Finally, I have finished my finals and college projects. It's been a pretty intense semseter - at least for the guys that attended. I, being the pro slacker that I am, have attended about 3 lectures and 4 or 5 classes throughout the semester (out of like 100 lectures and 30 classes or something). They're useless anyway, so I didn't lose much. However, I had to work a wee bit too hard starting from a week before the finals to cover all the stuff they've been teaching the whole semester. I think it worked out Ok, thank God. We'll see when the results are out [smile]

After having stopped working during the finals period (about a month), I returned at fullspeed. To my delight, I was assigned to a .NET-based project; A WinForms application. Given my relatively scarce knowledge of .NET methodology - basically, Syntax-level knowledge, not methodology - (it IS different from developing using, say, C++), I had to do a bit of reading. I found the book Introducing Microsoft .NET to be very good at - well, Duh - introducing .NET. It gives a very nice and brief overview of why they came up with it, and how to use it. The author - David Platt - is just hilarious, and gets the point across rather easily. For example, in Chapter 1, where he talks about common infrastructure problems that led to the development of .NET:

Quote:Platt's Second Law states that the amount of crap in the universe is conserved.[1] If someone has less crap to deal with, it's because he's managed to dump his ration on someone else's head, but there's no such thing as making it disappear. If hardware and bandwidth are so much easier and cheaper to get, that means writing the software to run that environment must, by the laws of the universe, be harder and more expensive by a corresponding amount

[lol]
And if you check the footnote:

Quote:[1] Platt's First Law is called "Exponential Estimation Explosion." It states that every software project takes three times as long as your best estimate, even if you apply this law to it.

So true...[smile]

Luckily there was a bucket-load of code in the project already, so I'm kind of learning by example too, by reading the code. My short experience with it so far, and with the VS2003 IDE, is very very enjoyable. Really, I don't find myself hitting the DirectX forum or the lounge every 5 minutes anymore (As a rule, when you see me reply a lot of times in a row, I'm developing something in php). You've got to love how C# is elegantly designed, and how superior the VS2003 Designer is. Things like this make life good!

Anyway, after having finished my first assigned task in the project, I had some free time to start planning the upcoming NeXe update. As you might have known, I released a test release of NeXe a while back. The idea was:
1) To ensure the concept was sound
2) To gather feedback from people
3) To estimate the number of dimwitted, RETARDED, mentally challenged, GOD-DAMNED, freaking stinking MORONIC psychopathic DUMBTARDS. (a.k.a spammers).

The concept is sound. The feedback was awesome (A round of applause to Jack/JollyJeffers, and Georg Rottensteiner). If you see gr4sshopper, IMPALE him for me. NeXe will need spam protection.

Now this update is more of a rebuild, actually. The current release is in classic ASP, which isn't very comfortable to me as a development platform. I've verified that the NeXe server supports ASP.NET. I'm moving to that. In fact, I'm going back to ASP.NET, because that's what I started experimenting with when I set out to revive NeXe.

I'm currently gathering, specifying and refining my requirements. I'm laying down the layout of system, how the stuff will work, what features will be available and how the users will interact with them. Hopefully, I'll be writing about these in upcoming entries and get some feedback. Which means I'll probably break the "Rarely Updated" rule.

Enough for now. If you've read so far, I'd like to say 2 things. First of all, thank you. Second thing: