August 2004 Meeting Wrap-Up

We had a great turn out last night. Steve was planning to share Mono with everyone, but had a grundle of technical difficulties that prevented that. Now he is going to share twice as much Mono in September! If you really can't wait until then, head over to Ars Technica for their article on Mono.

We discussed the need for Virtual Machines. Virtual machines allow to have multiple, different OS's installed and running simultaneously on the same PC. This can be useful for testing (since the virtual machines are isolated and can roll back to previous states) or development environments. Once again Ars Tehnica has a comparison between VMWare and Microsoft Virtual PC (previously of Connectix). They ranked VMWare a higher then Virtual PC, even though it costs a bit more. VMWare out performed Virtual PC, and in some cases out performed the host system. If you are on a really tight budget, or need to run a virtual machine on a non IA-32 compatible CPU check out Boch, the Open Source IA-32 Emulator. It will run any IA-32 (aka x86) OS on just about anything.

In case you haven't heard about Microsoft's Express products, you might want to check them out. These currently beta products are development tools for the .NET framework version 2.0. While in beta they are free, but after beta the plan is to charge less then $100 per product. Their target is non-professional programmers.

Steve pointed out a useful CD and DVD burning program called Burn 4 Free (who's site seems to be currently having some trouble). This free utility makes it easy to burn and copy most any format of CD or DVD. It supports all kinds of data types, drives and languages.

Since Richard Hundhausen wasn't able to attend we went out to his blog to catch up on his news. We also chatted with him on-line a little bit from Tampa.

If you are up for some competitive programming with cash prizes then you might want to check out TopCoder and their 2004 TopCoder Open, which is sponsored by Microsoft with $150,000 in prizes. Computer Associates is also offering a $1 million dollar bounty for tools to help people migrate to their open source Ingres database.

For anyone with a need to create a diagram, but who doesn't have access to Visio (also now owned by Microsoft), you can use Dia. Not only is Dia free / open source, but it actually has some features not found in Visio. It uses gtk+ so it runs on most any platform. If you want to run it on a Win32 platform, then you will need a special version for Win32.

For those that like spicy food, head over to Flying Pie Pizza for their Double Habanero pizza. This spicy delicacy is only available for the month of August. Steve and I, along with a few friends, met their for a single habanero pizza this week. It was good and hot.

Finally we declared Code Complete finished and had a good discussion about what book to read next. Randy suggested The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World saying that it is easy and fun to read, and could save our careers. In the end we decided to go with Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design by Alan Shalloway and James R. Trott since we were in the move for a more nitty-gritty technical book. Steve is going to check the book out and give us a quick review first part of next week and then we will make reading assignments if everyone decides to go with that book.

Coming up. . . .

So as a reminder, September we will have Steve sharing Mono, possibly me with Code Rush for Visual Studio, and the first few chapters of our new book.

Rational will be here in October, and November has Chris with SharpDevelop.