As many of you might have noticed, my two heroes Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have joined forces to create a new programming community.
Right now they seem to focus on weekly podcasts where they discuss questions and thoughts submitted by people around the world, but in the future it will work as some kind of knowledge base for all kind of programming topics. I don’t know how this will work out, but I’m definitely excited about it.
Take a look at stackoverflow.com you too!
The big news today is that the ASP.NET team has released the MVC framework as open source at Codeplex.
Check it out at http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet.
Joel Spolsky has written a very interesting (and entertaining) article about the problems with standardization.
Read it at Joel on Software.
One thing that I’ve noticed a lot when I’m reading forum posts and blog entries is that there is so much hate against Microsoft. This is in first place applicable - as I’ve understood - to people in the open source community. Personally, I try to be as open minded to new technology as I can, and I enjoy spending time learning about technological territories where I usually don’t spend much time. Having said that, I do have .NET and Microsoft technology as my main area of expertise (in other word, I’m in bed with the enemy).
What is most obvious is that these people would never give Microsoft credits, regardless of what Microsoft do. When Microsoft charge money for an application suite, they are called greedy. When they - as they have done in Sweden recently - give away programs like Windows Server 2003, Visual Studio 2005/2008 and SQL Server 2005 for free to students, people say that they’ve misunderstood the word “free”. Instead of appreciating the gesture and the fact that they obviously care about future developers.
Free for me, is when a company, with responsibility for staff and customers, can choose to charge, or not charge, for the products and services that they provide. I don’t think that Microsoft does everything perfect, but on the other hand no other companies or organizations do. There are things that Ubuntu does better than Vista, XCode better than Visual Studio and Apache better than IIS. That doesn’t make me hate the open source community.
There are so many cool things to learn from other areas that it is just a shame to be critical against something as a mere matter of principle.
Don’t you agree?
I just received my copy of the book “Framework Design Guidelines” and I must say that, by the first glance, it looks really promising. I will post a review of the book in a couple of weeks when I’ve read it.
When I wrote about the upcoming possibility to debug .NET Framework Source Code a while ago, I thought it would take months before it would be available to the public.
Since I didn’t know that it had been released, you can probably imagine how pleased I was when I found Shawn Burke’s very well written tutorial on how to get this to work in Visual Studio 2008.
Happy debugging!
I just found an interesting interview with Anders Hejlsberg where he talks about generics in C# and compares it to the corresponding implementations in Java and C++.
This is part seven in a series of interviews, so don’t miss the other six parts.
Even though I am sick today, I’m kind of happy. The reason for this is that the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview has been released. Yes… I know… I seriously need to get some professional help for this.
The ASP.NET 3.5 Extension Preview consists of five parts - all equally cool - but right now I’m most excited about the Model View Controller (MVC) framework, which will make it easier to unit test and support a test driven development workflow. While you’re at it you should also get the ASP.NET MVC toolkit which provides HTML rendering helpers and dynamic data support for MVC.
Read more about this on Scott Guthrie’s blog.
If you ever wanted to write an add-in for Windows Live Messenger (a.k.a. MSN Messenger), then you should definitely keep reading. The add-in functionality isn’t enabled by default – so it’s not obvious how to do – but please read the article through and I will tell you how it all works.
By the end of the article I will have shown you how to do a fully working auto reply add-in that tells users different things depending on your status.
Researchers at University of Cambridge have written an interesting article about the dangers with storing hashed passwords as MD5 without using salt.
Apparently hackers don’t always need to use a rainbow table to recreate an unsalted MD5 hash since Google sometimes can do that for them. Since many sites use unsalted MD5 hash to create unique URLs (for usernames, categories and such), many MD5 hashes are indexed by search engines.
Here is one approach to how you should use MD5 hashing in C#:
There’s nothing fancy to it at all, but it really makes a difference.