code monkey

As part of this year's Google Summer of Code, there were two projects that got chosen that were on my personal 'to-do' list. I was happy these projects got chosen because frankly, my to-do list is not getting shorter nor are the days getting longer. One of these is Ed Ropple's "Cloverleaf", which is an add-in to Visual Studio designed to facilitate writing and testing applications in Mono. We decided on the following features: - Test in Mono: Clicking this would run the current solution/project on the Mono runtime on Windows. - Scan with MoMA/Gendarme: Clicking this would run MoMA or Gendarme (which can run MoMA) on the solution/project. - Test on Linux: Clicking this would take the solution/project output and copy it to a Linux machine or virtual machine, and automatically start it. Ed did some great work over the summer, so for my Hack Week project I started polishing and packaging his code so we could get it into people's hands. Unfortunately, I ...

I thought this was a very interesting article on triaging bugs. It uses 3 metrics: * Type : What type of bug is this? For example is it a crashing issue, a problem with localization or a matter of visual polish? * Likelihood : How likely are users to experience the bug? For example, does everyone run into the issue or do only a few users run into it? * Priority : Of the people who experience the bug, how badly does it affect their experience with the product? Each metric is assigned a number, which when multiplied together produces a number representing "user pain", that is, how much pain it causes users. Bugs can then be sorted by this number, and you fix bugs from the top. It's a shame bugzilla doesn't really offer much flexibility for stuff like this. I'm not saying this is the best way to prioritize bugs, but it would be nice to have some ability to try out different methodologies.

Many people have commented that my puppy Helo looks like a kangaroo. Fortunately I have taken pictures of both to compare: Exhibit A: A Kangaroo. Exhibit B: Helo. I can certainly see the resemblance. At the very least, I think Helo looks more like a kangaroo than this:

Since the beginning of Winforms, we have ensured that our controls match the very ubiquitous and very ugly Windows Classic controls. These are the controls that you get if you do not call Application.EnableVisualStyles () before you start your application. For reference, they look like this: Now that we have things in generally working order, we can take some time to add spit and polish. For that, I am extremely pleased to mentor George Giolfan, who is working on our theming stuffs to give us better looking controls. He is doing this by creating a theme that renders controls using the VisualStyles namespace and refactoring our controls to support this. Since he is awesome, he has already been working on this since his Summer of Code application was accepted. Right now, it looks like this on Windows (Vista): While this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it doesn't really help our target users (Linux) yet. This will soon change, as the next step will be to implement the V...

Last night, we hit a very important milestone in our support for Winforms. We are API complete, which means that our public API is exactly the same as .Net's (all 12,776 methods). I wasn't around at the time, but the first check-in of Winforms occurred on July 8th, 2004, meaning it has taken almost 4 years to implement. Since then, there has been 6,434 commits to Winforms. Thank you to everyone who helped us get here! Thank you people who contributed code! Thank you people who contributed tests! Thank you people who contributed Bugzilla reports! What's next? Well, as with your typical 115k line cross-platform windowing/widget kit, there are bound to be bugs. So we'll be working to fix those. If you come across any, please report them so we can fix them too! Go here to report them. All of this will ship with our upcoming Mono 2.0 release.

- Game 3 of the Predators' spectacular playoff run. - First game at home here in Nashville. - Broadcast in glorious high-definition. ..or not.. Seriously now, how can I spend all my time hating Microsoft when there are much more evil monopolies out there like Comcast? I am only one man with only so much hate.

Although I am Southern and therefore cannot name more than 3 hockey teams, I must formally protest Jackson's and Mike's hockey playoff predictions. Evidently, they are not taking this into account when calculating Nashville's chances. I can only assume they are both bitter over their respective teams not making the playoffs.