.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

One of my most neglected hobbies is numerical computation (amid this sea of database access, layers, patterns, and services, anyone remember that one?), an example: a couple of years ago I bought the interesting Object-Oriented Implementation of Numerical Methods: An Introduction with Java & Smalltalk by Didier Besset, by then I was programming in C# and immediately had the idea of translating his algorithms to C#. Well, two years later (that is a couple of weeks ago) I dragged myself to do it only that, for being at least a little bit innovative, I decided to use C# 2005 Express. I know, I know, there are translators from Java to C# but, remember, this is my hobby, so I decided to take the scenic route; the process has been relatively painless (I'm in Chapter 7 now, working a few nights per week) and I've been able to use some of the nice features of C# (like operator overloading for polynomial operations, and List<double> instead of ArrayList for variable size vectors). Anyway, some doubts appeared on the way and I decided to contact Dr. Besset, after a couple of searches in Google I found his address and sent him my questions, to my amazement he promptly answered, and so here I am regularly e-mailing with Didier :-) One of the things I needed was some test data to validate my C# translation. Didier first sent me some test code in Smalltalk and then some more unit tests in Java, now to use them I needed NUnit, so this morning I downloaded the latets (beta) version of NUnit and, as it refused to install without .NET 1.1, I downloaded the source code, opened it with VS 2005 and recompiled it, had an error due to a missing resource file but, as it was used only in one menu option, I blatantly commented the calls and tried again: voilá, in spite of a raft of warnings, NUnit now runs on my .NET 2.0 Beta 1 environment. So, finally I translated some of Didier tests and, to my exhilaration, my code actually *passed* them. Isn't programming fun?

Everybody (me included) is totally excited by the Beta 1 launch, yet I think the Mono 1.0 release is an equally important landmark (provided it has the right quality level), my personal reasons for thinking so:

It seems like nobody noticed but release 1.0 of Shadowfax (a reference architecture and framework for enterprise applications) has been posted today here http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=9c29a963-594e-4e7a-9c45-576198df8058. One more step towards better architected systems.

OK, this is sure to be really silly stuff for some of you, but as I do 9x% of my work with SQL Server, taming the Oracle beast is a real challenge for me. The very first round, filling a dataset:

In a forum, I read that VB.NET 2.0 there won't be an equivalent to the C# 2.0 iterators and yield keyword. Being a C# fan and not one that misses a chance of teasing my VB.NET friends (and customers), I should be happy but, somehow, this sounds weird to me, is this indeed true?

In today's presentation, Anders introduced some new syntax (to me) for nullable types. It goes like this: if you have a value variable (struct or simpler) that could get null values, you declare it like this:

You could be tasting this:

There are now far more interesting news about TechEd now so I will quickly finish the story of my trip: