Morning Coffee 152

  • I was slammed Friday, so I didn’t get a chance to post the results of last Thursday night’s hockey game. I’m sure you’ve all been eager to hear. We lost, bad, 8-2. Personally, I was -3 and had no points, but I played much better than last week. We had three full lines of forwards, which was a big help, but I have started to find my ice-legs so to speak.
  • Charlie Calvert has the now-definitive list of LINQ to Everything. Of all of them, I found LINQ over C# fascinating, especially given my recent efforts in parsing.
  • Chris Tavares blogs about a distributed source control system called Bazaar. Unlike most version control systems, Bazaar is distributed which means you can use it without a server. According to Chris, you can share branches as easily as mailing a file. I wonder if you could make Bazaar work over a P2P network.
  • While looking up the MSDN link for the previous coffee item, I noticed an entire new section in the MSDN Library for Open Protocol Specifications. Not much to add, just wanted to highlight their existence.
  • Admitted non-designer Scott Guthrie shows off using the new version Expression Blend to build a Silverlight 2.0 app. Personally, I was most interested in seeing some of the new of built-in controls.

Comments:

I've been pretty interested lately on distributed control version systems; and I'm looking at both Git and Mercurial. Git seems technically the better one, but the Windows support seems to be still a bit lacking (and not sure why neither of them have a simple binary distribution on a zip file; why mess with installers?). Anyway, I think the concept is a great idea; and the one thing I really like about it is that it combines the offline support (even better, since pretty much all operations are available offline, not just a few) of SVN, with actual support for branches/merges, and, even better, easy way to provide for personal temporary branches, which is really the only TFS feature I miss every now and then (I'm of course talking about shelvesets).