I have no idea how he does it, but Terry Prachett is so consistently funny, amusing and a very good writer.

Making Money is a continuation to the Going Postal book, with the main hero being Moist, again thrust into an unwilling job description, and raising to the occasion.

It was both hilarious and a good read, two distinct qualities, but Prachett is combining them masterfully. Highly recommended, and more than worth a second read, which I need to make time to.

There is also the shred of a promise to have Moist as the tax collector for the city, which would make for an interesting story, considering he is a thief.

Important note: I am representing my own conclusions here, not anyone's official position.

First and foremost, the CLR libraries are not open source.

Let us talk about licenses, and what they gives us. By default, even if I have the source for a library, I can't really do anything with it. That is because the authors of the library retain copyright and you don't have any rights to do anything with it. Open Source explicitly gives you certain rights (usually modifications and redistribution rights) for the source.

The license that Microsoft is currently talking about is a Reference License. Jay Wren has more about the limitations, but I think that Miguel de Icaza has a better summary of what is going on.

More specifically, here are the things that you cannot do with the source:

• Fixing bugs - you can work around them, but you cannot fix and use it.
• Enhancing features - you know that feeling when it is almost there, it is going to remain almost. You cannot modify the code.
• Adding features - I would love to lie my hands on the assembly resolver code, I really want some hooks there, but that is not going possible either.

The main scenario is to debug into the framework, which is of immense value, especially since the System.Web assembly is included, but that about it.

If you want any of the above, you are not going to get it from the newly opened CLR libraries sources, the license does not allow it. You are better of browsing the Mono license, since that does explicitly allow you to do all of the above.

I have hardly had time to read Empire of Ivory and listen to Black Powder War and two thirds of Empire of Ivory when I got Making Money from Terry Prachett.

I have read Going Postal with great enjoyment, in fact, I just finished listening to it on the way back from JAOO.

I also got several other books as well, but I have yet to open them at all, since that one has all but capture all my attention.

We will see how fast I can go through that.

.

P.S: I noticed that I speak a lot more about other interests lately beside technology and programming, does it bother you?

I have no idea why this isn't in much wider circulation, but this is huge.

ScottGu has announced that Microsoft is Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries.

I am disappointed to see that even in the tiny source code samples that he has in the post I have violent disagreements (they speak about sealing stuff, which I have serious objection to).

This hopefully means a lot less ReflectorDebugging, although I am not sure about all the implication that this has.

Visual Developer - Visual C#

I am not that much of a visual guy, but I can leave with that. I have been told some horror stories about mismatching skills and distinctions.

Many thanks for Justin Angel, for all the effort he put into it.

.

Here is the first such script that I am going to use:

import Boobs.IO.Extensions
import Boobs.Compiler.Extensions

Task "default", ["build"]

Task "build", ["clean"]:
      MsBuild("MyApp.sln").Execute()

Task "clean":
      MsBuild("MyApp.sln", "/target:clean").Execute()

Svn "ContiniousIntegration":
      SvnUpdate
      Execute("default")

Note that this is probably incredibly primitive consider what rake can do, but it amuses me to be able to do this.

The commands are probably even more fun:

Tools\BooBuildSystem\boobs -f:default.boobs -t:ContiniousIntegration

The Svn task will only be run if the repository is more recent than the working copy, so this is something that makes it very easy to build CI scripts. In this case I need to do something a distributed deployment on commit, and while I can probably do this using CC.Net, I am not really fond of the anticipated pain (configuring permissions alone would be a PITA, I imagine) and the executable XML.

This is far simpler, if more primitive.

As an aside, I am getting addicted to parenthesis-less method calls. 

I was just sent this table schema (minor modifications to protect the responsible party):

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[tblEmployees] 
(
           [iEmployeeSirial] [int] IDENTITY (1, 1) NOT NULL ,
           [vcEmployeeID] [nvarchar] (15) COLLATE Hebrew_CI_AI NULL ,
           [vcEmployeeName] [nvarchar] (50) COLLATE Hebrew_CI_AI NOT NULL ,
           [vcAddress] [nvarchar] (60) COLLATE Hebrew_CI_AI NULL ,
           [vcCity] [nvarchar] (30) COLLATE Hebrew_CI_AI NULL ,
	   // many more fields
)

I am not going to enjoy the integration phase...

Sometimes it feels like it reads my mind, but in a good way.

James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

October 17, 1948 - September 16, 2007

Okay, I am in shock.

Robert Jordan is one of the main reasons that I have even minor fluency in English at all, he is responsible for a lot of inspiration and the name "Ayende Rahien" is taken from his books.

I spent many enjoyable hours reading and re-reading and re-reading his books, and I have spent many pleasurable moments arguing semantics and plot twists with other members of the community.

I never knew the man, but he sure did influenced me greatly.

To steal from him, this is the only thing that I can recall of the Old Tongue of the top of my head, which seems oddly appropriate.

Tia mi aven Moridin, isainde vadin