Community Server

Before .NET 3.5 was released the choice of whether you should choose Visual Basic or C# as your programming language was more or less a matter of taste. With the first incarnations of these languages, you could do virtually the same things with both. Visual Basic 9.0 introduced quite a few new interesting features, and the support for XML literals ...

My last post on Java generics and the Repository pattern got a bit of interest. Judging from the feedback I got, I feel the need to elaborate on the Inversion of Control part of this. As some readers pointed out, Google’s Guice container employes super type tokens to support generics to some extent. The IoC example I gave in my previous post ...

Whenever I stray off the beaten path of Java generics, I instantly miss C#’s generics implementation. Earlier today, Java’s type erasure erased a few good hours of productivity whilst I was doing a spike on bringing the IRepository<T> experience to Java. In C# you can get the class of any generic type argument in a straight forward ...

One of the challenges I have experienced when giving talks or blogging about domain specific languages is that developers are a little reluctant to writing code in languages they are unfamiliar with. This holds true even if the DSL in question is an external DSL based on commonly available languages such as Boo, Ruby, Groovy or ...

Last week I was awarded the MSDN Guru award at the Heroes happen {here} event in Oslo. The videos from the show have been posted and you can watch me accepting the award, giving the obligatory thank you speech and getting interview below. If you can’t understand what’s being said, it’s because its in Norwegian… Expect for the interview, which ...

On Thursday I was award the “MSDN Guru” award during the Norwegian Heroes Happen {here} launch event. This was fun, and I just want to thank the people who nominated me for the award. I feel very humble to be the winner among the other nominees, they where all great candidates. By the way, the picture shows a bottle of the specially ...

Fredrik Kalseth posted a notice about his talk for the Norwegian .NET User Group’s (NNUG) Vestfold’s chapter, so I thought I’d follow in his footsteps to inform the world about my speaking engagements next week. On Tuesday February 26th I’m giving a talk on language oriented programming with .NET for the Oslo chapter of ...

Whatever language you write in, your task as a programmer is to do the best you can with the tools at hand. A good programmer can overcome a poor language or a clumsy operating system, but even a great programming environment will not rescue a bad programmer. Kernighan and Pike When I attended Richard Öberg’s talk on Qi4J at the Oslo ...

There is an article in this week’s Economist referring to a paper by Dr. Mark Pagel et al published in the latest edition of Science on (spoken) languages evolving in punctuational bursts. The key point in Dr. Pagel’s research is that evolutionary change happens in sudden jumps separated by long periods of creeping evolution. The ...

A while a go Neil Gafter proposed extension methods as a new feature in Java 7. This is an interesting proposal and if it is implemented, it would make Quaere even better. I'll skip the tired list sorting example from the discussions and think out loud about how Quaere would benefit from extension methods. First lets look at some simple features. ...