practice with working with opposing views will make Microsoft a better place to work, make our strategies more thorough and our products better
Ok, on to the point. Jeff Atwood recently posted about some frustration he's dealing with regarding the differences between C# and VB.Net. Here's the article: C# and the Compilation Tax
I noticed something when I worked at GeoAge (How's that for link love to the company that had to lay me off?). We were a VB.Net shop, and I'm pretty sure they still are. I was a C# dev at heart. One thing that I hated about using both languages was that Intellisense was a lot better in VB than in C#. Autocomplete in particular saved me thousands of keystrokes a day at work.
Then I started playing with VS 2005. Turns out that in 2005, C#'s intellisense seemed to take a huge cue from VB, and we had equivalent completion, and intellisense.
I've developed a theory. The VB team focuses a lot of energy on making developing code easier, while the C# team devotes time to making the language more powerful. I think the C# team then capatilizes (one version back) on the work from the VB team. Probably under a lot of pressure from their customers, since they see how much more productive VB devs can be.
So, I expect that in the next version or two of VS, we'll see background compilation in C#, and see the My namespace make it into C#. Those are my predictions.
Just hold on Jeff, and hopefully the C# team will make you happy. Of course, by the time they do, the VB team will have some new thing that makes their devs more productive, so you'll be wanting more from the C# team. It's a vicious cycle, but I think it makes C# a better language, and the .NET platform stronger. If you can deal with being a cycle back in productivity.
The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,
I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.
My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,
My daughter beside me, angelic in rest.
Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,
Transforming the yard to a winter delight.
The sparkling lights in the tree I believe,
Completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.
My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,
Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep.
In perfect contentment, or so it would seem,
So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.
The sound wasn't loud, and it wasn't too near,
But I opened my eyes when it tickled my ear.
Perhaps just a cough, I didn't quite know,
Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.
My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,
And I crept to the door just to see who was near.
Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,
A lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.
A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old,
Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.
Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,
Standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.
"What are you doing?" I asked without fear,
"Come in this moment, it's freezing out here!
Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,
You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve!"
For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,
Away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts..
To the window that danced with a warm fire's light
Then he sighed and he said "Its really all right,
I'm out here by choice. I'm here every night."
"It's my duty to stand at the front of the line,
That separates you from the darkest of times.
No one had to ask or beg or implore me,
I'm proud to stand here like my fathers before me.
My Gramps died at ' Pearl on a day in December,"
Then he sighed, "That's a Christmas 'Gram always remembers."
My dad stood his watch in the jungles of ' Nam ',
And now it is my turn and so, here I am.
I've not seen my own son in more than a while,
But my wife sends me pictures, he's sure got her smile.
Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,
The red, white, and blue... an American flag.
I can live through the cold and the being alone,
Away from my family, my house and my home.
I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,
I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat.
I can carry the weight of killing another,
Or lay down my life with my sister and brother,
Who stand at the front against any and all,
To ensure for all time that this flag will not fall."
"So go back inside," he said, "harbor no fright,
Your family is waiting and I'll be all right."
"But isn't there something I can do, at the least,
"Give you money," I asked, "or prepare you a feast?
It seems all too little for all that you've done,
For being away from your wife and your son."
Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,
"Just tell us you love us, and never forget.
To fight for our rights back at home while we're gone,
To stand your own watch, no matter how long.
For when we come home, either standing or dead,
To know you remember we fought and we bled.
Is payment enough, and with that we will trust,
That we mattered to you as you mattered to us."
[Edit: I got a comment, supposedly from the author of this poem, asking for attribution. I obviously don't have any way to verify his identity, but I also don't want to steal anyone's limelight. So, here it is.]
