I thought I would finally take the plunge and start reading that mammoth book on C# and .net 3.5 that I bought ages ago.

Phew, there is a lot to go over but I have found a few things that sound great and a few things that really concern me.

• Good: No more worrying about Unicode and 64 bit. From what I have read its all Unicode under the hood and the runtime chooses 64 or 32 bit depending on the OS so you dont have to worry about it.
• Bad: No optional parameters on method calls. WHAT, I was soooo shocked that this wasnt available, are we back to VB days … it appears so. However I have read that .net 4 does have support for optional parameters but what worries me is that I had presumed that this sort of basic thing was a given, so what else am I presuming?
• Bad: ByRef/ByValue confusion. Now this is something I am totally confused about, it feels like VB where some things are passed by reference and others by value; unless you have read the documentation and thoroughly understand and remember things then you just won’t know. But then you are totally screwed if you have ValueTypes and ReferenceTypes embedded within each other, you just cannot presume any sort of basic understanding of what might happen without a full understanding of any objects you are using. For example, a struct is a ValueType and is passed by value unless you explicitly use the ref keyword, whereas a class is a ReferenceType and is allocated on the heap and is always by reference
• Bad: No implicit stack/heap allocation. Things are done automatically for you so you do not have to worry; but what if you want to do things like allocate a number on the heap, well tough thats just too advanced for your little brain, sorry! This is where I have the biggest problem; with C/C++ you just always knew what was gonna happen, everything was on the stack and went out of scope unless you allocated it on the heap with new; now in C# new doesn’t do anything but call the default constructor on the object and any embedded objects (huh), why bother with that, why not do that by default and do away with new altogether … I am clearly misunderstanding something here
• Good: I like the way you can define the type of an enum, whether its a Byte or an Int32 (by default), this is useful for serialisation; I also like the way you can find out the ‘string’ representation of any type value.
• Good: I like the way you can use int and it will always be an Int32 on all OS’s and languages that support .net; long will always be an Int64 where the OS supports it (e.g. not on embedded devices)

I will carry on reading and learning and see what other things are thrown up … hopefully I will be corrected on the above as I find out more.

After reading Digital Spy report on @richardbranson’s attack on Sky TV, it saddens me that he (whom I respect a great deal) blames Sky in much the same way as he did British Airways … the two are not the same.

The simple fact is that Sky TV can be used by anyone in the UK, Virgin Cable cannot; if cable covered the same territories then there would be a fair argument for anti-competitive behaviour but they will never beat Sky or come close due to the fundamental technology they have and the cost in pushing it to others … what is their investment in rural cabling by-the-way, or in-fact any new cabling (instead of upgrading existing infrastructure).

Personally I would love the choice, but I have none so I am stuck with Sky (which I am happy with anyway at the moment) … but it would be nice for some competition to drive prices down a bit.

Its simply not Sky’s fault, it is only Virgin’s fault and that will never change as I do not see Virgin ever cabling non-metro areas.

American novelist Louis Auchincloss:
“A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it, nobody else really cares.”

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I read today that Facebook and Twitter growth has stalled, what does that mean for them?

Personally, I think that if it’s not growing then it more than likely will start declining because without growth to cover churn then that churn will start eating away at the active user base.

Have they had their day? I don’t know, perhaps the fad is coming to a close but I don’t think that it will be the end of either, I think once the active user base starts dropping it will level out at a core basis that will still be very high but it won’t be at the high we currently see.

Whether that will be enough to sustain them is hard to say as twitter aren’t monetising their user base at all and facebook still loses money each month. It depends how long it will be before the VCs get bored I suppose.

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I popped into the large Curry’s electrical store in Exeter today whilst taking the kids for a pizza to have a little look around at the TVs … I have been sort of hankering after getting an LCD or Plasma TV for a while but have been putting it off due to the expense, but my big fat Sony CRT is starting to lose its colour (its only a few years old so why I ask is it doing that, but that’s another question and story) and everything goes a bit pink for a while, so I might finally indulge myself.

To be honest it is also the first time I have seen a proper HD picture and the difference side-by-side with a non-HD picture is absolutely amazing, but only through a BluRay player, the Disney animations like Wall-E were particularly startling, the HD picture through Freesat or Sky was absolutely terrible, compressed so much to be a pointless exercise.

After looking first at the size of screen, I think a 40 or 42″ would be the maximum size that we could comfortably have for our size and shape of living room, but how do I choose; the sizes of TV are scattered around, you cannot compare one size TV with other makes and models of the same size against each other.

Coupled with the fact of them being scattered about, some were playing BluRay HD but most werent, the only ones that were playing BluRay were the most expensive ones, like the LED Backlit LCD TVs making them look far far far better than any others giving them a really unfair advantage … yes this does look great but its because its the only one playing from a decent source!

You would think buying a TV would be fairly straightforward, pick the size you want and the one with the best picture; but no, I cannot see how that could be done without spending an entire day and your own personal assistant to plug in and play the same DVD in each set in turn to compare them.

I feared this was a totally impossible task and it put me off completely (not helped was a wife and two kids who wouldn’t have enjoyed this experience at all) … Curry’s could have sold me a TV easily today, instead I walked out the store disheartened and empty-handed.

Fail to Curry’s on multiple fronts I think!

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http://m.lifehacker.com/site?sid=lifehacker&pid=JuicerHub&targetUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flifehacker.com%2F5367129%2Fnine-workspaces-where-famous-folks-get-stuff-done%3Fop%3Dpost%26refId%3D5367129

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Great article by Obie Fernandez. To be honest I do use pair programming occasionally, normally to check over code that is important to be right as it’s a fundamental concept, or when I want to get the design right first time, or something that is difficult to fix later on if broken; but he has some great points in using it completely full-time

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Having installed the latest Office on a new laptop for my wife I am absolutely dumbfounded at some of the design decisions with it.

As my wife said, “how do I open a document or even create a new document?” … hmmm you have to click the weird logo in the top left to get a menu of commands with the things you want. Don’t ask me why the clipboard operations have been given pride of place on the left side of the main ribbon tab, most people never use them as those that know about the clipboard (and a lot of people do not) would use the keyboard, either way there should be “New”, “Open” and “Save” with Save being a nice big priority button.

“How do I save the document to a different place” … sorry again you have to go the weird logo menu thing.

“Is there any way to turn off the smart quote things as they cause problems with our computer system” … oh this is a toughie, you have to customise the toolbar strip (at the top above the ribbon) and add the “AutoCorrect Options” command yourself; then you can click the new button and edit the options, after which you will probably want to remove it again.

Then Word still has the horrible image handling, I remember working on the great word processor for the Commodore Amiga called Wordworth by Digita and we had much better and more intuitive graphic handling within documents … Word is just horrible and so messy to use!

Rant over, but I pity anyone who has to show someone how to get to grips with Office now, eek!

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