object88

Great video and replies, and it looks like many of my "but what about..." questions are already answered.  So I'll just have to make a request instead.    What are the chances of getting audio setting snapshots?  By this, I mean that I can have a couple of different snapshots where particular settings are tweaked, and I can jump back and forth between them.

Let's say that I'm on my work machine.  Sometimes I'm listening to music as I'm coding, and that's ALL that I want to hear-- nothing else.  Sometimes I'm listening to a #9 video, and I wouldn't mind hearing various small notifications (IM, email, etc.).  Sometimes I just want notifications, but I'm browsing noisey websites (and thus want to turn off browser audio).  It would be nice to have snapshots of these different settings that I can select at a glance, rather than tweak a bunch of different settings (and miss many that hadn't run in the last 30 seconds) if I want to go between different "modes".

Thoughts?

Azura wrote:

How does one construct a dynamic where clause in LINQ?
... Select clause?

I'd like to know that as well! 

Very exciting stuff, although I can't help thinking about LISP a little...

Aside, is there any way that we can get a clearer video of what's on the demonstrator's monitor?  Half the time I can't make out what's being typed.  (Sorry if this has already been covered a thousand times over; I have been gone from #9 for a while...)

Ah, what was I thinking?  I completely forgot that those calls were just GDI+ wrappers.

But the fact remains that there aren't fast managed code operations for manipulating bunches of pixels.  You have to get to pointers, which is "unsafe".  And, of course, once you get your pointers back, you have the chance to overrun all sorts of memory (speaking from expirience again).

So, the performance hit isn't because the code is managed, but rather because there isn't managed code that does the job well.

(Either that, or I'm completely lost regarding the meaning of managed code.  In which case, please someone put me out of my misery.)

Great example, Stoyan.  I didn't slow down while reading the code snippet, but I did stop (often) in your text.

To rationalize this behavior to myself, I'd say that I recognized the code snippet as code (and parsed it as such, given semicolons and double-slashes their due meaning), and I stopped often in the text because the periods were in illogical places.

That said, I'm going to have to reconsider the effectiveness of a period-- did I undervalue that or the strength of sentence parsing?

And what would E.E. Cummings have to say about all this? 

bill hill wrote:

For proportionally-spaced fonts (that's what we call non-fixed-space) two spaces is ugly, and slows the flow.

Ugly is subjective.    Can you elaborate on how double-spacing slows the flow of reading, and how the effect is different with mono-spaced?  Break it down, please.

bill hill wrote:

Bringhurst's book is excellent; no, it's not just about literature.

I apologize if I sounded like I was insulting Mr. Bringhurst's work.  I just don't see (yet?) how double-spacing is worse, esp. considering the multitude of meanings the period has today.  When I commented about literature, I'm thinking of the stuff you'll find outside the Engineeting department of your local bookstore.  You're not likely to find the following paragraph in them:

The 5.6.4.43 release of the .rc files suck.  When will they finally release the 6.2 version?  "Some time next month!" says the go-tool.net website.  .POWER is a useful tool, but really, there are too many bugs to release it.  And don't get me started on the lack of features-- phew!

There are "."s all over the place.  If I were to come to a full-stop every time I saw one, I'd go nuts.  To break it down:

The 5.
6.
4.
43 release of the.
rc files suck.
When will they finally release the 6.2 version?
"Some time next month!" says the go-tool.
net website.
.
POWER is a useful tool, but really, there are too many bugs to release it.
And don't get me started on the lack of features-- phew!

Yar!  That makes no sense!  The period symbol is now over-overloaded, so it seems proper to use another visual or contextual clue.

bill hill wrote:

Not just at the ends of sentences, but extra spaces between words. They can be hard to spot, but when proportional spacing kicks in to break a line in the right place, they often jump right out at you. And you won't even know they're there until they do - which on the screen can depend on the size to which the person reading your text has scaled a window. Point is, you have no control.

Not quite following you there.  I mean, extra spaces between words is definately improper (it tells me the sentence just stopped), but I don't know what you mean in your example.

bill hill wrote:

It's called "The Magic of Reading". Or else I'll just post it in dribs and drabs

I would like to read that, thanks!

Lwatson wrote:

Spending ones time mimimizing those performance problems is a much more effective use for that scarce resource.

Indeed.  Working on a web application using SOAP, and those SOAP calls are the bottleneck.

Still, it's more fun to optimize code bits.  Packing more data into SOAP calls to minimize the number of round trips is, well, not exciting. 

jj5 wrote:

Or when you say that you haven't debugged a memory leak in C# do you simply mean what you say? Not implying that you don't have memory leaks, just simply stating that you haven't debugged them..?

In C#, you don't do manual allocation of memory.  You don't keep manual track of object references.  I.e., you don't even have to allocate an object to handle a reference, or call AddRef or Release.  It's very much like VB in that regard, for better or for worse.

If the .NET subsystem takes care of all that stuff for you, you aren't given the opportunity to screw it up.

Of course, if .NET were to screw it up, we'd be in a world of hurt. 

The downside is that some .NET APIs are just slow.  Take the Bitmap methods "GetPixel" and "SetPixel".  Each call locks and unlocks some memory, which is an expensive operation.  If you're changing or setting the pixels of a image one by one (in my case, grayscaling the image), you're hurting.  So you have to use "unsafe" code, which gives you access to real memory pointers.  Here, you have enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot, but at least you can do it quickly.  You can operate on a whole region of memory by locking and unlocking once.

Sorry, in today's world, single-spacing at the end of the sentence is wrong.  The "." is used to connotate much more than the end of a sentence.  It's used to call functions, indicate sub-releases, abbreviate, etc.

If the eye is to pick up chunks of data off the page, it has to look for meaningful glyphs / clues.  The only unique clue for end-of-sentence, as far as I know, is double-spacing.  Esp. in technical or terse writing.  Look at that last sentence.  Is "Esp." the end of the sentence?  No!  It's not double spaced! 

Mr. Bringhurst may have a point insofar as literature is concerned, but we have to deal with technical writing here, with a mishmash of fixed-space and (what's it called?) non-fixed-space fonts, serif and sans-serif, and so forth.  What may have started off as a "quaint Victorian habit" is today a useful and practical guideline.  Furthermore, where the hell is the "en spaces" key on this damned keyboard?  (And what is a "bood designer"?)

BTW, dead-on regarding underlining.  Looks cute, but also looks like a hyperlink.  Ultimately annoying.  Avoid unless you're stuck with plain-text.

Further aside, avoid serif fonts for online text.  Harder to read.  Looks good on paper, though.

Signed,
Sore-eyes near San Francisco

Ah-hah!  Works much better in Internet Explorer.  Mozilla, not so much.  Very sad.  (What can I say, I like my options...)

Anyway, to answer my own question, it looks like it's not d/l'ing the whole dang videos.  Phew! 

Thanks, and off to ask questions!

If it's even remotely possible, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE provide links to the videos; don't embed them into the pages.  I don't want to install the latest and greatest WM9, and I'm constantly getting asked to download something from Microsoft.  Four times on the front page!

If I do install WM9, will I automagically download 4 videos when I come to the front page, or when my local cache expires?  Really, I don't need to use the bandwidth, I just have some developer questions I need answered.

Thanks!