At the end of last year, I wrote a blurb about the Open Source Fest event at Mix 2011. Imagine the typical exhibition hall, but filled with around 50 open source projects. Each project had a station in a large room where project members presented what they were working on to others. You could see the gleam of inspiration in the smiles of developers as they exchanged ideas and suggestions. I left this event completely fired up. This is the spirit we tried to capture with the MonkeySpace conference this year. And at least for me, it succeeded. I’m...
I was once accused of primitive obsession. Especially when it comes to strings. Guilty as charged! There’s a lot of reasons to be obsessed with string primitives. Many times, the data really is a just a string and encapsulating it in some custom type is just software “designerbation.” Also, strings are special and the .NET Framework heavily optimizes strings through techniques like string interning and providing classes like the StringBuilder. But in many cases, a strongly typed class that better represents the domain is the right thing to do. I think System.Uri and its corresponding UriBuilder is a...
My son and I returned from a week long vacation to visit my parents in Anchorage Alaska last night. Apparently, having the boys out of the house was quite the vacation for my wife as well. :) We had a great time watching the World Cup and going on outings to the zoo as well as hiking. Well, at least one of us was hiking while another was just enjoying the ride. We hiked up a trail to Flattop which has spectacular views of Anchorage. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it all the way to the...