Great news: Apparently I wasn’t the only one to complain about the previous target date on June 10th. Now the event has been moved to June 3rd instead, one week earlier. So now I’ll have to think about the session I’m going to suggest. I’ll see how it goes…

Mark Miller demonstrates writing plugins for DXCore live in the latest episode of dnrTV. He sounds a bit hurried, but if you want to get into DXCore programming, this is definitely a Must View. And if you’re not yet convinced you want to get into DXCore programming, let me tell you of course you should. In either case, click here to view the show! …

It’s on June 10th, once more in Reading. Read all about it here. I think this date is a very bad idea, because it’s the Saturday right before TechEd 2006 in Boston starts. I don’t know whether I’ll be going to Boston or not, but I’m sure this will reduce the number of participants and potential speakers vastly. I was planning to suggest a talk for DDD day 3, but now this won’t be possible for me in case I’m going to be at TechEd. Oh well.

I saw it on Mark Miller’s blog and immediately thought that’s something I just need :-) The Optimus Mini 3 is the first product that’s been announced with the new keyboard technology from Art. Lebedev Studio, where every single key has its own little display and can be remapped with its own animation, not only an image.

The first announcement I had originally seen from these guys was for the full Optim… …

A question I heard this morning made me remember this, and I thought it might be one of those improvements that many haven’t noticed yet. In VS 2005, the “Go to Definition” functionality has been improved an awful lot, in that VS creates a source code representation of class and interface definitions instead of showing some obscure information in Object Browser. Trying this on IList<T> gives me this output, for example:

The ellipsis …

int GetCount(IEnumerable enumerable) {
  int count = 0;
  foreach (object o in enumerable)
    count++;
  return count;
}

It’s that simple, right? Well, no, it isn’t. What you have to realize is that in contrast to ICollection, IList or IBindingList, IEnumerable is not an interface that’s by definition used with some kind of list or collection. IEnumerable (or rather IEnumerator, to which IEnumerable gives you access) is an iteration interface, a small but potential …

Can you help me? Don’t you love those newsgroup posts? Granted, this is not a real world example (at least I hope it’s not), but why do programming newbies always

1. neglect to assess the complexity of the arbitrary problem they just came up with

2. assess the complexity of the problem wrongly — far too low, that is

3. assume it can’t be very difficult if only they find someone to “tell them how to do it”

I don’t want to rant, I find this really interesting. Maybe we’ll all be able to crea …

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Sometimes you ask yourself what you did at a specific time of a specific day — those of us who ever worked as consultants or contractors of any kind know that situation. Only recently I found TimeSnapper, which is a great tool that takes regular snapshots of your desktop. It stores them away in a pretty well compressed format, so the archives don’t take up too much space. And it includes a nice browsing applet that lets you go bac …