Anyone else find this funny? I know I do! I told you I was a beta junkie.

If you haven't already read Joel's commentary on the current situation with browsers, specifically the Internet Explorer 8 beta, you should check it out¹. As always, read the opposing viewpoint as well. I would say that some of the comments to that post might provide more value than the sarcasm in the post, specifically this comment from Mark himself.

But you know, I'm not really posting to talk about the problems with browser compliance, web standards, or anything like that. I'm talking more about how commenters really have no clue what they're talking about. From Joel's post, "99% of the participants in the flame wars are not going to understand what they’re talking about."

The most recent post on the IEBlog revolved around how the WebBrowser control will render sites. One of the first comments is a complaint about naming regarding the WebBrowser control. The thing is, that is what it is named! Just try a Google search on the topic!

I guess this is exactly what Joel was talking about when he questioned the value of comments on sites that have enough traffic. Good thing my site doesn't get that much traffic Comments to my posts (when they come) are still quite welcome!

¹ While you're there, read the rest of his posts. And subscribe to his blog. Why aren't you already?

I am a huge fan of the immediate window in Visual Studio. I say forget the watch window - I'd rather use code to check values. In case you didn't know, you can get values in the Immediate window by typing "?" and the variable name. Like so:

? myCoolVar

You can also execute commands at the immediate window by just typing them. It is a nice way to change values at debug-time.

myCoolVar = "some other blah"

What I didn't realize until today is that you can create completely new variables at the Immediate window as well! Just type in the variable declaration as you normally would in code. (note that you need the semi-colon in this case)

string myNewCoolVar = "I'm a brand new variable!";

Here's a screenshot of this behavior in action:

Right now, I'm using this behavior while working with a new WPF application. I've got an IMultiValueConverter and it is a hassle casting my generic array of objects into types, especially when I'm still deciding on the various bindings I'd like to pass in. With this, I can just set a breakpoint and use the Immediate window to play with the code.

This gets me a lot closer to an interactive console (like IRB) with .NET. Though I can do all of this with IronPython, F#, or IronRuby, it is nice to be able to do this at debug time from Visual Studio.

Last night kicked out the Fort Smith .NET User Group's first meeting. It went great! I would guess that we had at least 20 or 30 people show up.

Raymond Lewallen spoke to us about Behavior Driven Design (BDD). I thought I'd share links to a few of the resources that he brought up last night.

• Dan North - He came up with the BDD idea
  • Also check out this blog post for more detail regarding BDD
• specunit-net - A set of extensions to strive for more behavioral tests (specifications) based on SpecUnit for Ruby
• NUnit - The testing framework Raymond used
  • MbUnit - I actually use MbUnit for most of my tests, but NUnit is fine.
• Castle Windsor - The IoC container that Raymond mentioned.
• Here are a few other IoC/DI containers available for .NET development
• StructureMap - From Jeremy Miller
• Unity - The Microsoft offering
• Rhino.Mocks - A mocking framework by Oren Eini.
• Automocking Container - An IoC container that takes advantage of Rhino.Mocks for mocking out dependencies.
• General BDD resources
  • Behavior-Driven.org
  • The Wikipedia entry on BDD

All in all, a great presentation. Considering the breadth of information that BDD covers, I think Raymond did a great job. I hope that FSDNUG can continue to bring topics like this to the area.

I was just setting at a command prompt in Vista on my laptop and I typed 'cd /' out of habit and, to my surprise, it worked! Not only that, but tab completion still behaved as expected!

I actually have been using the '/' character in PowerShell because it is easier to type than '\' (not as far to reach) and it is the default in *NIX systems as well (i.e. my Ubuntu installation).

Now granted, I probably shouldn't get used to this in the event that I inadvertently code a '/' character in one of my programs, but then again, I should technically be using the System.IO.Path.PathSeparator anyway.

I get excited about the little things.

NOTE - this might be the result of Service Pack 1 on Vista also...

UPDATE - I lied. You can type 'cd /' and get to the root, but tab completion still completes only for the current directory. In other words, if you're current directory is c:\windows\ and you type 'cd /[tab]', you'll get directories that are in c:\windows. Sorry. My excitement just dropped a little.

Last week, a small group of us traveled up to hear Jean-Paul Boodhoo present to the Northwest Arkansas .NET User Group. JP presented on advanced uses of generics in .NET (i.e. more than just strongly typed collections) though we also had a great look at Test Driven Development as well as some of the new features in C# 3.0.

