January 2005 Archives

Jet Brains have just announced the opening of the EAP for their new .NET Profiler, available for download. Resharper by Jet Brains and of course IntelliJ are excellent tools, however the future of Resharper and now the .NET Profiler are by no means certain, with Microsoft adopting many of Jetbrain's excellent features in Visual Studio 2005.

From what I have seen on Visual Studio 2005 it is a much better IDE than VS 2003 is, but still a little behind the usability that IntelliJ brought to the Java IDE market. It wil be interesting to see if development of Resharper for VS 2005 can bring anything that makes people who have not allready invested $99 in the product part with their cash. At the moment, Resharper in VS 2003 still makes me smile every time I use it - and I really miss it when I am working from a computer that doesn't have Resharper installed.

I took a look at build 100 of the .NET Profiler and in seems to work for exe file profiling. I managed to sucessfully profile my unit tests by invoking nunit-console.exe passing in the unit test dll as a command line parameter. The ASP.NET profilier just didn't seem to want to work in this build - which is a real shame. I am currently doing a lot of server side stuff and being able to profile my web service of remoting application while is was being driven by my nunit tests would be fanstatsic.

The output of the profiler is fairly easy to read. I've used Java profilers in the past (such as JProbe) but never was actually able to understand what it was telling me (this probably says more about me than the product as I know people who use it all the time and swear by it). 10 minutes with the .NET Profiler has made me realise that the Microsoft XML Serialisation / Deserialisation is pretty slow and so will make me code around this in the future to avoid calls to this when I don't have to.

I will continue to try out the .NET Profiler and see how it goes. My only worry is that code profiling is supposed to be one of the new features in MS Visual Studio Team System. Will Jetbrains compliment or compete against the Microsoft tool?

Just wanted to take the time to plug the JavaCoder.Net web site - a handy site put together by one of my pals that is helping me stay in touch with the world of Java. If you get the time, please take a look. It's very fast and completely free of adverts.

The bit of the site I really like is the rapid way of accessing information about java design patterns (much quicker than Sun's site). The java discussion forum is also worth a look and I would encorage you to contribute to make the site richer.

I am now back on the first page of Google when you search for Martin Woodward. Not sure what's changed as I still have the same number of links to my site. I think perhaps it is because the discussion of the Wikipedia definition for "Podcasting" very kindly links to me, and this definition is now linked to in many places - including news.bbc.co.uk (which seems to have near infinite page rank). However, I am still "below the fold" on Google, i.e. you have to scroll down to find me.

I'm also getting towards the end of some long hours at work (hence the lack of posting recently), so I think it is time to return to doing some stuff in the evenings and contributing back into the community (but more importantly do some programming just for fun). One of the things I have noticed is that people often are very kind and recognise the work you have done, the best form of recognition for me is a link back to my site - improving my pagerank some more. Unless of course you want to get something from my Amazon Wishlist ;-)

I'm currently doing a budget (January is always a long month, but this one will be particularly hard as my personal circumstances have changed rather a lot in the past year). I released that I had a new category to add to my usual food & drink, utilities, mortgage etc. I now have a separate section for "Information Subscriptions". Into this goes items such as my broadband, Sky+, New Scientist and PC Plus Subscriptions (among others). I realized how much I spend a year on information (currently just under GBP 1000), and how I consider such thinks important in my everyday life. It makes you realize what a different time we live in compared to just 20 years ago.