programming

Everyone's favourite .NET development tool has a new home with Red Gate Software. After eight years of working on .NET Reflector, Lutz Roeder, the original creator of the program, has handed it off to Red Gate in order to move on with his career and explore new opportunities.

While no actual licensing is available, that Flash processor and player for XNA I discussed last March, Fluix, now has its source available from the creator, who is looking for someone who can take over development of the project. Unfortunately, Scott Graham, the guy behind Fluix, hasn't had the time to work on it, and as far as I know, it's yet to be updated to work right with XNA 2.0, never mind 3.0 (which despite not being released, is out in CTP form).

I hope that we'll be seeing some new life for Fluix soon!

Simple. You do a technical review.

Because I was bored and going crazy, I quickly whipped up a program that simulates a bunch of plants being munched on by animals. If I decide to keep working on it, I need to implement better path finding and logic, as well as a few ideas you might glean from certain things in the code.

This isn't even alpha-level code, this is braindead coding at it's best. Player beware.

'Nuff said, but you'd probably like to know why I say this in my curmudgeonly fashion. First of all, a disclaimer: Text editors with highlight support do not an IDE make, even if they give you a task pane of files. Second, I'm writing this from a Windows perspective; any PHP IDEs that don't run on Windows are useless to me.

Every so often, I have issues that are more easily solved through the command line rather than through a graphical interface. And almost every time, the task to be done is repetitive, doing the same three or four acts over and over again on a set of files, but having to do it one file at a time. Today was no different.

Despite not being able to get any work done on Alarm Clock at the given time, I have been continuing to think about what work remains incomplete, and how best to accomplish it. Here's two of those insights...

Hot on the heels of VS2008's launch date (Feb 27, 2008) comes news that the next version of Visual Studio will still ship by the end of the year.

Via the Canadian Developers MSDN blog we now know when Microsoft will be launching the next version of Visual Studio (commonly known as Orcas), as well as SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. The release takes place on February 27. There's nothing available regarding the Canadian launch parties yet, but I'm sure that they'll be great, like others Microsoft has held!

The irrepressible Raymond Chen recently mused about "security holes" that aren't &endash; that is to say, features which may be misused but don't actually cause security vulnerabilities. While Raymond's blog is always worth reading, this is more about something from one of the comments on this entry. Commenter Erzengel mused that "impersonating a plugin could be an initial delivery system" for malware.