According to Google groups, I started posting to USENET in 1995. It seems like a long time, but a colleague of mine (we’ve worked together at not one, but two startups) has an archived post that precedes mine by almost 10 years. I’ve always liked newsgroups. I still browse and post, and if Google groups (I still type in www.deja.com) had a nickel for every newsgroup search I’ve done, I’d have to sell a kidney to buy food.

Reading through a .NET newsgroup today puts you right in the development trenches. Here you will find people trying to figure out how to call a stored proc from ADO.NET, how to work with connection pooling, and how to send email from an ASP.NET page. Unfortunately, I think 85% of the questions in newsgroups can be answered with 180 seconds of RTFM or Google time.

All of the noise in newsgroups makes the experience somewhat like listening to AM radio in a train tunnel. There is a lot of static and it’s too easy to miss any golden nuggets of information. I think this has driven a lot of quality people out of newsgroups for good. Also, newsgroups are not the place to look for what’s coming down the road. It’s interesting to note the Aero development newsgroup has received fewer posts since the beginning of the year than the reporting services group typically gets in a single day.

Blogs gives people a place to “push” ideas, in contrast to newsgroups and mailing lists, where it seems more acceptable to “pull” ideas by asking questions. Pull would work so much better if people didn’t ask the same questions over and over again each day. What’s sad is, readers looking for someone else to do the RTFM for them are boiling over into blogs.

In the newsgroup world, people post FAQs and documents like Eric Raymond’s “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way” to cut down on the noise. The problem is, the people who don’t RTFM also don’t read FAQs and documents. Fortunately, I don’t think the noise that fills up newsgroups will bog the blog space down, because unlike newsgroups, which are a free for all, bloggers have more control over content and want to keep their blogs interesting. I’m not talking about censoring posts, I’m talking about the blogger always having the headline post, and therefore chooses the direction and theme for the blog content.

Reading the right blogs gives you a better balance of what’s happening today, and what’s going to happen 2 years from now. Magazines, on the other hand, seem to slant heavy to the far future. I’ve seen a few blogs and a few letters to the editor complaining about such and such a magazine becoming less relevant when they don’t cover the current tool set with practical articles. Scoble says covering the new stuff sells more issues, but I wonder if this will continue to hold true as people get the breaking news from blogs, and the magazine cover about the “three pillars of Longhorn architecture” will be looking like three month old news. That would certainly force some more in-depth practical articles instead of the fluffy Gartner Group type executive summaries.

I still read newsgroups, and magazines, and continue to add to the blogroll. If I had to give up one of the three right now, I think newsgroups would have to go. That sounds like an interesting conclusion to end with.

If you are looking for the leaked MS source code, don’t do it. As John Lettice points out:

…if you are offered unlicensed access you're smart not to even look at it, because simply knowing how the stuff works compromises your ability to produce products independently, and renders you difficult/dangerous to employ in the relevant field.

And later …

Finally, this is very important: if you propose to continue working in the IT industry, and somebody offers you a look at the source, just say no. Remember - if you learn too much about the internals of Microsoft products, you may find yourself unable to work for anybody except Microsoft. Yikes.

This statement is obviously fact. Don Box told us all about COM internals, and guess where he works now? Microsoft. Chris Sells has openly admitted to pumping MS employees for insider information at trade shows. Guess where Chris works now? Microsoft.

Summary: Delete your Rotor source code, uninstall your decompiler. If not, you are a coding time bomb of intellectual property and a target for assimilation.

