Frans Bouma's blog

Microsoft made me a C# MVP! . I don't have to add that I'm very very very happy with this title and I hope I won't disappoint as an MVP in the coming year.

The1 has posted my entry to his Phraser programming competition here. It's in C# and shows some basic techniques like clever usage of a hashtable and recursion. A list of all entries to the compo can be found here. Competitions are fun, it keeps the mind fresh .

Joseph Cooney wonders which sourcecode should be read by a programmer to learn to become a better programmer. I'd say: none. At least, not the code for which you don't have the design documents or algorithm descriptions. A lot of code is very bad and it's pretty useless to just read code. The reason for that is that code is the end phase of programming software. What's way more important is the algorithm or set of algorithms the code has to represent. Only then you can learn something, because you can then see the start (algorithm) and end (code) of a transition every developer has to make a lot of times. Only with the algorithms in your hand you can check if the code you're reading is good code or not: if it doesn't describe / represent the algorithm(s) it has to represent, the code is buggy, bad and should be rewritten. You don't know that if you read sourcecode without the algorithm descriptions.

Alex Thissen reported yesterday (and we all know what day it was yesterday ) about a rumour that Objectspaces would be removed from .NET 2.0 and would be released as a separated package.

Get SP6 for Visual Studio 6.0 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/updates/sp/vs6/sp6/default.aspx

List of fixes: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/updates/sp/vs6/sp6/default.aspx (only VB6 and VC++ 6.0 have fixes)

Slashdot posted today a link to a photo journal of Chernobyl, made by a Ukrain girl called Elena who went back to the Chernobyl area, 18 years after the nuclear disaster. This is a good example of the true power of the Internet: real journalism, real facts and available to everybody worldwide.

I've been fighting this bug all day and it annoyes me more with every minute I spend on it. Here's the deal: I have a ListView control and a Textbox control on a winforms form (.NET 1.1). With the Textbox you can edit a field of the object on the current selected row in the ListView. Easy right? I thought so too .

For all the people who think the EU ruling in the Microsoft case is about Realplayer vs. Windows Media Player: you don't get it.

It's not about some crappy player vs. some other crappy player program. It's about the difference between integrating a program into an OS and shipping a program with an OS. In both occasions the user will not see the difference, as in both occasions the program is in the start menu. The difference is in the fact that the real (pun intended) customers of Windows (the OEM's) should be able to decide which package of extra software they ship with the OS. They can in the situation where the programs are not integrated with the OS. They can't when the programs are part of the OS.