Month: July 2008

Calling Trey Nash…

By jonskeet

Okay, this is a slightly odd post, but with any luck it’ll prove successful. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently reading through Trey Nash’s “Accelerated C# 2008”. I’m writing down errata as I go, but so far the only place I’ve found to leave them is on the Apress web site – which may well be a black hole as far as I know. So, if anyone knows how to get in touch with Mr Nash, could they either let me know or give him my email address (skeet@pobox.com) and ask him to mail me? The normal means of finding … Continue reading Calling Trey Nash…

Judging a book by its cover (or title)

By jonskeet

I’ve ranted about versioning before (and indeed in C# in Depth). I still believe that Microsoft didn’t do the world any favours when they introduced a relatively minor set of changes (just libraries, albeit important ones) with .NET 3.0 and a more major set of changes (languages, LINQ, core library improvements) with .NET 3.5. Using 2.5 and 3.0 would have made more sense, IMO. But never mind. The fact is, people are confused about what version number applies to what. A number of people claim to be using C# 3.5 when they mean either C# 3.0 or .NET 3.5. (For … Continue reading Judging a book by its cover (or title)

Google release protocol buffers as an open source project

By jonskeet

Yesterday the Google open source blog announced a new open source project, to release one of the core pieces of Google infrastructure: protocol buffers. Basically protocol buffers are a way of encoding structured data in a language-neutral and versioning-friendly fashion. Yes, there are a lot of similar ways of doing similar things, but this happens to be the one we use. Currently the protocol buffer compiler (which takes .proto files and converts them into source for various languages) supports C++, Java and Python. I’m hoping to add C# to that list reasonably quickly. To start with this will just be … Continue reading Google release protocol buffers as an open source project

The trouble with book reviews

By jonskeet

I’m currently reading two .NET books: Accelerated C# 2008 (Trey Nash) and Concurrent Programming on Windows (Joe Duffy). I will, in due course, post reviews here. However, the very act of thinking about the reviews has made me consider the inevitable inadequacies. There tend to be two kinds of people reviewing technical books: those who’ve bought the book as a "regular punter" – who are aiming to learn something new. Then there are those who already know about the subject matter, but are reading the book mostly to review it. I realise there are people in-between (for whom the problems … Continue reading The trouble with book reviews