Shey’s Rebellion

How can stuffing look like dog food, but taste so good?

Looks like the Canon Digital Rebl XT is the most popular camera on Flickr! I wonder if the Digital Rebel XTi will be as popular as the Rebel XT.

I still haven’t found a good Ruby IDE that offers intellisense, but I did come across Ruby in Steel today. It’s a Ruby plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 and while it doesn’t offer intellisense yet, the company, SaphireSteele, is advertising a developer edition with intellisense will be available in Jan ‘07.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Microsoft has released “.NET Framework 3.0,” it includes four new components, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), formerly code-named Avalon; Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), formerly code-named Indigo; Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows CardSpace (WCS), formerly code-named InfoCard.

Can you sense my excitement? I’ve never been happy about Microsoft re-branding WinFX, WinFX runs under .NET CLR 2.0; the new .NET Framework 3.0 still includes the same .NET 2.0 base class libraries!

We will see LINQ, as well as other changes to the C# and VB.NET languages released under .NET Framework 3.5.

These last few days, I’ve been working on a program that unlike many of my projects, has data that won’t sit still.

There are tons of network links, socket connections and data sets that I don’t have any control over; it’s incredibly difficult to unit-test.  How do you test a socket connection when the data the server is sending to you keeps changing?  I realized that there are lots of network programming tasks where I don’t even know how start unit testing, and sometimes, when I can test, I have to set up dummy servers to replicate the data, it’s incredibly painful and it feels wrong.

How do you go about unit testing these kinds of applications?

I really wish Sun would simplify the classes related to dates in the Java Library. The java.util.date and java.util.*calendar* classes are a mess, very verbose and cumbersome to use. This ONJava article helps but it’s just a reminder of how much easier dates are to play with in .NET