Stephen’s Personal Blog

My favorite part of .Net development is the buggy IDE that crashes 2-3 times a day. It’s interesting that it comes back up so quickly and in the place where you left minus bookmarks, search history, etc. Did this happen a lot when it was being built? If they had only spent that much time fixing the bugs. I can deal with an IDE that takes 30 seconds to load as long as I only have to do it every two weeks. Instead I’ve got an IDE that takes 2-3 seconds to load 20-30 times in two weeks. It’s all about trade offs.

How can .Net be considered a decent replacement for ASP? There were some things ASP did extremely well. One was be script. Script doesn’t have to be compiled. You make a change save you file and boom your changes are there for everyone. For .Net you must compile and since your files are in use you have to stop IIS, kick everyone off, insert your new files, start it back up. A one line change used to take as long as hitting the save button. Now, it’s a C++ application with all the associated build wait times. Give it 30 seconds or so. It may seem like a small time, but 30 seconds is 30 times longer than it used to take. That’s progress.

Visual Studio searching is needlessly click intensive. I used Visual Interdev 6 search for years and liked it better than VB6. You can search across files or in the one file. It’s annoying and silly to resize the one search both to suit your application. The other alternative it to dock the find tool, but that always struck me as extemely space wasteful. You only need something that’s 30% of the screen width not 100%. Then I got use to VC++ search and it’s better, though very different. There are two modes, searching across files and searching in the file. They have two different dialog boxes. Searching across files leaves a list of found items in docked window that suddenly appears. But you usually need every bit of width you can get out of it. That was usually the reason for resizing VI6’s search box. Searching in the file jumps to the place where it found your item. Each had it’s own button. You usually know the scope search.

VS03 combines the worst of both methods. There’s one search popup. You use two-three button clicks to switch between local document, entire solution. And the results are always displayed in the docked window. So, now I’m required to keep that POS on my screen. I want my one click back!

Ok, I’m pasting code from VB6 into the editor and the stupid thing adds a tab to each of the lines. So, this…

function fooBar() as string
Dim myVar as String
...
end function

becomes…

function fooBar() as string
Dim myVar as String
...
end function

What’s wrong with the new dictionary objects? I can’t just go to the one item in the list that I want. I have to cycle through the entire list iteratively until I find the one I want. This is incredibly wasteful, stupid, nonobvious, and verbose.

VBS
myValue= myDic(myItem)

C#
foreach(DictionaryEntry obj in myDic)
{
if (obj.Key.ToString()==myItem.ToString())
{
myValue = obj.Value.ToString();
break;
}
}

How does .net make me feel stupid? With over 7 years of professional experience and 13 all together, I can’t find/figure out how to convert a string to an integer. I must be fucking moron. Not!

I see after, 20 minutes of hunting and finding that everything wants to be as string with the ToString function, I found System.Convert.ToInt32(string). Wow, this is such an improvement over CInt(string) or Val(string) in VBScript and VB6. Oh look Val is in VB.Net, but not C#, because that makes sense seeing that they both compile into the same code.

It seems our understanding of gravity is in flux these days. This is from another scientific pair who dispute the existance of Dark Matter. For those that don’t know, when astronomers tried to apply our gravity formulas to larger bodies like black holes and galaxies the results didn’t match observed behavior. To resolve this Dark Matter was invented. This reminds me too much of the concept of ether. I like to find things that attempt to disprove it. My favorite idea is that gravity changes over extreme distances, like between stars or galaxies and is not constant. Perhaps it even changes over planetary distances. The first probes launched out of the solar system 30+ years ago are off their expected track by 400,000 miles. This seems semetrical, because of the formula for speed (velocity). In our experience on Earth speed is simply distance/time. However, in the extremely fast other factors begin to have more affect. Einstein’s equations show that mass increases the closer to the speed of light that you move and time dilation effects begin to become noticeable.

Why is this important?

I think it could lead to an improved understanding in a basic part of science. Understanding like this results in nuclear power, fiber optics, solid state circuits, radios, satellites, etc. Personally, I’m hoping for a new type of engine that would allow flying cars.

Anyway, enough rambling…

From PP.\RC.
…
A new law for gravity, developed by Dr Hong Sheng Zhao and his Belgian collaborator Dr Benoit Famaey of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), aims to prove whether Einstein’s theory was in fact correct and whether the astronomical mystery of Dark Matter actually exists. Their research was published on February 10th in the US-based Astrophysical Journal Letters. Their formula suggests that gravity drops less sharply with distance as in Einstein, and changes subtly from solar systems to galaxies and to the universe.
…
They have created a formula that allows gravity to change continuously over various distance scales and, most importantly, fits the data for observations of galaxies. To fit galaxy data equally well in the rival Dark Matter paradigm would be as challenging as balancing a ball on a needle, which motivated the two astronomers to look at an alternative gravity idea.
…