For the last 18 months I’ve done no real development outside of C#. After 10 years of C++ I was starting to think at times I missed it. Then I downloaded the source code to Allegiance, because I just can’t resist looking at source code. I ran across this:

while (true) {
    UpdateText((char*)LPCTSTR(CString("Copying ") + CString(data.cFileName)));
 
    if (data.dwFileAttributes & FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY) {
        if (
               (strcmp(data.cFileName, "." ) != 0)
            && (strcmp(data.cFileName, "..") != 0)
        ) {
            CopyDirectory(
                (char*)LPCTSTR(CString(pchFrom) + CString("\\") + CString(data.cFileName)),
                (char*)LPCTSTR(CString(pchTo  ) + CString("\\") + CString(data.cFileName))
            );
        }
    } else {
        if (!
            CopyFile(
                (char*)LPCTSTR(CString(pchFrom) + CString("\\") + CString(data.cFileName)),
                (char*)LPCTSTR(CString(pchTo  ) + CString("\\") + CString(data.cFileName)),
                true
            )
        ) {
            Error("Error copying file.");
        }
    }
    if (!FindNextFile(hff, &data)) {
        if (GetLastError() == ERROR_NO_MORE_FILES) {
            FindClose(hff);
            return;
        }
 
        Error("Error reading directory contents");
    }
}
 

Two thoughts came to mind. First, I cherish the string class in .NET. Second, I realize now I never did like Hungarian notation.

I also had flashbacks to a code review I did about 4 years ago. Another guy and I sat down to prepare and quickly realized our coding standards were missing something important, specifically, how to deal with strings. Inside of the source file for a single COM component (not much code really) we found all of the following were present: CString, CComBSTR, _bstr_t, _T, LPCTSTR, BSTR, wchar_t, and char *. I’m not sure if I remembered them all, perhaps there was an OLECHAR mixed in there too. In any case, it's nice working with just one simple string class, with the occasional StringBuilder thrown in.

Also, I closed a support case with Microsoft recently. There is a bug in the Office 2000 version of OWC and it wouldn’t display all my cube dimensions. More details in this article.

There are some good responses to Rory's post with the above title.

I like the ThreadPool class because it simplifies spinning off worker tasks, but I did run into one area where I could not use it.

All the threads in the ThreadPool CoInitialize into an MTA. If you are doing COM interop with STA components (like any VB6 component), and want to avoid the marshalling overhead, there is no choice but to spin up your own thread with ApartmentState = ApartmentState.STA set before start.

Mono 0.30 is now available. It is also encouraging to see some serious effort in porting useful .NET apps to mono, for example, dasBlog. I agree with a recent posts on [mono-list], rebuild the go-mono.net site in ASP.NET to really show it off.

Note to self:

When the temperatures are consistently below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, don't forget to bring the soda in out of the car.

The ACM Queue has an interesting article on Building Collaboration into an IDE. The authors have been prototyping a version of Eclipse where IM, source control, screen sharing, and email augment the IDE. The goal is to give you more time to code while you spend less outside the IDE or away from the desk. Another goal is to provide additional context and traceability between code artifacts (source code files) and collaborative artifacts (IMs and emails).

I couldn’t stop thinking of questions and ideas while reading, particularly along the lines of how easy it might be to build this with Longhorn technologies.

This made me think of WinFS:

“For example, metadata that links source code with e-mail needs to be stored somewhere—perhaps with a special header field or with an URL. Where to store collaborative artifacts is another issue: You could try to juggle multiple stores (e.g., one for e-mail, one for source code, one for discussion forums, one for chat transcripts, one for bug tracking, etc.), or you could attempt to consolidate everything into a single store (e.g., the source-control repository).‘

This made me think of Indigo:

“An IDE augmented with collaboration requires some kind of supporting network infrastructure. Designing such an infrastructure raises the interoperability issues mentioned earlier (e.g., support for directory services, standards for messaging, etc.).”

Some things I read I just wish were already in VS.NET, like hovering over a checked-out file will tell you who has the file checked out, instead of just “another user”. It would be nice to put a watch on a file and have the IDE notify me when the other user checks the file in.

Being a Visual Source Safe user, it would also be great if the source control product didn’t feel 8 years old. I know MS is working on updating VSS, but I think there is a lot of catching up to do just to make it a solid and trustworthy product. Then I want all the all the bells and whistles and extensible plug-in support.