Andrew Peters’ Blog

Thanks to everyone who came to my session today. Here are the slides and demos.

Joel Pobar (the guy behind LCG among other things) put me on to this great paper which does a nice job of arguing why it shouldn’t be static vs. dynamic, but rather: “Static Typing Where Possible, Dynamic Typing When Needed.”

I also particularly liked this quote:

Using XML instead of byte streams as a wire-format is one step
forward, but three steps backwards. While XML allows dealing
with semi-structured data, which as we argue is what we should
strive for, this comes at an enormous expense. XML is a prime
example of retarded innovation; it makes the life of the low-
level plumbing infrastructure easier by putting the burden on
the actual users by letting them parse the data themselves by
having them write abstract syntax tree, introducing an alien
data model (Infoset) and an overly complicated and verbose
type system (XSD) neither of which blends in very well with
the paradigm that programmers use to write their actual code.

Worth a read.

So far so good. Everything is working very nicely indeed. Highlights so far:

• Orcas perf and stability is very good.
• ReSharper perf and stability under Orcas is very good :-)
• ReSharper Unit Test runner now seems to be as fast as TD.NET. Is this the end of TD.NET?
• ReSharper Quick Fixes and Code Inspection stuff is working better.
• Increase in the number of static analysis and compiler warnings.

I can’t wait to hack Ruby on this stuff! :-)

UPDATE: I’m working on a .NET 2 solution. ReSharper’s support for .NET 3.5 is still crap :-(

If you’re like me you may have created some custom External Tool commands in the Visual Studio Tools menu. Unfortunately, External Tools cannot be imported/exported using the Import and Export Settings option so if you’ve upgraded to Orcas, here’s how to copy them over:

1. Jump into regedit and export the hive: \\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\External Tools
2. Open up the exported .reg file and change the 8.0 to 9.0
3. Double-click the .reg file to import the settings into the Orcas hive.

All done.

So apparently some large corporations in America are ditching email completely. Here’s how it works:

“Do you want to meet for lunch?” - Messenger.
“The QA team have a meeting at 12″ - Employee blog + RSS
Anything else - Wiki.

Wow! What an elegant solution to the spam nightmare - lose email completely. Isn’t it always the way that such hard problems just require being approached from a completely different angle: Instead of: “How do we fix email?” we ask: “How do we replace email?”