Fork me on GitHub

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Chaos is not a Theory it's a Way of Life

Well it has been awhile hasn't it. I've not disappeared, life has just been a bit hectic lately. I've sort of been screwed over by a good friend/ex-roommate in ways that complicated my finances and my household responsibilities but I think I've finally got all that straightened out and beyond that my project at work deploys today! Yay!!! :p

Other than that I've been thinking bunches about my research and how I plan to accomplish certain core goals, though down the line my thoughts tapered to other fun ideas as well, some of which, I have found, are already on their way to being what I thought of as very cool useful concepts. Make some beautiful code merged love out of them and I think you'd be on to something, lol. I won't detail my hopes and dreams too much more as I've already divulged quite a bit of hopes while not delivering much on any of them right now, but here are the really neat, already existing, partial implementations of my dreams; I suggest any C# developer who's ever done any JavaScript, Ajax, ASP.NET or Windows Forms check these out, they are pretty cool:
  • Script# - an absolutely awesome freeware concept and implementation, a little incomplete as far as I'm concerned (though I'm always pretty rough on that stuff, constantly looking for low level features). This is an incredibly useful C# compiler that compiles to JavaScript code instead of IL; complete with object oriented definition, proxy object creation for Ajax support and a robust framework developed around it for ease of use and RAD.
  • Visual WebGui - WOW! I didn't believe my eyes, I so wanted to do something like this (still do want to do a lower level implementation :p) but this is a great package. In a nutshell this is Windows Forms development for web applications. If you're still reading this instead of that link I dunno if you caught how important that was ;) I'm talking visual design using the same interface driven Windows Forms designers you're used to only it allows client-side use of the application (windows, buttons, textboxes, the whole shebang) while the logic runs in the safety of the server.
Beyond that, I thought it necessary to give a shoutout to a project I've been using in some of my prototypes for my research project. Props to the Managed DriectShow project by Kristoffer Vinther. I've tried other managed wrappers and this one is definitely the best design for a managed library. It's not just a wrapper it's an object oriented implementation that follows .NET patterns and practices and provides a scalable and usable media interface for playback, streaming, buffering and recording of media files, streams and capture devices. I'd like a little more documentation for it but it's in the early stages and it runs very well.

I have so many things I want to say about so much that I've been reading and thinking, but if I unload now it will be a disorganized mess so again I creep into the shadows to sort the random data that swarms me, hopefully to return with understanding to use and share :)