Philip Stears | Me

Personal Project Launched

For those that follow me on twitter, it’s probably not escaped notice that I’ve been making mention of a personal project for some time now. A couple of months ago I decided I really needed something to do out of work which didn’t involve, well, you know, more work. Much as I love what I do during the day, I was at serious risk of losing what little remains of my sanity. I also couldn’t bring myself to do DIY/gardening or one of the plethora of other activities that people seem to use for this purpose.

What I did decide to do was to put my money where my mouth was and start work on something I’ve been saying should be done for quite some time – the result of which was a project called ConnectBasic.

ConnectBasic is an attempt to create a fully featured macro programming environment which is easy to integrate into the 3rd party applications. It is based largely on the, seemingly defunct, VBA language but with ambitions to take on functionality from more modern languages which are useful to macro systems – for example, collections, dictionaries, sets, generics, integrated queries, and more. It’s probably also important to say that ultimately ConnectBasic is intended to be a superset of VBA which means I will be aiming to preserve as much of its quirkiness as possible, but possibly providing additional “Option xyz” statements to control these quirks.

The launch today isn’t me saying “it’s ready, go and integrate it!”, it is me saying that I think I’ve proved that the major components are prototyped and it seems to be workable, I’m actively seeking people to help out now, and I’m excited about kicking this project into the next gear. Be warned, it is very definitely a prototype as it exists today,

ConnectBasic is available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License on CodePlex today, and the official web site is at http://connectbasic.net/. The license agreement basically allows you to do whatever you like with the code – create derivative works, fork it, contribute, use it in open source/proprietary applications with or without attribution.

I’m really hoping that this project is going to grow into something great, the ability to write macros in modern applications has, for me, been one of the most important developments in software.

I’ll be posting more over the coming days and weeks to try and explain the major components of ConnectBasic, how it works, what it does/doesn’t do, what the road map looks like etc. In the mean time, if you’ve got any questions, please feel free to ping me at philip@connectbasic.net.

Phil(ip)

Thoughts on Microsoft’s DLR

At work I have the great fortune to work with a lot of fun technologies, but just recently I’ve been wanting to have a play with Microsoft’s Dynamic Language Runtime – the framework that emerged out of IronPython and is now the basis for IronPython, IronRuby, and a few others.

I’m not quite ready to talk about the project I’ve taken on yet, as I want to get it to a certain usable point before I make it available under the Ms-PL open source license, however I’ll be posting bits and pieces of information about the stuff I learn about the DLR here over the coming weeks.

In the mean time, if you’ve not hear about the DLR before, take a look at this excellent video from the Microsoft PDC:

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL10/

Test Post

This is a test post to see if RedGloo is still pulling blog entries from my personal blog :-)

Anyone for 64-bit? not Microsoft apparently.

Now, anyone that knows me knows that I'm usually a strong advocate of the blue monster, but every once in a while I run across something monumentally and staggeringly stupid that I wonder what on earth they were thinking.

The latest installment of maddening lack of forethought concerns the Group Policy Management Console, which is without any shadow of doubt, an essential part of an IT admin's life - unless that is you are using a 64-bit operating system. We're not allowed. Apparently.

Now, that is insulting enough, especially given that Microsoft will ONLY support Exchange 2007 on a 64-bit system, and are discontinuing Windows Server support for x86 after Longhorn, but wait, that simply wasn't enough.

It turns out that if you accidentally do try to install GPMC on a 64-bit machine, as I did; having not read the somewhat small-print, the setup program deletes the default group policy editor before telling you that the installation can't continue. Fantastic. A single serving of uselessness with a side order of administration pack reinstallation.

Oh, and to make things worse, the error message says nothing about not running on x64, it just says you need to install the .NET Framework first, now, given that I something like five versions of the framework, I find that error message somewhat irritating.

Grrr.

 

Edit: the bit about removing the old one turned out to be an issue with my system - sorry :-$, though the rest still stands.

Facebook Application Developer Event

Andy Callaghan is running an event for University of Reading students to learn how to build applications for Facebook:

Event: Free Event: An Introduction to Developing Facebook Applications

"I will show you how easy it is to build your first custom social app with Facebook"

What: Workshop

Host: Andy Callaghan

When: Wednesday, June 20 at 2:00pm

Where: G21, Engineering Building, University of Reading

To subscribe to the event you need to go along to Facebook:

http://rdg.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2370929104

 

Unfortunately I can't go as I am elsewhere, but Andy is a very intelligent and enthusiastic fellow and this event will be well worth attending.

What's your programmer personality type?

http://www.doolwind.com/programmertype.php?page=14 found via http://www.sellsbrothers.com/

Your programmer personality type is:
DHTB

You're a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.
You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.
You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Windows Server 2008

Most people will have heard by now that the new name for Windows Longhorn is going to be Windows Server 2008, as this video proves, the effort that went into the name is painstakingly difficulty ;-)

I moved all my hosting over to Longhorn Beta 3 shortly after it came out, and I have to say, it is nice being in the position of exploring what I can do with it, rather than scoping its limitations - especially IIS7.

IIS7 is easily the single biggest most exciting thing for me, though there are tonnes of others (good IPv6 support as an example).

Fracture

It's been a long while since I've seen a movie that I would genuinely recommend, luckily the tide seems to have turned.

Fracture was a great movie. I won't spoil it, but I will say that if you like Anthony Hopkins playing the self-confident intellectual (does he play anything else?) then you will not be at all disappointed.

It was so good it almost helped me over the emotionally traumatizing disaster that was Spiderman 3.

SQL Server Compact Edition and Linq To SQL

I just started playing with the relatively new SQL Server Compact Edition, which I have to say is a great piece of technology.

My next step though was to connect it up to my test application using the Linq to SQL ORM functionality, unfortunately it was not to be:

I hope this is a limitation that gets removed in a later build because the combination of SQL CE and Linq is going to massively powerful.

Unfortunately, I don't seem to be having much luck with Linq to SQL at all at the moment, I tried creating two tables with a simple foreign key constraint between them and each time I run my application, I get a System.InvalidOperationException with:

"Invalid association mapping for member 'WindowsApplication1.Customer.Purchases'. 'WindowsApplication1.Purchases' is not an entity."

I've not customized anything so I am not entirely sure what is going on, I can see where my weekend is going though:

Orcas, Silverlight, PopFly, ADO.NET Entity Framework, SQL Compact Edition, LINQ, C# 3.0, VB 9.0, Longhorn Server Beta 3, anything I missed?

Enabling Silverlight Debugging in "Orcas" Beta 1

I don't know if this is just because I had the previous version of Orcas installed on my machine, or because I have VS2005 as well, but, when I installed Orcas Beta 1, Silverlight debugging wouldn't work.

That is, unless I explicitly connected to a process and selected the debugging types manually, however there is a setting you can use to choose which debuggers to use under:

Tools -> Debugging -> Just-In-Time

If you make sure that "Core Managed" is selected your Silverlight debugging will work fine.