Knowing .NET

IDG’s newsweekly, InfoWorld, is moving to an online-only format (Read Steve Fox’s, its Editor-in-Chief, discussion). Fox says that InfoWorld is not “going away,” but so far the conversion of a print readership to online has been, at best, problematic. There have been some credible attempts ( Byte, for instance) but the problems are considerable, not least that the business instincts of a print publisher must be overridden regularly in this different medium. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and wish success for Infoworld’s staff, but this is yet another instance where I am grateful for having left the business aspects of publishing behind me.

In the airport today, I saw a fellow browsing Sudoku books. Flipping through them, seemingly evaluating pages as one might check out a writer’s style. I thought about going up beside him, looking over his shoulder and saying “Well, that one’s trivial,” or “Oh, that one.”

Last night I had a dream and it had something to do about useless wedding gifts. One thing was a quilted earpiece caddy for eyeglasses — you slipped it on over the ends of your eyeglasses while leaving your glasses on the counter overnight in a cold climate, thus avoiding that annoying “gee, my eyeglasses are chilly,” feeling that ruins so many a cold morning. What’s sad is that I know if I pick up a Sky Mall in the plane, I’ll see something even more absurd.

Naysawn has announced that the Visual Studio unit testing framework (MSTest) is moving into the Pro SKU of Visual Studio. That’s a good start, but I want to lobby for going the whole way:

Please move the unit testing framework into the .NET framework.

Source: MSTest Moving to VS Pro
Originally published on Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:35:00 GMT by Brad Wilson

And there was much rejoicing…

Of course, Brad’s right that unit-testing libraries ought to move into the base library, but the VS tools are sophisticated enough to be implemented solely as VS add-ins.