Fabrice's weblog

Inspecting System.Xml.dll reveals it references System..dll, inspecting System.dll reveals it references System.Xml.dll. As far as I know, it's not possible to create circular references. Is this a trick from Microsoft? If the two assemblies reference each other, why create two seperate ones?

There have been voices talking about the lack of updates to the .NET Framework and Visual Studio, especially since we learnt that the next versions won't be released before 2005. Microsoft did not release fixes while some well known problems exist. If you don't know the "Help | Check for Updates" command in Visual Studio, it's not worth looking for it, you won't find updates there. All we got was the .NET Framework 1.1 and Visual Studio 7.1.

When you work with configuration files throughout the framework and the application blocks, you encounter assembly qualified names. Assembly qualified names (AQN) look like this: "MyNamespace.MyClass, MyAssembly". This is useful, because a string like this gives you everything you need to find a type. You can simply use Type.GetType() to access a type, based on its AQN.

Now that the dates for Whidbey and Yukon have slipped again (Visual Studio 2004 is now Visual Studio 2005, and VS2005 is now VS2006 or VS2007!), maybe we'll see less madness about all the fabulous novelties in Whidbey, Yukon and Longhorn. Looks like we won't be deploying on Longhorn before 2009. That's 5 (FIVE) years from now. Unless you live in the future, maybe you'd better focus on the now more than on the cool new upcoming features...

Do you think a rental model for software could exist?

Sami Jaber published a new article on DotNetGuru (in French, but to be translated soon on the English DotNetGuru - Update: now available in English) about lightweight containers such as Pico, Spring, Avalon or HiveMind. As a complete gringo to J2EE, this notion of containers and Inversion of Control was completely new to me.

Looks like that will be a busy week-end :-)

Eric Gunnerson published an article in which he tests the different ways of invoking a method.