Chris covered SharpDevelop, the open source .NET IDE.
While the demo was great, and there were a number of features and advantages over Visual Studio.NET the overall conclusion was that you are better off using a commercial IDE for most of your projects. Might be a nice additional tool to have in your toolbox.
Randy talked about job descriptions, skills and pay rates. We discussed ways to increase our earning capacity. Pretty interesting discussion.
We finally covered chapters 5 though 8 in Design Pattern's Explained. The book is really easy reading so we are stepping up the pace. Next month (January) we are covering 9 through 17. We will devote more time to it at the meetings.
Didn't get a chance to get to news, so here is what I had left to cover:
- Delphi Popularity
- Delphi 2005 Launch Tour in Boise
- Top 10 Persistent Design Bugs
- I would add failure to trim trailing white space from a programming IDE to the list.
- Firefox 1 released
- Just in case you were living under a rock. In related news IE's popularity has begun a steady decline. Mozilla seems to control between 10% and 20% (or more) of the traffic depending on the site. In other related news, AOL announced the next Netscape to support both IE and Gecko (Mozilla's) engines. If you are interested in using the Gecko engine in your browser you can use the Mozilla ActiveX control that was designed to mimic the IE ActiveX control.
- Delphi 2005 without .NET
- Want to use Delphi 2005, but could care less about .NET?
- Exploring MDD and the future of Development
- IBM explores MDD and the future of software development. Might be a good idea to keep your eyes on this trend.
- OOPSLA 2004 MDA Panel
- More on MDA from the OOPSLA panel, as posted in David I's blog.
- User-Centric UI
- More information on improving your user interface.
- Joel On Software: The Book
- Take one popular Blog on software development (and related areas), edit, add some content and you have the new Joel On Software book. If nothing else it is more effective to hit people with when they just don't get it.
- US, India, Russia and Ukraine - largest programmer populations
- Interestingly Ukraine has the 4th largest programmer population.
- EA faces Class Action lawsuit for programmer conditions
- Electronic Arts requires seven 13 hour days from their developers. Aren't you glad you don't work in the gaming industry? My question is are you really more productive after about 60 hours a week?
- Make Love Not Spam - Lycos.uk's DDoS screen saver against spam
- Lycos.uk's launches a screen saver that launches a DDoS attack against spam sites. More effective then expected.
- 2004 IOCCC Winners Source Code Released
- And you thought that code you were supporting was bad. Take a look at this code from the "Winners" of the 17th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Some of it is actually pretty, but not if you were to try and maintain it.
- The Lessons of Software Monoculture
- Commentary about a homogenous software culture. It makes it easier for programmers, but also easier for cracker and script kiddies.
- Programmers Hold Funerals for Old Code
- I guess it can't be that bad of an idea if it gets programmers to get rid of their old code. Some of them just never let it go! (I am guilty of that)
- Standards-Based CSS/XHTML Slide Show
- A competitor to PowerPoint designed for web deployment. Pretty cool.
- Grid Computing: Conceptual Flyover For Developers
- What is this "Grid Computing" you speak of, and what does it mean to me as a software developer?
- Google Scholar
- Google scholarly papers and citations.
- JBuilder 2005 Update 1 is available for download
- Seems like everyone always waits for the first patch.
- Delphi 2005 update 1 comming
- Because of yet another last minute "fix" from Microsoft for Internet Explorer Delphi 2005 has some odd behavior on a fully patched machine. This update will address that as well as a few other issues. Should be any day now.
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