Thread locking is one of those things where one moment I understand it with crystal clarity and the next moment become a blithering idiot. One day I know it is going to stick.
In the mean time here is an interesting article by Jeff Moser on how locks lock,
This is one of those things that has been of a point of contention for a while but this morning has really got my goat. why don't software vendors give the pricing of their product up front? Think about it. How many times have you gone to a vendor's web site and had to have drill to forever to get an actual price for the product you are interest. Are they ashamed of the price? Is their software so horrendously expensive that they think it will scare you off before you have even considered it? Who knows what they are thinking I am just as likely to not buy their product because I need a compass to find the price.
My example for today is Scooter Software and their product Beyond Compare. The product was mentioned by Scott Hanselman as his favourite diff tool so I thought would check it out since I am always on the look for new tools to add to the armoury. Anyway when you follow the link you are presented with a nicely designed little web site but no where can I find the price. So where is it? In this particular case you need to chose to purchase the product before you'll actually find out the price. Imagine if supermarkets operated that way.
So here is a word of advice to all those online software vendors, make the products pricing easy to find. Either have it on the front page or at least a link to a page with the pricing. Cost is one of the things that is considered before someone purchases something but I tell you now I will be less inclined to purchase something if I don't know how much it will cost.
Rich Strahl from West Wind technologies has written a wide ranging blog post on ASP.Net (ASP.NET gets no Respect). I won't attempt to summarise it but it is worth a read.
I have worked with ASP.Net since 1.0 and having come from an ASP classic background I found the web forms model a nice change. True it has its issues but for me it always got the job done which is what you want.
One year down and one year to go on my masters. I have month without study ahead of me so time to catch up on some of the new features in .Net 3.5. To this end I have decided to tackle Linq in all, at least of, its permutations.
Rather than spinning up an instance of VS2008 just to explore some simple examples and ideas I am a couple of tools to assist my explorations.
The first one is Snippet Compiler by Jeff Key. There has been a version of this around since .Net 1.1 and the latest version, Snippet Compiler Live 2008 Ultimate Edition for Developers (Alpha), is a real gem. This is a great little tool to have for testing bits of code or exploring what a class does. At the moment I have been using to play with the code examples in "Introducing Linq" which is a free e-book that can be found at http://introducinglinq.com/. The only gotcha you need to keep in mind is you need to reference the relevant libraries. For the underlying Linq stuff this System.Core.
The other tool that I have just come across this weekend is LinqPad by Joseph Albahari. This application has been written as tool to explore Linq and has some nice database features. I haven't had a real chance to play with it yet but it is one that I will be recommending to colleagues.
So there you go, if you are looking for a light-weight utility to explore Linq with either of these will do the job.
So it is a tip of the hat to Jeff and Joseph.
Vijayshinva Karnure wrote a short on blog why you can't find a reference to .Net 3.5 in IIS. Kinda of thing that is easy to forget in the heat of the moment.
