Just protect that leg

dave, when i used VS in the past, they had a vi plugin that gave you most of vim's key bindings. you might want to check if there is something similar for emacs, i bet there is.

There is a plug-in like that, but you only get a handful of them. Plus, this isn't my computer and I'm a little green at the place. I'm not openly complaining to the company about VS, just expression my utter shock here. Not that I really think you guys care...

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Q: Is the bolded here similar to "self" in Python? I want to think it is, since it inherits from C#'s built-in abstract class, which I would think has a default "id" value somewhere.

self is a reference to the object (Rectangle). base(id) calls the parent classes 1 argument constructor (Shape/whatever).

I'd bring up the issues with VS. Tell your boss that you set up an emacs based environment and why you did it.

It's always good to talk about your tools openly. If the place is decent the answer should be along the lines of "cool" and potentially an explanation of how you could have configured your VS setup better (if that's possible I haven't used VS in ages).

Cool. I'll pre-order that from the site. A month is a pretty good timeline. I suspect that is when the hammer will hit the floor.

Isn't Jon Skeet like some S.O. super-hero? I sort of recall someone talking about him in this thread.

What did you mean by "it's not my machine?" Are you sharing a development machine with someone?

I mean that the machine belongs to the company. I don't feel like it is an important thing to bother with since there is some risk of something going bonkers and that is not something I want to take the blame for regardless if it is my fault or not (it would be very easy to blame me for something).

The computer is set up in a way that benefits the company and that is, IMO, the highest priority. I know that other things will be attached in the future (version control), other things will be downloaded, and that is something they know how to deal with in their specific environment.

If I was hired with the intention of working there for 5 years and I was junior-level or something, then this would be a reasonable conversation, but since this is only a few months, it really doesn't matter. I feel that learning the flow and the programming language is a much much more important conversation, and surely the manager would agree so clearly not talking about it is a dominant strategy. It doesn't hurt to get used to using VS so I can talk intelligently about it in the future.

I basically think you are very wrong here. Get the machine set up the way that makes you most productive for the company. If you are overly concerned about it ask the IT guy before making the changes. If the IT is any good all they are going to do when you leave is re-image the machine anyway so it shouldn't matter (within reason) how you set it up.

Skeet's book is good - the 2nd best book about C#/.Net IMO.

The best is CLR via C#. It is more foundational and describes the guts of how the .Net works.

Thanks for that reference too. Both of the books look pretty cool from the previews, although they seem to come from different directions. I'll check them both out and figure it out.

+1

So, I recieved a rude email today from someone I've never even met, which in turn made me not want to help them. Basically he's writing some chef scripts to automate the build of ec2 instances that will be running some programs I wrote. I know programmers can be blunt for time saving reasons but I feel following something like the below template would help greatly in improving what are essentially email relations.

Questions and comments:

1. C# is in my view is sophisticated and extensive. I wrote a few apps to learn to be functional with it. I wouldn't call myself an expert. I did use CLR to interface with some Python scripts. My advice would start off learning to be functional with it, don't try and learn all the features at at one time.

2. .NET 4.5 is pretty much the same. It is extensive and it appears to me that you're just focusing on a small subset which is a good thing.

3. MSDN has a lot of code examples for .NET.

4. Are you using VS 10 or VS 12? I have no doubt that you would be more productive in an environment you knew well. BTW VS 12 Express is available for free but it doesn't include TFS (essentially version control MSFT style).

From the department of lol patents...

...bought a Starbucks coffee to go today. You get the cup and a piece of cardboard wrapped around it roughly in the middle of the cup because the cup is too hot. It's just that ugly old brown cardboard with a Starbucks logo on it. On the back there's small print...patent pending.

Where there places doing it before Starbucks? I don't remember.

if those other places didn't themselves file a patent, would it matter?

It would be prior art. I'll mock silly patents as much as the next guy but I don't think those sleeves are all that obvious an enhancement to to-go cups of coffee. Mostly because those cups of coffee existed for a long time before Starbucks and cardboard also existed so there was no barrier to someone else coming up with them if it was so obvious.

prior art -- new word for me! so does that mean that the person who created the prior art would be allowed to apply for a patent, assuming they could prove there was no prior-prior art before them? like if some little greek diner had proof of using those sleeves since 1950, could they pwn starbucks?

That's getting beyond my knowledge of patent law, my understanding is that prior art can invalidate a patent and that's about it. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of limit on being able to patent something but it's probably much more convoluted than that...

How big a difference between this card board solution and just using a napkin or whatever it's called english? putting a napkin around it to insulate against the heat is something just about everyone has done, right?

What are the problems with using a napkin? It takes a non-trival amount of attention to get it situated correctly, you can't put down the cup without having to go through the process of adjusting the napkin again. The sleeve solves those nicely, nicely enough to be considered a nontrivial improvement? I don't know.

I feel like this is actually a pretty good example of why patents are actually a really hard problem to solve.

I'm with Kerowo and think that the coffee sleeve thing is actually probably worthy of a patent (assuming no prior-art).

Yeah, this is definitely good advice. The language, from what I've been exposed to so far, is massive.

Today, I finally started diving down and finishing some dynamic content. I just went ahead and started with using something called "repeaters," which are sort of an abstraction over looping (turned out the resources I was copying from got it completely wrong), which are of course good for creating data tables.

But it turns out that there are 4 different ways I could have created the same content, and this is just in .NET + C#.

It is not very hard to be functional with the framework, but it is built for many different levels of talent and experience. I like that it isn't particularly opinionated, but it is very easy to walk down the wrong paths and find bad information. The noise isn't too loud in the internet, but it can be a bit difficult to find that one stupid thing I am looking for.

It may well be my own experience, but the thing I find most difficult with any language is learning how it ties to a database and how it interacts with the database. C# raises the ante by a long-shot over Clojure and Python. I'm sort of pleased that I felt the tide shift from "fml" to "ah!" in the course of one day today. Obviously, the strangest thing for me is the highly explicit typing in the language. I don't see why people complain about it or hold on to it, but it is more <tab>'ing.

I hate to say it, but out of all the things that are useful for learning .Net, <tab> is incredibly helpful.

Yeah, we're keeping it stripped down at this point. Obviously, I would get lost in the tarpit if there was any convolution. I'm personally staying as low-level as possible. I've pretty much just stuck to using the compiler so far.

The documentation isn't as helpful as I would like, though there are definitely some good parts in it. It can be very easy to mix up VB / C# and other things without you realizing it. Plus they tend to cram a walrus down your throat when all you really want is a hot dog. It can also get a little complicated because the version-numbers that rank highest with Google tend to be completely random.

I've found that Stack Overflow is the most dependable and accurate so far.

I'm using VS 12 at work. Everything is pretty much shiny and new, so everything has integrated without too much headache so far. (knock on wood).

I have VS 12 Express on my own computer right now.

One other thing. When I say this is a startup, I mean that there is one person (the boss) and me (the intern), and that is pretty much the entire operation at this point, so there is no IT (or anyone with time to do IT) and many other odd things.

Keep us up to date on your effort Dave. FWIW I am impressed.