The poem is actually entitled "A Soldier's Christmas" and was written by Michael Marks on December 7th, 2000. The works of Mr. Marks have been featured in the Washington Times, hang in the Titan Missile Museum, and are featured on the International War Veteran's Poetry Archive at http://www.iwvpa.net/marksmI know, because I am Michael Marks. LCDR Giles simply forwarded my poem long ago and had his email signature appended at the bottom, later misinterpreted as an authorship attribution.Could you PLEASE edit this post to include "Michael Marks, copyright Dec 7, 2000" before the kind comments by LCDR Giles, as the error gets copied and sent along. Thanks for helping me clear this up!Warmest regards,Michael Marks
[End Edit]
PLEASE, would you do me the kind favor of sending this to as many
people as you can? Christmas will be coming soon and some credit is due to our U.S. Service men and women for our being able to celebrate these festivities. Let's try in this small way to pay a tiny bit of what we
owe. Make people stop and think of our heroes, living and dead, who
sacrificed themselves for us.
LCDR Jeff Giles, SC, USN
30th Naval Construction Regiment OIC,
Logistics Cell One
Al Taqqadum, Iraq
For the last day and a half, I've been attending a class on threading in C#. The class is taught by Jeffrey Richter, one of the partners at Wintellect.
This is an amazing class. I feel much more prepared to write asynchronous code now. I've been taking a lot of notes, and will be posting a few new posts on how to do multi-threaded programming.
Stay tuned!
Last week, there was some discussion on blogs about what motivates developers to work.
Rob Walling presented the argument that there are things he values more than money.
Today, Dennis Forbes presents his argument that he's definitely in it for the money, and so are most of us.
I proclaim that I am a mixture of both points of view. Money is important to me, obviously, or I wouldn't ask about salary when I get new jobs.
I would say that money is not the only thing that is important to me, or even the number one priority, though. I've got data to prove it, too.
I can't share the data with you, however. Give me a call if you're curious.
WO Fay, who is a combat artist in Iraq, generally posts some good stuff on his blog. Sometimes, I disagree with the strength of his position. I think that's just a factor of my being out for several years, and him being at war.
Wednesday, though, he posted something that perfectly matches my own opinion. Go read it. Then and Now
I'm sitting in a performance engineering class today. There was a guy who came in right before the class started, and was on the waitlist. He managed to get a seat, because some people didn't show up.
This guy, of course, chose to sit right next to me.
45 minutes later, this guy has not once moved his hand away from his nose. He has been snorting every 10-15 seconds since he sat down, and for the past two minutes, has been digging around in his nose.
To be fair, I don't think he's picking his nose; it appears that his nose is bleeding. But still, get a damn tissue, dude.
If you are remote desktop'ed into a machine, then your clipboard is synced between your local machine and the remote machine. So, if you copy some data from a text file on the remote machine, you can paste that data into the local machine, and vice-versa.
This is not true, however, if you daisy chain your remote connections, as in the previous post. Your local machine and machine A will be synced, and machines A and B will be synced, but you can't copy from machine B directly to your local machine.
What I do to get around this is to copy from B, then create a new text file on A. Paste the data from B into the text file, then copy the text from A, and paste it onto your local machine.
Or, you could save the data to a text file from B, directly onto your local machine's C drive, using the technique in the previous post.
Phil Haack pointed us all to a blog entry by Steven Harman, which shows how to automagically map your remote drives to your remote desktop connected computer. I'll go one step further.
Let's say you're remote desktopped into Machine A. You are all super cool, now that you've read Steven's blog post, so you have easy access to your local computer's hard drive.
But, let's say you need to remote desktop into machine B, which you can only do from machine A (due to network limitations).
How do you map your local machine's hard drives all the way through to machine B?
It's simple, actually. On machine A, in your remote desktop window, map a network drive to \\tsclient\c (if the c drive is the one you want mapped).
That drive should show up with a letter now, probably close to 'Z', unless you changed it during the mapping.
Now, if you remote into machine B, after following Steven's advice, you'll see a drive similar to 'Z on TSClient'. That drive is actually the hard drive of your local machine, visible to both machines A and B.
Take note, however, that file operations to your local drive through a daisy-chained Remote Desktop connection will be noticeably slower than usual.
