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.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

Programming in Quito, 2.860 m above sea level

  • Up to speed with 2005: Windows Forms

    It tells you something when you see the Datagrid Girl herself coming to attend a *Windows Forms* presentation (not to mention a few RDs and some Microsoft PMs). For all the publicity (mostly deserved) about the all new ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Forms has also got a number of enhancements in .NET 2005, not as massive as ASP.NET, granted, but may be this is due to the fact that Windows Forms was already pretty mature on .NET 1.1 ;-) So most enhancements come in the form of new controls, if this doesn't sound compelling enough, you should check DatagridView or ToolsStrip. But do it quickly because it seems like Marcie is planning to become the DatagridView Chick. Dang, Clemens Vasters just asked about how the ToolStrip autosave works and, as the instructor was a little lost, the guy that *wrote* it is helping with the answer, I better stop blogging and start paying attention.

  • Up to speed with 2005

    Glen Gordon comments about a very intense 3 day event in Bellevue on Microsoft 2005 technologies. And it's intense: today's agenda spans for 12 hours! Best of the day so far: VSTO 2005 rocks! (and it does help that the team doing the presentations was really energetic). So, go download it and give it a try. A funny comment fron Glen's blog: "MS corporate has put together an intense 3 day training meeting for field personnel like me as well as key Microsoft advocates around the world." As I am not a Microsoft employee I guess that puts me in the "key Microsoft advocates around the world" bag, you can imagine my grin. Now back to hear Jeff Prosise's talk about Membership in ASP.NET 2.0.

  • Open source projects in .NET

    It seems that the open source season has arrived to .NET, now they are talking about it everywhere. Of late, I have found individual initiatives as well as companies that mantain several projects, and just yesterday I stumbled on one of the most complete catalogs I've seen of open source projects, exclusively in C#! Me myself, I surrendered to the temptation and got involved in this project, (un)fortunately I've got precious little time that I can dedicate to it but I will try and tell you how the adventure goes.

  • MIT courseware on line

    Probably you already new this but for me it's big news: through the Microsoft Academic Alliance site I found the courseware for a number of courses given at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To be honest, it's frustrating not to have the time for downloading a couple of those and start learning.
     
    Edgar Sánchez
     
     

  • Numerical Mono

    As soon as I got the SciMark2 benchmark running on C# I started to wonder how well (or whether) SciMark2 would run on Mono. Yesterday, I fired up my Suse Linux partition, copied the CommandLine.exe to a Linux volume and run "mono CommandLine.exe". First of all, the benchmark just run, no translations, no recompilations, I know, I know, "no big deal, what are the news" but, given the number of people who said that Microsoft would never allow .NET in Linux to happen and that Mono would never complete, I like to shout a "So there!" from time to time. Anyway, these are the SciMark2 results on Mono 1.0 (always in my good old Toshiba portable):

  • .NET 2.0 and Java 1.5 for numerical computing

    Going ahead with my numerical algorithms translation, I started to wonder if I was going to win something in performance. Is .NET 2.0 going to be faster than Java 1.5 for numerical computing? To find out, I downloaded the SciMark2 benchmark from the http://math.nist.gov site and I translated it to C# using Visual C# Express, at this point I didn't try to understand (let alone enhance) the code, only to get it working in C# (except a couple of obvious changes like using Array.CopyTo() to copy arrays). Anyway, these are the results I got with Java 1.5 Beta 2 in my portable (2.8 GHz Mobile Intel Pentium 4 CPU):