LOLCatz has LOLCodez nowzz

If you haven't yet seen Lolcats (lolcats.com) or icanhascheezburger.com, consider yourself lucky that your brain has not been infected (don't visit those url's!).

If you're not so lucky (or infected so badly you can't admit your addiction), a new programming language has been developed by analyzing lolcats speak: LOLCode.net.  LOLCode.NET utilizes the .NET Runtime and can even be debugged in Visual Studio.

You always wanted to write the following code and have it run, right?

IM IN YR LOOP
VISIBLE COUNTER
I HAS A DIFFERENCE
LOL DIFFERENCE R COUNTER NERF MINIMUM
IZ MINIMUM UP DIFFERENCE LIEK MAXIMUM OVAR 2
YARLY
VISIBLE "Half way there" NOWAI
I HAS A NEXT COUNTER TIEMZD NEXTCOUNTER!!2
KTHX
[....]

Comic from xcd:  http://www.xkcd.com/262/

Evidence based scheduling

FogBugz (lead by famous blogger Joel Spolsky) just released version 6.0.  With it they are making waves due to the inclusion of evidence based scheduling.

Evidence based scheduling tracks developer estimates per feature against actual time spent (including interruption time) to determine estimate accuracy and plot a distribution curve of likelihood of shipping software on time. 

My question is:  how can we leverage this type of mechanism at a  company that does many, many small projects?  Are the projects similar enough that this would help?  Could each project be treated as a sprint (or sprints) in an overall continued effort?

Read this post for an overview of evidence based scheduling:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html

Read some reactions to the feature:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/29.html

SubSonic (MS sponsors open source)

Rob Conery of SubSonic famehas just joined on with Microsoft (http://blog.wekeroad.com/2007/10/26/microsoft-subsonic-and-me/).

This is very interesting as he will continue to work on SubSonic, and SubSonic will continue to be open source.

Also it appears SubSonic will be deeply integrated in the new MVC framework that's been announced.

 

What are you thinking about SubSonic?

Silverlight building steam

Silverlight is an incredibly interesting direction for teams building web applications, especially those with .NET skill sets already in place.

This site: http://silverlight.net/showcase/Default.aspx now is live, hosting some of the cool new work being done in silverlight.

The Home Shopping Network is actually innovating - they are offering video streaming via Silverlight, but overlaying controls on the video for the user to easily jump into ordering.  For example clicking the "buy" button takes the user to the product purchase page with all the details of what they were just watching filled out.

Silverlight is enabling this by allowing meta data to be carried with the video (including timeline based metadata) and UI controls that can integrate and utilize the meta data, including overlapping and interacting with the video.

Very cool.

Configuration Tool for CCNET.Config

This looks like it has some potential to make setting up projects on cruisecontrol faster and easier:

http://ccnetconfig.org/gallery/117.aspx