Live Chat Programs

ok… this may be against blog-ettiquete… Windows Media 9 released today… coolest player feature - the ability to have a minized player appear in your taskbar… I appologize in advance it the mention of this has offended, angered, or otherwise pissed you off… now, get over it!

And if Don likes it, it can’t be all bad.

I got to meet Ray Ozzie last month and we got on talking about his history and the computer industry. He happened to have an old copy of the original VisiCalc lying around, so he mailed it around later. The amazing thing is that sucker still runs. It runs on XP and the internal versions of Longhorn… very cool. When thinking about building platforms, that kind of compatability is amazing.
http://www.simplegeek.com/permalink.aspx/41

I just finished the Cross Platform.NET on Silverlight talk at DevWeek. Demos can be downloaded from http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/downloads/DevWeek2008XPlatDemos.zip

I’m all done at DevWeek for this year. But if you want to hear more about Silverlight, I’ll be teaching Pluralsight’s Applied Silverlight course in London later this month - running from 31st March. (And the following week I’ll be teaching our Applied WPF course, also in London.)

In April I will be going to see some family in North Carolina and I thought I’d take the opportunity to speak at the local user group there.  

On April 9th, I will be speaking at the Triangle.NET User Group in Raleigh, NC… 

Here is what I planned to cover..  Sort of think of it like Mix08 in 1.5 hours

Come hear about the exciting future technologies for web development on.NET.  Brad Abrams, Group Program Manager for the.NET Framework at Microsoft will discuss and demo new web development technology his team is working on.  In particular, you will walk away understand the ASP.NET MVC framework,

Live Person Software: Turn website visitors into your customers.

why it was created and what it is good for.  We will also drill into the new innovations in Silverlight 2 that will be announced at Mix ’08 in Vegas.  

Applied Metamodelling: A Foundation for Language Driven Development (2004)
by Tony Clark, Paul Sammut, James Willans

An excerpt:

Language-driven development is fundamentally based on the ability to rapidly design new languages and tools in a unified and interoperable manner. We argue that existing technologies do not provide this capability, but a language engineering approach based on metamodelling can. The detailed study of metamodelling and how it can realise the Language-Driven Development vision will form the focus for the remainder of this book.

In software engineering circles the term “language driven development” is synonymous with “language oriented programming”, a term which LtU members are more familiar with (thanks to Martin Ward’s article Language Oriented Programming which first appeared in 1994, and then Martin Fowler’s essays on the topic). The book hasn’t appeared on the radar here on LtU, despite 41 citations. I suspect this is due in part to only one citation at Citeseer , and the lack of cross-talk between computer scientists and software engineers.

There are a lot of similarities between the XMF language (discussion at LtU ) and that of the Katahdin language (discussion at LtU ). Other related discussions here at LtU, include Language Workbenches: The Killer App for DSLs - about the essay by Martin Fowler, Ralph Johnson: Language workbenches - a response to Fowler’s essay, XActium - Lightweight Language Engineering? - which discusses an essay about a previous version of XMF, Generating Interpreters? , Language Oriented Programming - discusses an essay by Jetbrain’s Sergey Dmitriev, “Language Oriented Programming” Meta Programming System - discussion of the Jetbrain MPS system, The DSL, MDA, UML thing again… - an older discussion on the relationship between DSLs and MDA.

(more…)

Over here on the IE team we take leaks seriously. Extremely seriously. This is contrary to the popular opinion, but I’ll let you make your own informed decisions. My new posting on MSDN is specifically designed to help you identify and fix several patterns of leaks. These range from your basic circular reference to your more complex (and more popular) closure based leak. Hopefully this new material can help you identify and exterminate all of the leaks in your code. If you have questions about the article feel free to post here or over on the IE team blog and I’ll try to respond to any non-flaming responses

MSDN: Leak Patterns in IE

Walking around Mix08 today I had a chance to help a few people with some install issues.  In some cases the installer was asking for VS 2008 media and in other cases it was refusing to install. 

Luckily, Bradley Bartz from the Visual Web Developer team was around to help folks.  He drilled into the cause of the issues he saw and wrote up a very nice blog post listing the common issues and solutions.

Installation Tips for Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008

O’Reilly is hosting a collaborative book/wiki called
Software Craftsmanship: Apprentice to Journeyman. It’s structured as a series of “recipes” on how to approach different aspects of software development.

How’d you like that for an opening title? Did it grab your attention? Hell, your reading this far so I guess it did. The book I’m focusing on here is Build Your Own.NET Language and Compiler  and please, don’t click the link and then go buy it. I don’t care about the 50 cents worth of referral money I’ll get if you do. I wouldn’t even recommend the book if I got 50 bucks of referral money (well, money talks, so maybe I would).

The book starts out with the basics of parsing and regular expressions and all that jazz. But the extent of the code is a bunch of screen shots. We are writing a parser/compiler dang it, we aren’t WYSIWYGing our way through life at this point, you have to show some real frigin code. What you end up with is a bunch of screen shots of many tools for writing a compiler, but not really the code, unless of course you go grab the CD and break through all of the code without a lick of explanation from the book. God I hope the code is well documented with comments, or you just bought an issue of Compiler’s Illustrated and this isn’t the Swimsuit edition. I’ll include some of my own links at the bottom, where I give actual code for many of these processes.

OK, so you get to see a bunch of tools, and what do you get? Well, you get a bunch of half-assed tools (sorry for the language if your kid is reading my highly technical blog… In fact, if he/she is I could use some interns, must type 50+ WPM and be proficient at C, C++, or C#). A mathematical expression evaluator is the first. I think it is always the first. People always trivialize math. So make sure you look at all the pretty pictures and try to glean some wisdom from the text. I have a mathematical expression evaluator by the way, it’s called calc.exe and from what I can tell it has shipped since 16-bit windows. He also makes an attempt at a regular expression workbench. You can’t have enough of those (actually I’m not being sarcastic here, I always appreciate a new regex tool), but then he never writes anything or demonstrates compiler technology that uses regular expressions. Does he go into NFA/DFA technology? Well, he does talk about it for a few sentences. BNF format? Again a few sentences here and there. But wait, another tool is what you get and this time it is a picture of a drop-down menu with all sorts of really tantalizing names (convert from BNF to XML, display a BNF parse tree, display formatted docs, etc…). At this point use one of the pages to catch the drool coming off your lip, because that is as close as you’ll get in this book to anything cool.

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