.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

I was browsing the Encyclopædia Britannica and I landed on Ada Lovelace, from my college years I knew that the Ada programming language was named in her honor and I knew that she is consider the mother of programming, but the details have slipped me: Ada wrote an article on Babbage analytical engine, in there she suggested a "plan" for using the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers (all this happened circa 1843), because of this  Ada Lovelace is considered the first programmer and the first program is Ada's plan. A version of such program in C++ can be downloaded here and this is one of those moments when I wish I had the time for writing a C# version or may be even a Haskell version of it.

Some time ago mi pal Keiji Miyabe asked me how to unit test ASP.NET pages. As you know, the idea of unit testing was born in the business layer (where the problem is solved, among others, by NUnit) but it has started to grow into other layers as well, for example NUnitAsp tests web pages (exactly what Keiji was looking for). I discovered this while checking fellow RD Scott Hanselman blog , where he mentions and interesting alternative way to test pages that leverages Cassini, the open source web server written in C#.

As you probably know, CodeSmith is a freeware code generator based on templates. Even though CodeSmith requires good C# or VB.NET programming skills, it is very, very flexible. When I told about it to my pal Tomás Zules, he liked the idea but, as we were in an ASP.NET 2.0 training, the immediate question was whether CodeSmith run on .NET 2.0, I didn't know so yesternight I made some testing. To begin with, the CodeSmith .msi installer demands .NET 1.1 so I had to look for another road so I downloaded the CodeSmith .zip file, unzipped it and I had CodeSmith in my .NET 2.0 partition. When I tried to run CodeSmith.exe, I got again a message asking for .NET 1.0 or 1.1 and, as I recalled of a similar issue with NUnit, I opened the CodeSmith.exe.config file and found this lines at the beginning of the file:

  <startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v1.1.4322" />
    <supportedRuntime version="v1.0.3705" />
    <requiredRuntime version="v1.0.3705" />
  </startup>

Y just added my .NET version like this:

  <startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v1.1.4322" />
    <supportedRuntime version="v1.0.3705" />
    <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.40607" />
    <requiredRuntime version="v1.0.3705" />
  </startup>

And lo and behold, it run.Well, at least some simple examples run. I hope some of you will make more detailed tests but, so far, .NET 2.0 binary compatibility with .NET 1.1 is looking good.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft's strategy of offering low price/enterprise IDEs for .NET 2.0 will play out. Of late I've been showing Visual Web Developer (low price) to several audiences and this weekend I did my first Visual Studio 2005 (enterprise) training, as you can create ASP.NET web sites with both it's a good question what features VWD doesn't have, up until today I hadn't seen a short list. Rob Howard is a regional director who used to by part of the ASP.NET team. Rob is co-author of ASP.NET v.2.0 - The Beta Version. Well, in the corrections of the book I finally found such list, that I reproduce here:

During the great MSDN Tour in Ecuador, one of the most interesting questions I got was made by a couple of students who, as part of their final work, needed to use/port A.I. algorithms to .NET. Scrambling for an answer I pointed them to Mondrian, but Mondrian is a functional language, a programming paradigm with deep roots in LISP but that leans more towards maths than to A.I. I also mentioned  Mercury, and that was a better shot, because Mercury is a logic programming language (á la Prolog), Mercury is in beta but it may well be enough for their needs. Another possibility is DotLisp, a LISP dialect for .NET scripting, also in beta. Moving forward, we have P# which is a Prolog compiler that generates C#. Finally, a fascinating detail is the fact that the .NET Framework 1.1 includes a LISP mini-compiler here, the compiler is written in C# and generates MSIL, so it could be a good starting point for the translation of the algorithms. All in all, A.I. in .NET is possible but it is clearly in an early stage, which makes it a hot topic for a final paper.