SubSonic: .NET-based Database Access Layer akin to Ruby's ActiveRecord

Via  Rob Connery Interviewed by Miguel de Icaza, I took a quick look at SubSonic, which appears to be a good solution in the ASP.NET world for very rapidly generating Create-Retrieve-Update-Delete functionality pages that honor database foreign keys.

One of the dazzlers in the Ruby world is a library …

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Electric Karmann Ghia

My friend Doug has apparently gotten his converted Karmann Ghia onto the road...

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Microsoft's Popfly: Getting Their Ducks In A Row

Popfly is the name (and URL) of Microsoft's new non-professional developer community, a Windows Live site whose flashiest feature is a Silverlight-based "mashup editor" that facilitates pipes-and-filters development. Before reviewing the gratuitous 3-D spinning cubes, though, pay attention to the context:

  • Visual Studio Express has had 14,000,000 downloads …
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IronPython, IronRuby Discussion with Jim Hugunin and Jon Lam

I'm dying because I've just had a long talk with two of Microsoft's heavy hitters on the Dynamic Languages Runtime (DLR) team and have much to discuss, yet I am in a frenzy preparing for a business trip and cannot yet take the time to do the discussion any kind …

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Fuzzy Bits

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle)

That quote, which I saw by way of Jeff Atwood's latest, reminds me of what may be my favorite Stan Kelly-Bootle story. Stan worked on the EDSAC which …

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I'll Stand By You

It caught my eye that "I'll Stand By You" by Carrie Underwood is the #2 single on iTunes. I clicked on the tune to hear the snippet (I won't buy copy-protected music ever again, but I do like browsing...). Not to be harsh to Carrie Underwood, who has a lovely …

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Matching Donations To Team Hanselman Fight Diabetes

There are lots of worthy causes out there to donate to, but it's always nice to have a personal connection. Scott Hanselman, whose blog and podcast are must-reading/hearing, is fighting diabetes.

I'll be matching donations to Team Hanselman up to ... see now, never having done this before, I don't …

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Creating DOS/Windows VM From MSDN Downloads?

My goal is to create a VM running Windows 3.11 (VMWare by preference, but Virtual PC if it's easier).

One can download EN_MSDOS60.EXE and EN_WIN311.EXE from MSDN, but these files seem to simply be compressions of the files in the relevant distributions. Most challengingly, EN …

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Sun's Fortress Language : Looks Very Well Designed

This is a rather daunting (124 slide) PDF on Sun's "Fortress" programming language, designed in large part by \<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele%2c_Jr."" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Guy Steele, which is designed for scientific / mathematical programming. It looks really good -- lots of …

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Thread Creation Overhead Can Trip Up Pros

Michael Seuss has a good blog piece on \<a href="http://www.thinkingparallel.com/2007/05/02/parallel-programming-fun-with-loop-carried-dependencies/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">parallelizing code that contains loop-carried dependenciess, which is to say, code such as the following, where the calculation in one pass is dependent on a previous pass' …

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