Tag Archives: programming

Visual Studio 2005 Add-Ins and Tools That I Use

  By Yaakov Ellis | December 19, 2006 - 12:13 | , , ,
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I am right now in the middle (about 20% and 18K lines of code through) a pretty substantial Windows Forms project using Visual Studio 2005 (C#). Here are some of the add-ins that I have been using (ranked in order of essential to useful):
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Porting .Net Assemblies to Mono using MoMA

  By Yaakov Ellis | November 28, 2006 - 19:00 | , ,
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For those who have not heard about it, Mono is a platform designed to allow porting of .Net-based applications to nearly every computing platform available (including Linux and Mac). It is open-source (sponsored by Novell) and is an essential tool for any developer who wishes to run .Net code on a non-Windows OS.

I am right now in the middle of a Desktop project being written with VS.net 2005, C# and Windows Forms technology. The powers-that-be (ie: the clients) have inquired to the feasibility of potentially porting over the code to Mac or Linux. My answer has been that if it is possible, we will have to use Mono to do it, but I cannot say anything more about its compatibility until more of the programming work is completed.

The process of porting over a completed .Net Assembly to Mono just got a bit easier. A tool called MoMA (Mono Migration Analyzer) has been released (written by Jonathan Pobst) that will do the following: given any .Net assembly (.dll or .exe file) it will go through the file and report back any potential issues that may arise using the assembly with Mono (most likely a .Net 2.0 feature that has not yet been implemented, or a calls to Win32 APIs that are not documented in the .Net API). Definitely a very helpful tool in debugging a .Net aseembly that refuses to compile in Mono.

Miguel de Icaza gives a more thorough step-by-step guide and review of his experiences using MoMA (though it doesn’t seem to be too complicated).

They Write the Right Stuff

  By Yaakov Ellis | October 24, 2006 - 20:50 | ,
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Their quarters are a study in white-collar pedestrian. The most striking thing is how ordinary they look. Other than the occasional bit of memorabilia, you could be in the offices of any small company or government agency. Everyone has his or her own small office, and the offices have desks, PCs, and sparse personal artifacts. People wear moderately dressy clothes to work, neat but nothing flashy, certainly nothing grungy.

It’s strictly an 8-to-5 kind of place — there are late nights, but they’re the exception. The programmers are intense, but low-key…They’re adults, with spouses and kids and lives beyond their…software program.

Does this sound like your company? Would you want to work at a place like this?

This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.

These are the 260 men and women of the “on-board shuttle group” who develop the software that runs NASA’s space shuttles. You can read more about in They Write the Right Stuff. (more…)

Items of Interest: 2006.05.02

  By Yaakov Ellis | May 2, 2006 - 12:51 |
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Things that I found interesting on May 2, 2006: