Knowing .NET

The Mono team has announced the beta 1 release of Mono. Read the release notes here or download here.

via [Cook Computing]

Have you tried Mono? Do you think that it's an important project, a sideshow, or somehow negative (e.g., "All that effort shouldn't be put into an evil language like C#")?

10:37:29 AM    comment []   trackback []

As part of the ACM, one receives free unlimited access to the ACM Professional Development Centre. The PD Centre is hosted at the Sun Learning Center (the "centre" at the "center") and to say that it's Sun-centric is an understatement (they have recently added 5 courses on .NET fundamentals, but compare that to 77 courses on Solaris, and 30 courses for Sun One Middleware).

Fair or foul? No one's forcing you to take "Solaris 9: Manage Network Printers and System Processes" and, if you wish to be a Sun sysadmin, I'm sure it's a valuable offer. But is it proper for a professional organization to lends its brand to a commercial entity?

9:23:17 AM    comment []   trackback []

For this month, aside from occasional out-link posts, all of my posts will be in the form of questions. I hope to increase the amount of feedback I get, both in my comments and directly to my email address (lobrien@thinkingin.net). More importantly, I hope to break down the "echo chamber" quality of the blogosphere a bit and get some new perspectives on the state of the software development industry.

For instance, I love the Tablet PC. To me it's an exciting form factor, it suggests all sorts of new applications, and the SDK has tremendous bang for the buck. If I were looking to start up a company, we'd be building Tablet software (heck, I've got the application designed!). But obviously, very few people share that view and what can I learn by writing Yet Another Blog Entry on how much I love the Tablet PC? So,

If you had, say, a quarter of a million dollars in angel funding to start your own software company right now, what would you build?

9:07:12 AM    comment []   trackback []