Author: andy

Writing, magtape

A useful article on how to write a better weblog. In summary: don’t just link, say something new, join the dots, create content. Well, that was my original idea with this blog. I was going to write articles or nothing, and that would help me organise my thoughts and practice writing. Unfortunately, I quiickly found out how hard that is. If I spend a day playing with, say, web services, my poor little brain is just too frazzled to be able to extract some useful or interesting commentary from the experience. And even if I could, I find it very difficult to switch from coding to writing – I produce very long sentences with nested, punctuated clauses, and way too many brackets. Code, in other words.

Everett and C#

Fresh-out-of-NDA, Breaking news on the next “Everett” version of Visual Studio. I suppose it’ll be nice to have a forms designer for managed C++, but is anyone doing new development in managed C++? There’s a longer-term roadmap for Visual Studio, including how it ties-in the forthcoming windows releases, here. I wonder why its call Everett.

On a related topic, Anders Hejlsberg’s OOPSLA presentation on C# has some hints on future language features, starting at slide 29. Predictably, we get generics (at last). Quite C++-like, but instantiated at run-time rather than compile-time. I’m not sure about that – managed code seems to take an age to start already. I like the ability to declare constraints on type arguments (slide 34), but I wonder how much code the new ‘where’ keyword will break. Partial types (slide 40) are a good idea – might be useful for hiding the implementation details of a class while maintaining the visibility of its public interface. gotdotnet has a FAQ with some explanations.