The Aqua Tower in Chicago, my favorite piece of architecture

Visiting downtown Chicago I couldn't help but falling in love with this piece of art and its eternal waves...

AQUA from Spirit of Space on Vimeo.

Silverlight development on Eclipse, with c# though :)

For all the Java junkies that can't get away from Eclipse, please see the release of Eclipse4SL from Soyatec.

I particurlarly prefer Visual Studio but can tell that the Express editions are not the best choice when debugging .NET code.

Can't wait to touch it :)

The best explanation of the credit crisis in just 5 mins

I saw this video first on this speaker's blog Sacha Chua

and vimeo's copyright seems okay with bloggers like me embedding their videos on their sites.

Kuddos to the author Jonathan Jarvis

Enjoy! ... the video, not the credit crisis...


The Credit Crisis - Animatic from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Top worst ten bugs in history of software.

I got this on a newsletter at work:
Top Ten worst bugs in history.


I remember the floating point bug on the Pentium. We received a few Pentium machines for the electronic lab at the University and that was the first thing we tried... and yes, there was a bug. It was fun to know why...

Adding an NHibernate collection to your QuickWatch initializes it

I spent most of the day trying to improve performance on an application. We use NHibernate 2.0 and try to lazy load most of the collections.
I found these two links very useful for troubleshooting my performance issue:
http://djeeg.blogspot.com/2006/08/nhibernateutilisinitialized.html
and the NHibernate reference:
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/nhibernate/html/performance.html

The curious thing is I got really confused when testing my
NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized(_myobject.MyCollection) line and it was false
but I saw a query retrieving the collection in Profiler...


until I realized that adding the collection to the Watch initializes it. The same happens if you open this collection in QuickWatch. :-p

If you call your .NET application from a batch file...

If you deploy your .NET applications with a batch file, be aware that the way you call your .NET application might affect how it behaves.

The facts are as follows (for our application anyways):

when the application is called using the following line in the batch file:

start C:\Progra~1\ApplicationFolder\Application.exe

the application fails

if you call the application using the windows explorer in the batch file:

explorer C:\Program Files\ApplicationFolder\Application.exe

it works fine but it shows a security warnings that you're downloading files and that publisher is unknown...Not good for the end user, not good.

If you call the application from a path that doesn't have white spaces using the start command, it works fine:

start C:\ApplicationFolder\Application.exe

(This option would be good if we didn't use Program Files for the deployment, but most people do)

and, finally, if you use the start command but take out the DOS path it works!

start " " "c:\Program Files\ApplicationFolder\Application.exe"


I checked the assemblies binding errors, the code access security for every assembly in the application, debugged the application, et-cetera without results.

Changing the old DOS path did the trick!!!

Why? I still have to get a hold on this script guy to ask him why :-p

Happy coding!

C# OpenSource IDE, SharpDevelop

Reading an article about reordering elements by drag and dropping them inside a listview
I found this opensource IDE for .NET
#Develop

It might not compete with Visual Studio Express, but all the IDE source code is there, in case you ever wonder how to build one ;)

Cheers!