Virtual Thought

This is a great development tool: FitNesse.

As an example of how it wires up to code check out this page.

I’m a huge fan of NAnt, and have been actively seeking ways to use it to improve even my non-coding life. I like it that much.

When first approaching NAnt, I first came upon the tool Nantpad, which was supposed to be this great editor for editing NAnt. At the time I used it (more than a year ago), it was nothing more than an XML schema hooked up to a TreeList, with a PropertyGrid thrown in to change things. It wasn’t that great.

However, I’ve been hearing more and more things about it on the NAnt pages, so I thought I’d mosey on over to www.nantpad.com and see how it’s coming along. And, thankfully, it seems to have improved a bit.

But not so much that it should now cost $250 a pop. Nope.

I think Scott Hanselman said it best: “They have GOT to be kidding with the pricing. $250 a seat for an editor to an open source tool? Come on, guys, NAnt is NOT that hard to edit. $25, no brainer. $50 gives me pause. $250 must be a joke. God bless you for trying. Now try again.”

According to CNet, a ”...French computer scientist Antoine Joux had uncovered a flaw in a popular algorithm called MD5…” The flaw allows someone to circumvent the algorithm which, I assume, means that this cryptographically strong one-way hash is now, under some circumstances, a two-way hash.

That really sucks. Here’s the article.

So I might shelve Runner for a bit, at least until I get some other games under my belt. It’s still a bit too big, at least the way I envision it working… all the content (art, music, scripts, levels), let alone the coding of the engine, etc… a little too much given that I’m only working on it in my spare time. The end result of all this is that I never feel like I’m getting anywhere on the game, when I could write something in a 1000 line program that would gratify my game-creation needs just fine. So it’s time to work on something else… maybe something kinda like 1942… shooting, flying, etc. We’ll see.

Also, found two good articles about NAnt in development: Managing .NET development with NAnt and this blog entry. Schweet.

Sean posted an article about an article he read entitled “Great Hackers”. Whenever I read articles about “great hackers” I become two separate people. On the one hand is the part of me that is trying very hard not to sense greatness about myself, but secretly knows I’m a great hacker; the other part is convinced that his twin is a nutjob, and that I shouldn’t bother thinking about whether I’m a great hacker because I’m not and just be happy while secretly despising that other people get to be “great hackers” and I don’t.

I don’t particularly like either of these people. I hope that I strike a happy medium between the two selves that wage war in me when I read great articles like this. “Hacker chic”, I call it. I love hackers. My friend, John Hood is a fantastic hacker… you can tell by his stylin’ HTML moves. This is the guy who writes video games, reverse engineered a Playstation 2 for fun, and is now making money reverse engineering cars when he’s not “doodling”, a process other human beings call “creating neat works of art”. John is absolutely a hacker, and I’m nowhere in his league for that stuff.

But neither am I strictly a codemonkey. I have a good head for design, I love tackling strange coding problems, and I dream about creating intelligent agents that will help me rule the world help all mankind evolve to a different plane. I’m writing a game in my spare time, I absolutely adore weird crusty technologies (witness the 800 baud modem and old style radio mike I have at home). Where does this put me?

I don’t know.

Got a comment on this post about SignedXML from SevenObjects themselves pointing out a small error on my part:

Or maybe the article was based on our licensing scheme which was release prior to that blogg ;-)

I would suggest that there are numerous articles around which explain SignedXML very well, or maybe people just develop it themselves for thier own requirements.

http://jclement.ca/devel/dotnet/signedxml.html
http://www.xmltrustcenter.org/xkms/dotnet/sign.htm

Heh! I stand slightly corrected… and I’m still glad I paid the $11. Thanks guys!

There’s an article on MSDN about the Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now, and while I agree with most of their statements, I have a couple of things to say…

I would add ReSharper to the list of programs every .NET developer should download right now, of course. I can’t imagine not being able to refactor my code with a couple of mouse clicks, or renaming a variable everywhere it appears in my program intelligently and quickly… thanks to Ryan for showing it to me in the first place.

Second, there’s this sentence down where the article discusses Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector... “The .NET Framework introduced the world to the concept of reflection…” Hello? Java much?

This kind of thing pisses me off.