March 2004 Entries
I use W2K3 for my development Environment and like to keep it fairly clean.
I didn't want to install some third party burning software just so I could burn ISOs, but since it's not built into the OS (for BillG only knows what reason...) I needed something lightweight and preferably FREE.
I found burnatonce and it's exactly what I was looking for.
Lightweight, functional, works on W2K3 and best of all FREE!
burnatonce is a cdrdao / mkisofs gui for windows. No giant installers, no tons of junk I don't need, just a straight to the point burning utility.
You know, I really understand driver issues and new Os version, but for cryin' out loud this thing has been around for at least 6 months and they haven't fixed it yet.
They seem to think no one will ever install a MS Bluetooth Keyboard on W2K3 Server...
Here is a fix/hack.
Note: this did not completely work for me, I still had to MANUALLY install the Bluetooth Drivers by running hdwwiz.cpl in the extracted hotfix directory, then it installed everything from the CD that it needed and the driver setup correctly. Until I did this bluetooth was not enabled and I had no Wireless Link Control Panel.
You may have to hit the connect/channel buttons a couple times to initially recognize the devices.
Note: one moderately annoying thing to point out... Using a bluetooth KB exclusively makes it impossible to get to your BIOS since it doesn't have any BIOS drivers. You will need to have a spare USB or PS/2 kb to edit your BIOS settings.
Implementing these WSE specs can be hazardous to your health and should come with warning labels.
I am sure I won't implement them in production systems until they are built into the .NET Framework.
The only problem with that plan is that they still won't be built into Java or PHP or anything else that might need to use them for interop. This is precisely why we need codegen.
If CodeGen REALLY existed in the ideal way, we could write code in any language and it would translate into another. Isn't that what the Compiler does? I mean if it can translate from C#, etc. into assembler then we should be able to also have programs that effectively “compiles” code from VB to C#, C# to Java and so on.
Thus came the birth of IL and the CLR, if it can go ONE Way it can go both, compiling to IL isn't an MD5 hash (even though it seems so at times)
Somehow this just doesn't translate into a marketable product for anyone, but hopefully some Grad Student or bored developer will decide it's worthwhile someday and it will appear as Open Source. Someday...
On that great day (when it actually works...) all this nonsense about which languages are evil will be over, you could just run your favorite language code through the generator and out pops C++, C#, VB, Java, whatever. This was almost the promise that Microsoft was heralding when VS.NET Beta 1 was being introduced.
This is going to be one of the most significant areas of development over the next decade.
“Code generation has the potential to revolutionize application development. Rather than handcrafting each piece of code, enterprises will increasingly turn to code generation to automatically generate code to perform a variety of tasks. Code Generation in Microsoft .NET presents the fundamentals of code generation and how to use it to maximize speed, reusability, agility, and consistency, This results in a huge cost savings and improvement in software reliability.“
That's what refactoring and OOP is all about, we hate doing the same old crap over and over again. We desperately need algorithm engines built into our development tools.
This type of functionality done right would dramatically improve our ability to write code in any language.
When new breakthrough languages come along, they would just have a bolt on that our codegen programs could use to spit out the same rules we wrote for say VB3 into C#, then we would really have code reuse and not have to continue this nonsense of re-inventing the wheel.
I firmly believe that the most amazing software of the next decade will have to be written by high level languages (higher than C#) and/or code generators because teams of even 100 developers just can't type it fast enough.
Will it diminish our usefulness as Developers? Not at all, it will simply give us the ability to write bigger, better stronger applications without the unavoidable holes and mistakes that happen writing plumbing on a tight schedule.
I could really care less about how to write a SOAP call. If the plumbers agree that it's a good way to communicate between applications on web servers, then fine, let me call it from a method, not write all the communications handshaking line by line. I am so sick of writing all my own XML techniques I could scream, but until they are built into a codegen/algorithm engine I suppose I am just going to be forced to.
Hobbyist programmers? How about just the business developers than have no desire to write plumbing!
This is one of topics I tend to become enraged about frequently.
Plumbing sux! I don't want to plumb I want to write useful applications and let the plumbers do what they do best, just because I can swing a hammer doen't mean I want to build my whole house. (Been there, Done that, move on...)
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Copyright © 2003-2004 H. Steele Price, IV -
All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of my employer, your mother, or any government agency.