PRSS = Post Release Stress Syndrome

It's been a while since I last blogged, and a lot have happened in the time.
Mostly I've been busy with the post-release of Maximilian 1.0 (= my son). It's amazing how tricky it is to code and blog, with such a cute kid to distract you and a lot of diapers to change...

Now, however, we're slowing finding a routine in our daily lifes and I'll try to start blogging again - but bear with me if I don't post daily like I used to.

I have a ton of unfinished coding and blogging projects in the pipeline that I'll try to finish off while at the same time I'll try to keep posting my comments when I see new cool developments in my spheres...Like today when Mats, you pointed me to the fact that EPiServer 5 RC4 just has been released. I already have a download in progress and I can't wait to see what changes it has brought since RC2.

My own MiniMax implementation

As you might have noticed these last couple of days has been kind of slow tech-blog wise.
This is of course due to the birth of our wonderful boy, Maximilian, who was born monday morning.
I expect it'll be a couple of weeks before I again have time to write tech-blog entries :-)

Check my personal blog for personal updates.

NXT: My first 'bot

As I mentioned earlier I recently got a cool Lego MindStorms NXT to play with.
Now, with the help of Jesper, we managed to build the basic humanoid robot - and it's awesome!

I've coded it to do a few things:

• Whenever the light is on, Mr. Bot will say "Goodmorning" and start walking.
• When the light is turned off he'll say "Goodnight" and stop walking
• When he's 12 cm from an obstacle he'll say "Please" (...move) and stop.
• When he hears a noise (like somebody clapping their hands) he'll look around to see whats going on
• If he's hand-button is pushed he'll greet you with the words "Have a nice day".

Of course I also made a simple C# Win Forms application that can remote control him.
My initial idea was to build in some simple learning mechanism (perhaps reinforcement learning) but I havn't gotten around to that yet. So far I'm just blinded by all the possibilities :-)

As handsome as Mr. Bot is now, you better take a good look, cause now he's being taken apart. Jesper suggest a really funny use for the NXT - something that every household needs: So now I'm going to build a machine that can automatically color-sort M&M's - and perhaps send out maydays if Olga comes too close to the candy!

WCF: Sharing Types between Server and Client

A discussion I've run into time and time again through the last few months when I've been working with WCF is whether to use the generated proxy classes client-side or think of something else (like inherting the proxy-classes, creating your own proxies, or somehow try to make the proxy classes identical to the source classes).
I guess the discussions arise as a result of people not being sure if they should consider WCF like Web Services which has a loose coupling (generated client proxies) or like Remoting which often has a tighter coupling between the interacting participants (shared dll).
Until now I've mainly been a fan of the loose coupling because of three things:

• It's the easiest and fastest just click the right buttons in your VS and you're set! (yes, I can be quite lazy at times but remember that lazy developers often are the best)
• There's no dependency of a specific version dll between the client and the server. If the Server gets an update that breaks the service-convention the client just has to regenerate it's proxy and you're set.
• I havn't seen a clean and pretty alternate solution before. Mostly it's been messy.

However today I just came across this excellent codeproject posting that gives a fine example of how to share a type between a WCF Service and a WCF consumer. It turns out that it's built into the SvcUtil (the client proxy generator) as a command-line switch. Now doesn't that make me feel stupid :-)