent the interests of the entire Redmond community: its current and future residents, employees, landowners, and business owners in the great little city of Redmond, WA by providing advice and channeling public feedback about current and long range Land Use Planning to Redmond’s Mayor and City Council. Week in and week out for the past five years, I have studied, solicited and listened to public feedback about, and provided counsel on land use planning issues to Councilmember Jim Robinson and the other members of the City Council and Mayor Ives on questions such as:

• How many houses can be built on an acre and where, in the city?
• Should the City build out a Municipal Wi-Fi network?
• How wide must sidewalks be in the downtown area?
• Where should we have bicycle lanes?
• When, where, and how many native trees (and soil) can homebuilders remove?
• How much should existing residents pay for extra sewage capacity to accommodate new development, if any?

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With a farewell quote from the greatest American writer of all time, my friend, neighbor, and idea-mate, Alex Barnett has announced that he is leaving Microsoft and Redmond to join a startup in Utah: Bungee Labs. [Lump_in_throat]. If they had any idea of the potential that Microsoft is losing, with Alex’s departure, Steve would be ranting, Bill would be knocking on Alex and Katia’s door, this evening, and Mary Jo would be working overtime.

Alex who? Alex Barnett is one of the most brilliant “practitioners” of social software, on Earth. Alex lives in the future; he reads, blogs , and tags prolifically in the present; and he routinely conceives of BIG ideas that have or will soon change the way WE discover resources, connect, interact, and collaborate, on the World Wide Web. Alex is the only [other;-)] blogger whose RSS feed I have recommended to every member of my team, Microsoft.com Communities Technologies, and do to practically everyone else I work with with, inside and outside MSFT.

Although Alex and I didn’t really connect until about a year ago (a fact which we both find odd given the proximity of our interests, jobs, and homes) Alex has fast become my singular idea mate. Recently, upon learning that I had yet to read The Singularity is Near , Alex purchased me a copy and delivered it to my doorstep. He’s just that kind of guy.

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Dare Obasanjo recently wrote a blog entry comparing some language features commonly associated with ‘dynamic’ languages with C# 3.0 equivalents. Towards the end is a section called “Python vs. C# 3.0: Tuples and Dynamic Typing vs. Anonymous Types and Type Inferencing.” In it, he complains that he ended up needing to use nominal types, instead of anonymous types. For example, he wrote:

var vote = new Vote()
{
 Weight = voteFunc(item),
 Item = item,
 FeedTitle = feedTitle
};

This required him to define the Vote class somewhere. He had been hoping to use C#’s anonymous types, which would have removed the need to define the Vote class explicitly, letting him write:

var vote =
{
 Weight = voteFunc(item),
 Item = item,
 FeedTitle = feedTitle
};

He couldn’t do this because his code structure prevented the anonymous type flowing to where he needed it. The first part of his code was a loop which added a bunch of these votes to a list which he later wanted to iterate through. The anonymous type was buried in the nested scope of the first loop, and was therefore inaccessible in the second loop. The fundamental problem here is that C# type inference for ‘var’ variables occurs at the point of declaration. The compiler isn’t prepared to wait around and see what you do with the variable – if it can’t infer the type at the point of declaration it gives up with an error.

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F. Cardone and J. R. Hindley. History of Lambda-Calculus and Combinatory logic. To appear as a chapter in Volume 5 of the Handbook of the History of Logic.

From the introduction:

Seen in outline, the history of LC and CL splits into three main periods: first, several years of intensive and very fruitful study in the 1920s and ’30s; next, a middle period of nearly 30 years of relative quiet; then in the late 1960s an upsurge of activity stimulated by developments in higher-order function theory, by connections
with programming languages, and by new technical discoveries. The fruits of the first period included the first-ever proof that predicate logic is undecidable. The results of the second attracted very little non-specialist interest, but included completeness, cut-elimination and standardization theorems (for example) that found many uses later. The achievements of the third, from the 1960s onward, included constructions and analyses of models, development of polymorphic type systems, deep analyses of the reduction process, and many others probably well known to the reader. The high level of activity of this period continues today.

Beware: This is a long paper (but less than you might expect it to be by looking at the page count: about half the pages are dedicated to the bibliography).

In the announcement on the TYPES Forum the authors invited comments, suggestions and additional information on the topics of the paper, namely the development of lambda-calculi and combinatory logic from the prehistory (Frege, Peano and Russell) to the end of 20th century.
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2679

I hesitate to talk about this because I don’t want people who don’t know about it to think, “Hey, what’s this DevPath thing? I need that.” But, maybe if I don’t explain how to use it, it will be too much effort for people who don’t already know how. (And, for those who already know how and are, in fact, using it, hopefully, they’ll see this and get off that plan.)

The intent of DevPath was to make the development environment less painful. Assemblies could be put there and bound to at runtime, ignoring the assembly version and overriding the GAC.

It turns out that that’s badness for several reasons (below). So, DevPath is soon to be deprecated. Don’t use it - not even in the development environment.

Why It Should Never Be Used
Versioning alone is why you should never, ever use it in a production environment. It subscribes your users to dll hell. See Avoid Partial Binds for details (DevPath causes partial binding, since the version is ignored for the bind).