The presentation was great and it got me really excited about user groups in general, which is why I'm also excited to announce that Fort Smith will be getting its own user group! Many thanks to Michael Paladino for doing a lot of the work in getting this started. FSDNUG went live last week. I'm hoping to add a feed to the site at some point so that news can easily be pushed out without continually checking the site, but for now, it is just static HTML.

Raymond Lewallen will be kicking off the group with a presentation on Behavior Driven Development. I've read about BDD and am attempting to practice TDD, so I'm excited to hear Raymond's talk. If you live in the area, be sure to come out for the meeting!

I've found myself wishing that I could pass in more than two arguments to Path.Combine. That is, something like this:

Path.Combine(rootPath, someCalculatedPath, someKnownFileName);

As it is, Path.Combine only accepts two arguments, so I end up with calls that look like this:

Path.Combine(Path.Combine(rootPath, comeCalculatedPath), someKnownFileName);

It seems like a hassle to me. Here is a simple wrapper function (with accompanying test) that will accomplish this:

public static class FileUtils
{
    public static string CombinePaths(params string[] paths)
    {
        if (paths.Length == 0) return string.Empty; 

        return Path.Combine(paths.First(), CombinePaths(paths.Skip(1).ToArray()));
    }
} 

[TestFixture]
public class FileUtilsTests
{
    [Test]
    public void Should_combine_paths_correctly()
    {
        string expected = @"c:\some\path\to\file.txt"; 

        Assert.AreEqual(expected, FileUtils.CombinePaths("c:\\some", "path\\to", "file.txt"));
    }
}

In my post looking forward to 2008, I mentioned that I wanted to take more time this year to learn new technologies, particularly outside of the Microsoft communities. With all of the push in .NET towards dynamic languages right now, why not look to some of the dynamic languages that have been out there being used for years?

I know what you're thinking - looks like David here decided to learn Ruby. I mean, that's what everyone is using, right? Ruby and Ruby on Rails? Nahhh, I'm actually learning Python! Probably the key factor for me was the Python Challenge. I follow MoW's Powershell blog and he's started up a series on working through the Python Challenge using Powershell. I had heard about the challenge before, but hadn't really looked into it much, but this was enough to prompt me to get over there and try it out. (I am planning on still learning Ruby, though - I'll just go through the challenges with Ruby later)

I resisted the urge to try to find an IDE for Python and just code it up in a text editor. It has forced me to get more familiar with the syntax as a result. The Python site has a great tutorial for starters as well as some good documentation on the available modules. The hardest part for me is to not write the code like I write C# or VB. For one of the challenges, you have to take a given string, a given mapping, and then translate the string to get the instructions to move to the next challenge. I wrote a basic loop over the characters in the string, converted them to their ordinal values, performed the translation, and then converted them back to characters. It worked, but it wasn't the best way to do it in Python. Python provides this great function called string.maketrans. Also, the map function is amazing. It is sort of like the List<T>.ForEach method except that it reads a lot better (though lambda expressions in C# make it a little better). I'm starting to understand the power behind the whole map/reduce idea that Google is so big on. List comprehensions are really cool, too.

Anyway, so far, I'm to the 5th challenge (with some help from Google, the Python tutorials, and the challenge forums at times) and it is pretty cool. One of the most enlightening things about going through the challenge is that, as you complete one, you can go look at submitted solutions on the wiki. It is a great way to evaluate if you solved the challenge the "right" way or not. It is a great learning experience. One way I'm trying to apply this knowledge is that I'm running the challenges in both CPython (Python that runs on C, the standard I think) and IronPython.

Another thing I've done to try to see how other development communities work is that I've installed Ubuntu 8.04 (the alpha) on my laptop. I'm now dual booting Vista x64 and Ubuntu and it is pretty nice. I have two favorite things about Ubuntu so far - the ridiculous customization that you can do with it (compiz is amazing) and the package manager. Seriously, the fact that you don't have to pull up a browser to download apps and install them is a massive plus over Windows. In fact, you can just run a simple apt-get command if you want. Don't worry, though, I'm not planning on switching from Vista anytime, soon. Ubuntu is great and I'll be keeping it on the laptop, but I still like Vista, too. Right, right, blasphemy, I know. They're both great operating systems as far as I'm concerned. One takes an entire DVD and seems like a resource hog (not as bad anymore) and the other fits on a CD and requires editing conf files, downloading "restricted" drivers, and sitting at the command line to get video and wireless working Seriously, neither are perfect. It has been nice seeing both sides of the fence, though.