I’ve been reading up and keeping abreast of both the .NET world and Java world this year, both have some mighty exciting advancements coming – teaser: its all about the Pentiums! I’ll try and cover some of my research into parallel work later.
One of the other areas I’ve been keen on (after hearing from the leader of our pack, Mr Wolfe) was Scala and came across a incredibly useful resource by Daniel Spiewak on looking at Scala from a Java developers perspective.
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Here’s a little cookie from the cookie jar. To quote the legendary Jon Skeet from Threading with Windows Forms:
There are two different ways of invoking a method on the UI thread, one synchronous (Invoke) and one asynchronous (BeginInvoke). They work in much the same way – you specify a delegate and (optionally) some arguments, and a message goes on the queue for the UI thread to process.
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I recently took a look at the ANTS Memory Profiler 5.1 from RedGate software and posted my thoughts on it at the DeveloperFusion market place. Having toyed with several profilers in the past – DevPartner from Compuware (who’s now someone else who now owns the product) being my primary love since I first came across their .
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I’ve been working heavily with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and subsequently CentOS) the past few months (shh! dont tell my MSFT homey!) and one of the great things about CentOS and RHEL is that they both install using LVM - which is a helluvah lot easier when time passes and you realise your running out of space on a drive.
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Here’s a quick tip for you. Converting a string back to an Enum using Generics in C#.
private static T ToEnum<T>(string value) { return (T) Enum.Parse(typeof(T), value); } Nice and easy, here’s an example usage – very lame I know.
// Original enum UriFormat uriFormat = UriFormat.SafeUnescaped; // Persisted value string uriFormatText = uriFormat.
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Sun is prepping up the release of VirtualBox 3.0 which should be out soonishly (before the end of the month if everything is on track!). Amongst the top new bits of functionality is the guest multi-processing (SMP) support, you can now offer your virtual machines upto 32 virtual CPUs, which at last count was the highest by any hypervisor (VMWare can offer a maximum of 2).
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The release of Visual Studio 2008 brought along Code Metrics to the IDE‘s ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality (I’ve been overusing that phrase thanks to our resident CRM Consultant at work!). This was a major boon for .NET developers to get a clear idea of health of what they write, Visual Studio 2005 gave FxCop integration that provided much needed static code analysis for .
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A few weeks ago saw the launch of Wolfram Research Alpha, a natural search engine which could do some funky things. Now Microsoft have stepped up from their previous attempts – Ms Dewey (Janina Gavankar, who’s quite a hottie! reminds me of Tiffany) and now we have the final release of Bing (aka codenamed Kumo) which is going to be a behemoth search engine.
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I’ve moved my entire mailbox over to Gmail now, previously I was a firm believer in IMAP and didnt move to Gmail fully sooner because of the lack of folders – unlike in real life where my life is usually a mess, I keep my mail quite organised. Whats more, the junk mail filters are second to none.
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