It’s not good for the dev. env., either - it makes it unnecessarily different from the shipping env., which may lead to uncaught versioning or deployment bugs in the shipping env.

What to Do Instead
If DevPath was a development environment-only solution for you:
I strongly recommend not changing your assembly versions between non-shipping builds instead of using DevPath.

If you are shipping code relying on DevPath:
One thing you could do is create a new AppDomain with the ApplicationBase set to the path you care about. Once you do that, see Executing Code in Another Appdomain.

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With a simple extension method to ControlCollection to flatten the control tree you can use LINQ to query the control tree:

public static class PageExtensions
{
 public static IEnumerable<Control> All(this ControlCollection controls)
 {
 foreach (Control control in controls)
 {
 foreach (Control grandChild in control.Controls.All())
 yield return grandChild;
	
 yield return control;
 }
 }
}

Now I can do things like this:

// get the first empty textbox
TextBox firstEmpty = accountDetails.Controls
.All()
.OfType<TextBox>()
.Where(tb => tb.Text.Trim().Length == 0)
.FirstOrDefault();
	
// and focus it
if (firstEmpty != null)
 firstEmpty.Focus();

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Since the conversation on this topic was interesting, I thought it would be appropriate to add some more information and answer where I stand on the question. After all, I asked the question in my previous blog post, I didn’t answer it.

First , my opening comments as Will and I sat down for the interview. (these come courtesy of Will in an email to me about this subject)

>> WL: Okay. I want to start off actually, this is going to be
>> just a big Q&A, pretty much straight up and everything. So I want to
>> start…
>> MC: This is just for GQ now.
>> WL: Just for GQ, not for Dea

dspin. No Deadspin stuff, and no
>>… yeah, I have the journalist hat on. And I have the journalist
>> hat on at Deadspin, too, but anyway, let’s… another debate for
>> another time.
>> MC: We won’t call that journalism.
>> WL: Another debate for another time.

So i made it clear that I wanted no association with his blog at all.

Does his writing a piece about me with a link back to the very item that he knew I wanted nothing to do with constitute a lack of ethics ? I think so. It certainly is a major fuck you.

Does making the following comment “Cuban was not amused and spent most of the interview accusing Deadspin of being the Inside Edition of sports. So that was fun.) ” diminish the integrity of the interview itself ? Probably not, but to som (more…)

A while back I did a customer briefing about how to use Silverlight and ASP.NET to build a great media driven web site.  You can find the write-up, demo, and slides on my original post.

Recently, I got a hold of the video! 

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/01/30/video-from-building-a-great-media-driven-web-site-with-silverlight-and-asp-net.aspx

I haven’t done the research to find out when the last time 7 games separated one conference’s top 10 teams, all with a winning record and playing good basketball this late in the season. It hasn’t happened in the 8 years I have owned the Mavs.

This year is shaping up to be a crazy one. A 5 or 6 game losing streak and any of the 4 teams who have had the best record in the west over the past month could find themselves out of the playoffs.

This scenario is not lost on players or fans. The feel in arenas lately have been very playoff like. You can feel the energy as fans know what is at stake. Players are looking at the standings and paying far clos

er attention to game by game results of division and conference teams. They know what is at stake with every game.

This season, at least in the Western Conference, no one is going to ask the question of whether the regular season is important. For the remainder of this season, EVERY game is important. Every team will have their up and down streaks simply because its going to be hard to play playoff quality basketball for 40 games. Back to back games in the West are going to be brutal.

The playoffs to make the playoffs has started and it doesn’t look like any team will get a breather between now and when their season ends.

That will make this the Best NBA Season Ever !

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http://www.blogmaverick.com/2008/01/28/is-this-the-best-nba-season-ever/

In the transition from C# 1.0 to C# 2.0, they added
generics.  This was an enormous improvement.  Huge.

(At first I was actually kind of skeptical of generics. 
They reminded me of C++ templates, the use of which I had opposed on several
occasions.  But my 1993 reasons for advocacy against C++ templates really
weren’t relevant to the C# generics in 2005.)

So when I started my recent exploration of Java, one of my
main questions was:  Are the generics in Java 1.5 similar to generics in C#
2.0?

The answer:  Sort of.  Not really.

To be fair, I’ll admit right up front that Java generics are
better than no generics.  I’m using them.  They work just fine in practice for
most situations.

But they’re fundamentally different from C# generics.  In
C#, a generic is implemented at the CLR level.  When you instantiate a
List<T>, at runtime it will generate an implementation of a List which is
specifically for type T.

When TPTB added generics to Java, one of their goals was to
avoid the need for any changes to the VM.  So Java’s generics are implemented
at the compiler level using a technique called “type erasure”.  Basically, the
Java compiler does all the necessary type checking, but then it throws the
parameterized type information away and generates regular collection code. 
This has a few consequences which are rather unfortunate:

• Since the parameterized type is no longer present in the
  bytecode, reflection doesn’t show it.

• The compiler inserts all the casts that you would have had
  to write if you were using the non-generic collection class directly.

• In a generic collection of a primitive type, the
  parameterized type gets boxed.

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