the case against .NET

Mike Dillamore on software development and the herd mentality

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Entries from August 2005

Pandora experiences

August 31st, 2005 · 2 Comments · General

A number of bloggers have been writing about Pandora. I found it via Scoble, and have been trying it for almost a week.
It works like this: you tell it a band/music artist you like, and it builds a radio station (streamed over your broadband connection) including that artist and others you may like. [...]

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Opera for free!

August 30th, 2005 · 1 Comment · Miscellaneous software

Opera is giving away free registration codes as part of it’s “10-year online anniversary party”. Get this while you can - Opera 8 is a very good browser.
However, I hope Opera can find a way to make their browser free on a permanent basis. Developers and influencers will only consider Opera as their primary browser [...]

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Tetris as a project scheduling aid

August 26th, 2005 · No Comments · Blogging, General

Been a bit quiet lately, due to a recent vacation. In fact, my previous 3 posts were queued up prior to my departure, as my colleague Adrian correctly deduced.
Anyway, I was chatting with my manager the other day when he made an analogy which was so obvious I was amazed I’d not come across [...]

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Richard Grimes on .NET

August 18th, 2005 · No Comments · .NET

Given the title of this blog, maybe I’ve been a bit quiet on why I’m not totally enamoured with .NET.
To make a case, I’m going to need to refer to some older material, so please forgive me if you’ve seen this before.
Richard Grimes is a well known author and speaker on COM and .NET. [...]

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Another brick on the floor

August 13th, 2005 · No Comments · Gadgets

My home office room is modest in size, and that’s being generous. Yet it contains an amazing 17 devices/appliances currently plugged into mains electrical outlets, and several more which are currently disconnected.
Of these 17, more than half are fed through some kind of external DC adapter, or ‘power brick’. When I travel, several [...]

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I think Microsoft gets it … almost

August 8th, 2005 · 2 Comments · .NET, Miscellaneous software

Am I imagining it, or is Microsoft more inclined to speak my language of late?
I’m hearing less about Indigo, Avalon and XAML, and more about REST, Ajax and RSS. And that’s the way it should be - the future lies with cross-platform interoperability, especially with mobile devices such as smartphones, and not with fancy [...]

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New Header Graphic: Citroën DS

August 5th, 2005 · No Comments · General, Images

Time for a change.

This Citroën DS was caught in Steyning High Street on the morning of Sunday June 19th, 2005. The driver told me he owned 11 of these cars.
The DS (in French, this sounds the same as the word for goddess) is 50 years old this year. Special celebrations will take place [...]

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The problem with aggregators

August 5th, 2005 · 3 Comments · Blogging

Elliotte Rusty Harold grumbles about RSS aggregators offering a poorer user experience than web pages. I have to agree.
I completely love Bloglines, and spend way more time there than any other site. However, there’s no substitute for actually visiting your favourite feeds’ HTML web pages once in a while. In the same way [...]

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Header Graphic

August 3rd, 2005 · No Comments · General, Images

I’m aiming to change the header graphic regularly. The opening image shows the River Thames in London, taken from the new Hungerford Bridge on a dull afternoon, Saturday January 29th 2005.

I was in London for the visit of Sheffield United - the football (soccer) team I support - to West Ham United, for an [...]

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C++: Just Say No

August 3rd, 2005 · No Comments · .NET, Miscellaneous software

In my opening post I mentioned that, in the past, I might have called this blog “the case against C++”. In other words, I’m taking issue with developers who unquestioningly use languages and technologies without looking at what’s most appropriate for their application (i.e. the herd mentality). .NET is simply the most recent [...]

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