I’ve often sung the Reflector praise and today is no different. You sometimes end up in a situation with two assemblies; you don’t know which version is which and need to know specific differences between assemblies.

Enter the Reflector Diff plug-in by Sean Hederman which allows you to do text style diffs between two assemblies. A truly inspired use of disassembly and by  itself reason enough for the existence of Reflector 

Also be sure to check out Sean Hederman’s blog while you’re at it.

I wonder whether the corporate language at Bolia.com will be Bolia any time soon  Oh yeah, we’ve begun implementation of new functionality on ASP.NET 2.0. You won’t be seeing any of this on Bolia.com any time soon as the first systems to get the royal treatment are internal processing ones. Stay tuned though stuff will start to happening on the frontend too.

… Been busy moving that’s why. We bought a house for our small family and have been getting it ready for us to move into. The move is completed and I should return to my not so regular blogging schedule soon.

I’ve got a couple of very cool posts planned based on some of the stuff I’ve been working on lately including creating an attribute-based Code Access Security framework which integrates to Active Directory, my experience unit- and webtesting with Team System, and some of my gotchas about switching from ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0.

An updated version of the beta 2 preview of Internet Explorer 7 is available as of today. Go get it while the getting is good and be aware that you need to uninstall previous beta versions before installing the refresh.

More information on the IEBlog: New IE7 Build Available from MIX06!

Update: If you are doing any sort of webtesting with Team System on your box please be aware that neither this nor the previous build of IE7 will work with the webtest recorder. I’m told that work is being done to fix this.

A colleague of mine (thanks Sune) sent me a link to a hilarious post over at Joel on Software. Descriptions don’t do it justice so just head on over there to get a good laugh. Before you go keep this quote in mind, “we're introducing a general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory”. I guarantee that It’ll all make sense when we’re done over there

Why I Hate Frameworks

If you’re just getting started with ASP.NET 2.0 Dino Esposito has a great article just for you over at Code Magazine called Top-Ten Annotations and Remarks about the Wonderful and Powerful New Set of Features in ASP.NET 2.0. A great read for a heads up about some of the new features:

“You’ll still write a good deal of code in ASP.NET 2.0. Don’t completely trust those who say that ASP.NET 2.0 cuts 70% of the amount of code you’re called to write. You’ll end up writing more or less the same quantity of code, but you’ll write code of different quality. You’ll have more components and less boilerplate code to tie together pages and controls. Features like the provider model, data source controls, and master pages make coding easier and equally effective. But since there’s no magic behind, you have to learn the implications of each feature you employ. In the end, ASP.NET 2.0 comes with code behind, not magic behind.”

I liked this little bit of statistics:

“The core functions of ASP.NET are implemented in the system.web assembly. In ASP.NET 1.x, the system.web assembly counts 14 namespaces and 321 exported types. In ASP.NET 2.0, the number of namespaces grows up to 22. The number of exported types, instead, almost quadruples up to 1121 types. Do you still want to call it a major upgrade?”

When doing exception logging in our applications I’ve always needed additional information about the object which caused the exception. In my rush to get things done I created a new exception type which an ObjectData property which would hold my user data never thinking that my work might already have been done for me.

Sure enough, today I stumble upon the Exception.Data property which is new to .NET 2.0 and…. wait for it…. supports user data. It’s basically an IDictionary which will hold any number of objects for later use. Now I can through away my custom exception and be on my merry way with the project.

Sometimes it’s the little things that count

Dejligt med noget sne, som blidt daler ned og lægger en dæmper på verden. Dejligt med noget sne, som kan dække vinterens brune og grå farver. Dejligt med noget sne, som får tempoet i verden til at sænke sig.

ELLER….

Fucking lorte Århus Sporveje busser, som ikke fatter at holde afstand til cykelstien, hvilket resulterer i at de stakkels cyklister bliver smurt ind i sjap og splat på vejen på arbejde. Undertegnede sidder lige nu og skriver denne post indsmurt i brun sjap og sand, som bussen fra Århus Sporveje var så venlig at smadre op over mig 5 minutter inden jeg nåede frem til kontoret.

Nam nam og god fucking weekend Århus Sporveje!

Eller som Dolph ville sige, “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”