Frans Bouma's blog

The article I posted yesterday received the expected replies and I hope in the future it will show people how to look at software, the users of that software and on the various 'holy wars' that are still going on (and probably will be). Today

A couple of days now I stumble across blogs which are written by VB.NET developers who feel offended by some remark of some MS employee I will not mention here or feel offended because someone criticizes VB.NET. I feel sorry for those VB.NET developers who feel offended: they do not understand that it isn't something personal, it's just criticism on a language and, sorry, every soul has the right to have that criticism. Sometimes it's criticism on the developers using VB.NET and then again, sorry, this is sometimes true, albeit it is based on generalization which is something that should be noted as well.

(via Randy's blog). Infoworld reports that IBM will enhance DB2 with .NET integration. Read the infoworld article here.

A short list of things I could determine from the C# 2.0 draft which was released yesterday which are not a topic of much discussions but are good to know. I've added page numbers to the items, so you can go back to the C# 2.0 draft yourself and look them up (page numbers are the actual page numbers on the page). I've skipped the features: Generics, Anonymous methods, Iterators and Partial types, because these are the obvious items discussed in the draft :)

I read The Inquirer every day through their RSS feed, and although its often amusing, they now have a very valid point: Microsoft's new release policy according to security fixes/bulletins is completely irresponsible.

I'm a database purist. This means that I like, no, adore database theory and the technology behind databases. Databases are one of the most high-tech software systems we all work with today, although not a lot of people will recognize them as such. As a developer using Microsoft software for years, I used SqlServer, starting with v6.5 till today with SqlServer 2000. Lately, I had to work with Oracle 9i to write the Oracle driver for LLBLGen Pro. This required me to learn more about Oracle than the usual SELECT * FROM Foo material. What I discovered was something I didn't expect: Oracle 9i is amazing.

One of the blogs I would recommend to everyone is Eric Sink's blog. Not only are the blogs insightful and full of knowledge, they are very well written and most of the time great entertainment for the geek's eye and mind.

There will be a new operating system among us in a couple of years: the OS currently code-named 'Longhorn'. The date today is September 29th, 2003. Longhorn is expected in late 2005. That's almost 2 years from now. In these two years, we have to live with Windows XP, that's the current top desktop OS Microsoft has to offer.