A Quiet Day at Home

There is a big public service strike in France today. I was "forced" to take the day off and stay with this kids. Of course it is a crisis at work, so I was in (almost) constant touch with the office via phone and email. The boys were a bit wild this morning, but in the afternoon I exchanged a little boy for a girl and everything is much more quiet (even tib has found new maners since Valetine is here).

Checked out some cool stuff today. I downloaded the .NET framework beta 2 and installed it on my development machine. No problems. I see there is the new MSBUILD delivered with it. This seems to be quite interesting. I would like to hack up a build script to build our current release (just to see if it is going to be good enough to replace our Nant builds). I don't mind Nant (and I like Ant), but it is a bit rough around the edges sometimes and I don't know how actively it is being developed. I have the impression that it is hard to gain any mindshare in the Microsoft world, because if people start to use your product Microsoft will deliver a clone of it just to wipe you off the face of the earth. I fear that MSBUILD is going to do this to Nant. On the other hand, Nant exists because VS.2003's build infrastructure basically sucks. I think it is completely, totally, 100% useless (and I mean that in the nicest way possible).

I was hoping for anoymous inner classes in the .NET framework version 2, but I notice they just have anoymous methods. These methods would be able to be used anywhere a delegate would be used. I find this sucks a bit, since I don't really think delegate are such a good idea. When will Microsoft enter the Object Oriented world and give up on function pointers! I was planning on using anoymous inner classes to implement interfaces, but this seems to not be possible (I will have to look further and perhaps think a bit).

I might try to install VS C# express to see if it is as good as VS 2003 (which I think sucks). This would allow me to get rid of VS from my work machine.

I spent a good part of the afternoon writing a proposal using arbortext's Epic editor. Maybe I just hate Microsoft, but I do find this editor to be sweet. I wrote my last two proposals with MS word and I planted far too often (I even sent the client a crashed version of some installation documentation, that was missing the last 3 pages - after this event, which resulted in a 2 day misunderstanding on how to install the product - I vowed never to use word again). As an aside, I have installed open office on my development machine and it seemed to handle my word documents okay. It even gives me our custom styles, I was quite surprised. I did use OO on linux about 6 months ago - and I did have a few problems, so I am not really ready to switch to OO yet. I have epic and it is a great editor, so I don't really need to look further.

Finally, I had another problem with XML encoding. This is got to be the most annoying problem we have ever had. That is the '&', '>' and '<' characters in XML streams. I think the current problem was that we have an encoded xml stream that is read by a filter that is suppose to extract some information and re-stream the xml. Unfortunately it removes the encoding and streams the pure text. Will we ever get this right? Between that and the character encoding (i.e. iso-8859-1, UTF-8 and unicode) I don't think that XML is that easy after all!