A day like today Carl Sagan would have turned 76 years old. This small post is a tribute to the veterans of the world wars who fought Nazism and intolerance.

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Coming from a C# world I’m trying to get a grasp on the Java language, mostly for comparison purposes and to see if really the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

What I like so far of the Java 1.6 that I see C# might benefit from:
1. The main one is cross platform portability. I wish Mono would have more support.
2. Enums are more complex, but I’m wondering if we ever really use that complexity…
3. Static imports, but do they really add to maintainability or make it worse?

What I find confusing in Java vs C#:

1. Checked exceptions: In Java, the exceptions that a method throws must be declared and are part of a method’s public interface. They were left out from C# on purpose. Here’s an interview made by Bruce Eckel (Thinking in C++) to Anders Hejlsberg (lead C# architect and Turbo Pascal creator, I should point out I wrote my first program in Turbo Pascal :-p)…
2. Initialization blocks, not the static ones that are similar to c# static constructors but instance initialization blocks…why would you ever use them? I’m still puzzled…

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I came across this article

Why use the Entity Framework? Yeah, why exactly?

refuting a marketing like article by one of the EF team members.

After using NHibernate for a while and looking into JPA and old JDO on the Java world, I don’t think I’ll get my hands on the EF any time soon, if I can avoid it.

Why? The main reasons are summarized on this site:

ADO .NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence

I will mention the most compelling ones to me:

1. Main focus on the data aspect
2. Lack of Lazy loading, hydration, dirty flagging
3. Lack of persistence ignorance…The tight coupling of the persistence infrastructure to the entity classes largely eliminates the ability to efficiently use very tight feedback cycles on the business logic with automated testing.

As Peter Ritchie summarizes on his comment:
…if I’m a traditional TDD methodologist (for lack of a better term) and I’m building up my code base with test-first mentality then it’s all about the code. The automated tests are used for documentation of things like requirements, user stories, etc. Agile folk try to avoid documents like conceptual models, our conceptional model is the code, it’s our classes. I don’t need another conceptual modeler and I don’t need to have a modeler create new classes for me, I don’t need it to modify my classes, the classes I’ve defined for my application do exactly what they need to do.

As we build up our classes to reflect what the domain is, as we know it now, we eventually want to add the ability to persist those objects to a store of some sort. It’s at that point we being to think of OR/M. But we want to keep that persistence separate from our abstractions, keeping true to the single responsibility principle and separation of concerns. All the trappings of persistence are abstracted somewhere else.

Just my opinionated opinion…I have the gut feeling EF is sending ADO.NET back to the 1.1 version with Typed DataSets that were mere replicas of the database schema…

Ignorance is bliss and in this case persistence ignorance is a bliss I won’t give up on.

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http://geocities.yahoo.com/
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/26/geocities.closing/index.html

I had my first free sites posted there back in the late 90s…

This is how the web used to look like back then :-p

http://web.archive.org/web/19961022173245/http://www.geocities.com/

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Hi Developer that wanders the internet searching for the solution to your bug. Take a brief moment and vote for us, bunch of developers who also wander the internet to search solutions for our bugs and blog about them to help others

Microsoft Canada and TechNet Innovation Code Awards

We’ll be good and post more on our blog, interesting, good stuff :-p
Kidding, let the code prevail!

Oh, we’re the Tablet PC team, good stuff with SQL Server 2005 and Smart Clients

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I submitted the following bug to the Microsoft Connect program for SQL Server 2005. If you have found problems with row filtering and merge replication in SQL Server 2005 please vote for a quicker resolution.
298931

Cheers!

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We’re involved in extending an application with WinForms 2.0 and CAB. I thought I would put the resources I used to learn about this framework in a single place, my blog :-p, as opposed to have the URLs saved on my bookmarks.

Here it goes, in other of preference:

• CAB PDF document by Sal Razzak
• CAB Application Start Up Sequence published on the CAB Wiki
• Architectural Journal Case Study. Very good for understanding how to divide your use cases in workitems while you’re implementing your app.
• Best description of responsibilities in CAB
• Best CAB sample application, yes, the Hands On Labs are not the greatest samples to start with…Take a look at this PetStore version developed using CAB.
• Szymon Kbalzcyks’ saga on understanding CAB
• The ultimate reference book on CAB

Later on, the online reference links for each pattern used in CAB.

Cheers!

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I got this from a colleague:

1. Open Microsoft Internet Explorer.
2. On the Tools menu, click Internet Options.
3. On the Advanced tab, locate the Browsing section, and uncheck the Disable script debugging check box, and then click OK.
4. Close Internet Explorer.
5. In your JavasSript function add the keyword debugger . This causes VS.NET to switch to debug mode when it runs that line.

EX : –

function OnLookup()

{

debugger;

var xr = new XMLHttpRequest();

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Embedded as I am in globalizing applications I thought I would create this entry for future reference.

More than once I have to validate user input and more than once that input is a currency value. The currency symbols are not part of the expressions here.

For en-US or en-CA:

^(\d{1,3})(,\d{3})*(\.\d{2})?$

fr-CA currency formatting regular expression:

^(\d{1,3})(\s{1}\d{3})*(,\d{2})?$

Ttyl!

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