A Face Made For Email

re: A Face Made For Email

Patrtick — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 02:59:39 GMT

This link to the video is broken.

A Face Made For Email, Part Three

Fabulous Adventures In Coding — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 19:40:36 GMT

Yes, it has happened again . This time, our fabulous C# Community Program Manager Charlie Calvert was

A Face Made For Email, Part Two

Fabulous Adventures In Coding — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 18:38:00 GMT

re: A Face Made For Email

Eric Lippert — Sat, 10 Apr 2004 04:22:00 GMT

Scoble explains why they chose windows media:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/04/07.html#a7181

It's true -- we're a bunch of cheapskates. :-)

re: A Face Made For Email

Eric Lippert — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 23:24:00 GMT

> can't Microsoft afford to buy a tripod for the camera? Got kinda dizzy from the cinema verite style

I was the first interview, and Scoble was still trying out some experiments to get the hang of it. You'll see that in some of the other interviews, the camera work is even goofier! In later ones he did end up using a tripod.

re: A Face Made For Email

Dan Shappir — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 21:35:00 GMT

> You can always explicitly Dispose objects if
> you want to deterministically finalize
> objects that are holding onto unmanaged
> resources like handles, etc.

Obviously, but that is exactly my point: in C# it's up to the client to invoke the determinate finalization while C++ makes it possible for the service provider to invoke it automatically. C# does do a better job than Java with IDisposable and the using keyword. But still, putting the onus on the client means that some clients will forget to implement the invocation, thus effectively introducing a resource leak in an environment that supposedly banishes resource leaks.

All this is not to say that I think GC is a bad thing. Indeed, I think it is generally a good thing. It's just that, like everything else, it's not perfect. It may be that MC++ represents the best of both worlds, but I haven't gotten around to use it yet.

re: A Face Made For Email

Robert Hahn — Thu, 08 Apr 2004 14:16:00 GMT

Eric:

Darn right I'm old school. ;) You can just go ahead and visualize me in my plaid flannel shirt, long grey-streaked beard (that I've had since I was 4) and Birkenstocks on stockinged feet trying to figure out how to convert MPG to ASCII to play on my terminal window. Maybe I'll videotape that and send it off to Channel 9, too!

</joke>

re: A Face Made For Email

Eric Lippert — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 22:06:00 GMT

I agree that there are scarcer resources out there than memory. Two things:

1) You can always explicitly Dispose objects if you want to deterministically finalize objects that are holding onto unmanaged resources like handles, etc.

2) I'm hopeful that the Longhorn extensions to the framework will mitigate some of this worry.

Case in point: right now I'm working on some managed code that must do some fairly serious work on an unmanaged IStorage*. Getting the storage and stream lifetimes right is nightmarish -- I ended up writing all the storage management in a C++ object which then implements an interface which is pleasant to use from managed code. When structured storages are added to WinFX, that becomes someone else's problem and I can abandon my silly wrapper.

Long story short: coding is still hard, tools have pros and cons, and no language or framework is a panacea.

re: A Face Made For Email

Dan Shappir — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 20:41:00 GMT

> Makes no difference to me

OK, I'll bite:
Just watched your video about managed code and the (coder) performance benefits. This is also a point you've previously made in your blog.

Now here is the thing from my POV - I totally agree that GC is much better for components than ref counting. OTOH I'm not so sure about the memory leak part. Yes, it's a good thing not having to worry about memory leaks but it comes at a price and that price is determinate finalization. In C++ it's straightforward for me to create a class that guarantees proper resource deallocation. In .NET I must rely on proper use by the my client, e.g. invoke cleanup through IDispatch.

The thing is, memory is (almost) the least worrying resource, even in server apps. It's resources like handles that you really need to watch out for. And for this C++ appears to be better than C#.

re: A Face Made For Email

Eric Lippert — Wed, 07 Apr 2004 17:00:00 GMT

> which would you prefer in any case

Makes no difference to me.