Channel9 has a Longhorn Wiki and on it, Adam Kinney has started a list of Longhorn Blogs. Want to add your own? Click on the Edit link on the top left.

In his June ’03 Bugslayer column, John Robbins made a sideways comment when discussing Son of Strike (SOS), a debugging extension from Microsoft for doing all kinds of low-level, mixed native and managed code debugging.

What Jon said was this: “Interestingly, starting with Visual Studio® .NET 2003, you can load SOS when doing mixed-mode debugging.” And then he didn’t say how to load SOS into VS.NET, even after spending the rest of the article telling us how cool SOS was.

Luckily, Mike Stanton, an SDE on the CLR team, has created a set of instructions for loading SOS into VS.NET. Actually, he posted those instructions in December of last year, but it wasn’t ’til today that they were accurate because it wasn’t ’til today that I tried them and couldn’t get them to work. Now they are and I can and I have all kinds of low-level goodness to explore with Son of Strike.

I gave a talk at the Twin Cities .NET User Group in Minneapolis in January and I met a guy there building a web sit to crawl .NET source code on the web. I didn't get his contact info and he didn't email me, so I don't know how to get a hold of him. If that's you, please drop me a line. Thanks!

Wow. I've seen bits and drops of Whidbey (I'm limited to builds that work on Longhorn), so haven't seen the grand, overall vision of it. In the latest Microsoft Developer Tool Roadmap, they whole darn thing is laid out and the new stuff goes on forever! Details are presented for IDE enhancements, language enhancements for VB, C#, C++ and J#, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, devices, ADO.NET, web services, Office, SQL Server, Analysis and Design (aka "Whitehorse") and even a bit about what's coming in Longhorn on the tools side. Holy New Stuff, Batman!

Jason Nadal has posted an RSS reader that uses the Longhorn text-to-speech APIs to actually read you the morning news while you do other things. Includes source.

I think these are the sexiest PC laptops I've ever seen, but I can't decide if I want the Cabriolet or the New Yorker.

I’m sure by the time you read this, you’ll have already heard about Channel9 (apparently Greg announced it first). There don’t seem to be nearly as many snowmen shooting rectangles at each other as I’d expected, though…

Subscribed.

Tuesday, April 6, 2004

Sometimes I get emails from folks that don’t have a formal computer science knowledge and want the benefits of one w/o actually going back to college. Since I was disappointed in my own formal education (despite going on to “better” my BS in Computer Science with an MS), I can understand this desire.

My first thought was the MIT Open Courseware, which has a full course of computer science curriculum. However, while the course material is all there, unless there are officially sanctioned forums for each course, there’s really no place to ask questions even of fellow students.

After thinking on it for a while, I thought I’d go right to my favorite source. Prof. Joe Hummel is a professor of computer science at Lake Forest College in Illinois and has spent a lot of time thinking about how to fill in missing CS knowledge in professional programmers (VB programmers, mostly) at DevelopMentor. Here’s what he said:

For starters, I’d recommend a book by Brookshear called “Computer Science: an overview” (8th edition). It’s written for those new to CS, but introduces lots of nice CS concepts like algorithm analysis, theory of computation (e.g. that some problems cannot be solved!), and other things like OS, networks, DBs, etc. It’s a great starter book. After that, I’d recommend books on data structures and algorithms. After that, it really depends on what his interests are: Programming Languages? Theory? Operating Systems? Distributed Systems? Software Eng? AI?