foxpro.catalyst «

FoxPro workBLOGS and MORE… . . .

Suffering from a slight fever and cough, I visited a client in Baliuag, Bulacan today to update the ILS Program and install the client modules of Project Sophieai. I’ll share some stuff tomorrow… right now I’m pumping this system with vitamins C and E hoping these could drive away the dark forces from this operating system of mine.

Linkwarps: .NETRocks! features Tim Huckaby and John Koziol points one of the new behavior which even in its improved existence pays respect to the ‘legacy’… SET VARCHARMAPPING ON | OFF.

Version Control with Subversion: Basic Concepts

Fotovision.

During that two week when this site was offline, one of the most discussed article is Joel Spolsky’s How Microsoft Lost the API War.

There are quite a number of reactions already in the IT community:

• Larry O’Brien: mciSendString(“Wrong, Joel”)
• Prasenjeet Dutta: Right or wrong, Joel scored a slam dunk.
• Dotnetfinserv: One Run-time to Rule them all.
• D. Hamilton: Rich Client, Poor Client, Smart Client, Web Client.
• SecretGeek: How Microsoft Lost the Joel War

There’s even more. It was even discussed in one of the latest episode of DotNetRocks.

Backups… backups… backups…

DotNetRocks! TechEd 2004 episode now ready for download.

Ex.links
� DotNetNuke
� Visual Studio 2005 Team System
… and RollingStone.com reviews Shrek 2.

Rick Strahl: Is the Rich .NET Client ready yet?

Mike Gunderloy’s Coder to Developer (from Joel Spolsky)

There’s something weird about software development, some mystical quality, that makes all kinds of people think they know how to do it.

Five rules of data normalization.

I’ve been following the updates and articles inside West Wind Technologies for months now, but it was only recently that I have discovered that Rick Strahl, the main brain behind that site, maintains a blog. West Wind is a good resource if you’re into developing Visual Foxpro applications for the web. Rick Strahl discusses programming issues on his blog and there are helpful whitepapers, articles and downloadable stuff in that site as well.

One of his recent blog discusses Open source and making money.

Speaking of ‘insightful blogs’ here’s Lenn Pryor’s take on Evangelism, dogma, rhetoric, and believing and Joel Spolsky’s views on Perfectionism.

Note to self: Refrain from lambasting VB when evangelizing VisualFoxpro.

While the next article link is not a blog, it is a good read too. Besides anything Google-related is interesting. Google and Akamai: Cult of Secrecy versus Kingdom of Openness

Our ‘give-it-a-spin’ file for the day… an AudioCD Ripping ActiveX Control.

These numbers are scary. The approach towards prevention is disappointing. These are just some of the reasons why software quality matters. It is about time programmers and developers exercise their code of honor and allegiance to ‘the man’.

Give Your Forms a Base by Deborah Kurata. Thought it needs a premium account for you to access the next two pages, the title alone gives you a good idea on how to make your programming approach more effective.

Box and Fox on .NET Rocks! I’ve been hooked on this internet audio talk show lately.

CodeProject.com | Not necessarily foxpro-intensive, but it has lots of programming tips, articles and resources.

This article, Why software still stinks, written by Scott Rosenberg points out a number of interesting things. Here are some insights from that article uttered by some of the pioneers of the software industry.

• “I looked at the programmer as an individual on a quest to create something new that would change the world.” (Susan Lammers)
• “Software inefficiency can always outpace Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law isn’t a match for our bad coding.” (Jaron Lanier – pioneer of virtual reality)
• “Software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty.” (Charles Simonyi, from Xerox PARC and Microsoft code guru behind Microsoft’s Office suite)
• “Most successful programmers are at heart can-do engineers who are optimistic that every problem has a solution.”
• “There are two meanings to software design. One is, designing the artifact we’re trying to implement. The other is the sheer software engineering to make that artifact come into being. I believe these are two separate roles — the subject matter expert and the software engineer.” (Charles Simonyi)
• “A lot of stuff in the Mac and Windows world was supposed to be temporary and got wedged into place,” he said. “Making programming fundamentally better might be the single most important challenge we face — and the most difficult one.” Today’s software world is simply too “brittle” — one tiny error and everything grinds to a halt: “We’re constantly teetering on the edge of catastrophe.” Nature and biological systems are much more flexible, adaptable and forgiving, and we should look to them for new answers. “The path forward is being biomimetic.”

And I wasn’t able to stop myself from laughing when i read these two lines:

• “There’s this wonderful outpouring of creativity in the open-source world. So what do they make — another version of Unix?” (Jaron Lanier)
• “And what do they put on top of it? Another Windows!” (Jef Raskin)

And one more from young Bill Gates:

• “The best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.” (Bill Gates)

That article pointed out a lot of good links too. To name a few: The Father of Macintosh, The computer is an amplifier for your brain and Are microchips too fast for mere mortals?

Kevin McNeash, chief architect and developer of that Mere Mortals Framework, was interviewed on .NET Rocks!

Two more interesting and informative articles from Joel Spolsky:

The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code
Things You Should Never Do, Part I

More informative software development-related articles can be found inside the Complete Archive Section of his site.