Peter Drayton recently made some Observations on CIL books. He summed them up very well. For most developers I think CIL Programming: Under the Hood of .NET would be the best buy because its an introductory text and is much more readable as a result. It contains a lot of detail on Reflection.Emit which is proving very useful in the XML-RPC.NET work I'm doing this weekend: implementing code to automatically generate XML-RPC.NET proxies. Judging from the emails I've replied to over the last few months implementing a proxy causes the most problems and the new proxy generator will make this much easier. Define an interface to represent the XML-RPC end-point and then use it to generate a proxy. Using the proxy generator will look something like this:
interface IFoo
{
int Add(int a, intb);
}
IFoo fooProxy = XmlRpcProxyGen.Create(typeof(IFoo), "http://localhost/math.rem");
int result = fooProxy.Add(1, 2);
Alternatively it will be possible to save the proxy to disk as an assembly. So far I've got a prototype of the generator working and I'm now working out the details of how it will fit into the XML-RPC.NET library. [Cook Computing]
This is interesting. In a way it is a way simillar to a wish I expressed earlier. reflexion can be use to auto generate proxy.
2002 Ig Nobel Prizes. I went with my family to the annual Ig Nobel Awards last night. The Ig Nobels, honoring scientific achievements "that cannot or should not be reproduced," are the brainchild of Marc Abrahams, editor of The Annals of Improbable Research, a humor magazine that is somehow related to the old Journal or Irreproducible Results. [JOHO the Blog]
Here's a direct link to the laureates list. I think last year's winners were overall better finds, especially the Technology Ig Nobel:
Object-orientation in Fortran? Hello! I don't want that in Fortran. Let's keep Fortran for its first purpose: mathematical calculation. Remember that Fortran means: Formula Translation.
Radio Tip: [Dog News] Here's one way that's quite wonderful and integrated right into your weblog. Metalinker by Blogdex for instant blog gratification! Blogdex ( http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/ ) has done it again: they've created another great tool for you to keep track of the weblog community's debates and discussions. It's easy... really... just go to ThinkBlank at http://www.thinkblank.com, add a little code to your weblog and that's it. The semantic web is taking shape, bit by bit... (you'll find out from your own weblog who's linking to your article (or not) and who's linking to your posted links (or not). This solution requires javascript, but other than that, wow... and you can put the thinkblank.js in your gems folder (just rename it thinkblank.txt) and call it with the txt extension in your homepage template. [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ]
This is a good tool but it is not woven deep enough in the presentation layer of the blog. I don't want my blog to littered with "[b]". I want a more visually subtler intergration with the presentation layer. maybe I'll use it onli in one or two categories if it had value to the information.
Shirky: Weblogs and Publishing. (SOURCE:Clay's email newsletter)-Another must read from clay Shirky! A lot of people in the weblog world are asking "How can we make money doing this?" The answer is that most of us can't. Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly. [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
Most of us can't make money and it's OK. I am not maintaining a web log for profit but to share tidbits of knowledge somebody else could use.
