And check out the effect it had on my stats!

That’s right – 7 more visitors in one day! Damn!

http://aboutcode.net/2010/11/17/going-postal-generating-email-with-aspnet-mvc-view-engines.html

No I have a whole bunch of ‘Pending Changes’ where the files actually don’t exist in TFS *or* my computer (I deleted them locally too). I can’t Undo them – TFS tells me “No pending changes were found for [file]”. I can’t commit them then delete them. Basically I can’t get rid of them.

This is irrational. Basically TFS is being quite obstinate about it’s belief about the state of my workspace even in the face of the facts that:
a) the files physically don’t exist anymore
b) I *say* they don’t exist anymore

Why is TFS contradicting me? Why can’t TFS just believe me when I say “those files can be totally disregarded, they’re gone, I don’t care, *THIS* is what my workspace should look like”. Instead TFS replies “no it isn’t”.

“Yes it is”
“No it isn’t”
“Yes it is!”
“No it isn’t!”

Sigh.

So far Wave has not been the game-changer Google suggested it would be, but I’m not discounting it. As far as I’m concerned it’s Email 2, and Google would only have to roll out Wave as a ‘new version’ of the current Gmail to all of a sudden garner a lot of interest.

But again that’s pure speculation and not what I’m interested in writing about today. A particular aspect of these services has caught my attention, in particular the embedding features.

Mashable have added a ‘Buzz This’ button to their blog, which looks like a little hack on Google Reader:

<a rel="nofollow external" target="_blank"
href="http://www.google.com/reader/link?url=http://mashable.com/2010/02/10/google-buzz-contest/&amp;title=Google+Buzz+Contest%3A+Win+a+Google+Nexus+One&amp;srcURL=http://mashable.com/">
<img height="58" width="50" alt="" src="http://mashable.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-digg-this/i/google-buzz.png" original="http://mashable.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-digg-this/i/google-buzz.png">
</a>

The link provides a prompt to add a comment and post the item in your Buzz profile. It’s a really simple way to blogs to push their content out through Buzz.

Wave as it’s own embed strategy, which is to actually embed a Wave into a page, as @kevinblake demonstrates in this example post.

At the moment these two features are disparate, but they indicate an overriding theme that Google have hinted at before in rhetoric around Wave – a ubiquitous sharing and conversation platform across the web. Layers over the web that unify individual websites into a single whole. This is, to me anyway, an exciting idea.

I also see Buzz as a way to blog.  There’s currently no direct integration between WordPress and Buzz (nor with Blogger at this stage), and until Buzz offers the kind of features that make WordPress useful to me (stats, mainly) I wouldn’t use it as such. I would however cross-post, which is what I’m going to do today.

Google’s vision is just much bigger than Facebook’s. So perhaps Buzz could hurt Facebook, but I also imagine Google aren’t bothered. Facebook is one of the engines that keeps the web churning. Google on the other hand is more about infrastructure, they’re the banks that the river flows between. What would the river be without something to produce a current?

I followed this tutorial: http://blog.webintellix.com/2009/10/how-to-use-cucumber-with-net-and-c.html

And when I reached step 5 and executed ‘icucumber features’ (in my case I called the batch file icuc.bat for brevity) I get this result:

Fail. Incidentally I’m using Ruby 1.9.1 and IronRuby 1.0 RC 1 which at the time of writing are the latest versions. I updated the paths given in the tutorial to match the appropriate paths on my machine.

Background and definition of the Visitor Pattern.

An example of the visitor pattern in C# using double-dispatch and reflection.

A great article about reflection and MemberInfo cache.

I’m going to have a good look at the VideoLoader. Currently I’m relying on the MediaElement control doing the legwork of downloading the file for me, but I’m positive I could use a WebRequest object to stream the bytes directly. The only difficulty would be in providing regular progress reports to the queue manager.

So, if anyone’s interested, here it is: http://code.google.com/p/silverlightpreloader/

This post will continue to be revised as I get around to enumerate all the issues I have with it and writing posts describing each issue in detail.

Complaints and Grievances

1. State change events seem to be based on guesswork.
2. The DownloadProgress property isn’t always what it seems
3. MediaElement class combines responsibilities for both loading and rendering video making it impossible to make use of just one of these aspects

Well annoyingly the CurrentState value isn’t always what it should be. I’ve worked with MediaElement a lot over the last few months and I’ve noticed that when a video finishes buffering its state could be any one of

• Stopped
• Paused
• Closed
• Opening
• Pondering
• Being coy

I guess that external factors like browser cache, video format and progressive downloading might play a part but, come on, seriously, the runtime really should be providing the solutions or workarounds to these problems so that I don’t have to. In a lot of cases there simply is no workaround. Very aggravating indeed.