EVE Online

LINQPad is an awesome aide to .NET Developers. Written by Joseph Albahari of LinqBridge and the C# In a Nutshell series fame. LINQPad allows the developer to write, compile and run C# or VB.NET Expressions, Statements of Programs outside of Visual Studio. Everything I am going to show you in this post can be done with Visual Studio simply by wrapping the text in a new console application, and adding references to the DLLs. However I strongly encourage you to download LINQPad and give it a go. In the event you are using 64-bit windows and are still using LINQPad 2 you will need to download the x86 version of LINQPad 2, as all of the EVEMon assemblies are compiled for x86. If you have LINQPad 4 you don’t need to worry about. Assuming you have EVEMon installed, the first step is to load the EVEMon.Common.dll assembly into LINQPad: ...

Within EVEMon we have started making heavy use of LINQBridge which uses Visual Studio 2008’s Multi-Targeting capabilities to allow a .NET 2.0 applications to use the compiler functionality of C# 3.0. This reduces our need to push EVEMon towards .NET 3.5, and simplifies our dependency stack for the end user (.NET 2.0 is pre-installed on Vista and above, .NET 3.5 is pre-installed in Windows 7 and above). One of the annoyances I have run into is every time there is a problem with a LINQ statement the debugger will stop in the LINQBridge project rather than EVEMon’s code; this usually tells you nothing useful forcing you to dig into the exception to find the stack trace to find out which line caused the exception. ...

I had been intending to post up all sorts of bits of news about life, driving, programming and cats but it didn’t happen. I have been busy which is good, however it doesn’t leave very much room for blogging. This post is going to be one really quick catch up entry to try and get me back into the swing of it. I finally passed my driving test at the beginning of the summer, it was my fourth try and I passed with three minors which was a great feeling… since then I have driven once, as part of PassPlus, which didn’t really feel vastly different, although it was more enjoyable knowing that I didn’t have a test coming up. ...

I have been working on EVEMon for about two months now, taking on the responsibility of committing changes to the trunk, fixing bugs and adding new features. As a project I have been involved for several years submitting bug fixes and little features, it was down to my experiences with EVEMon that I decided to implement Subversion and Trac at work. Unfortunately the first time it came to me to be responsible for a release, it seemed to go terribly wrong. The updated installer worked fine, and it seemed initially there were no problems with the updated code base. However BattleClinic shortly went a little mad with bug reports similar to this one: ...

Graeme Arthur tagged me, normally I hate these things but this is kind of a reverse chain letter… sort of… maybe if i re-write the rules slightly. Rules Link to the original tagger(s), and list these rules on my blog. Share 7 facts about myself in the post - some random, some weird. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter. 7 Facts About Me At the time of writing I have been alive for approximately 871 million seconds. I first started programming (in Spectrum BASIC) at about the age of 8 since then I have coded projects in Visual Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java, Ada, PHP and C#. I have played EVE Online for almost five years now, have been playing less often of late however I still get to enjoy the time I do spend in EVE, although it is getting increasingly more and more lonely in space. I have been learning about Sharepoint over the past few weeks, I have already completed most of the Microsoft e-Learning on the topic and read several blogs, I recently signed up to the Sharepoint User Group UK. I wrote my dissertation on the future of MMOGs, I disagree with a good proportion of what I wrote, however it was one of the most enjoyable parts of my Degree. I type at between 40 and 60 words per minute, it has taken me 5 minutes to get to 300 words in this blog post, some of them however were copied and pasted from Graeme’s post. Like Graeme I also play bass (albeit I play badly) and dabble in live PA, although I don’t really enjoy the later any more. 7 people to tag: ...

Disclosure: This page contains Amazon Affiliate links; as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Further information can be found in my disclaimer and privacy policy. So today was a mock test, one of several before I take my actual test. We drove down to the test center in Brighton Marina where Kev explained the test to me, how majors and minors worked and what would score as what. I still haven’t done emergency stops so we could not cover that, other than that it seemed pretty much as I had read and expected. ...

No, I haven’t taken up free running I have just been playing a little more Call of Duty 4 over the past week, I was encouraged to look back at it by a friend some time ago. Only just got round to trying it again. Since I last played there has been another patch, that includes new maps (I thought there were four maps, however I have only played three. ...

Nate Combs has again posted on Terra Nova about what makes rare minerals rare. Nate makes the very good point; that rare minerals are not as scarce as the name might suggest. It is well worth a read as his his personal “scratchpad”.

I read an interesting article on The Register about the Firefox Plugin AdBlock Plus, the article covers a bit about the current favourable relationship between Firefox and Google which could be threatened by the increased usage of products that block adverts from being displayed. I am no fan of adverts on websites, as you can see; this site is devoid of adverts for the conscious reason that I find them distracting. Many adverts can not be controlled, if I add adverts to a page then I am leaving some of my screen space open to be used by another company, doubtlessly this company will have different views on what is appropriate, perhaps they promote content I would find objectionable (betting or breaking of game rules for example). ...

Disclosure: This page contains Amazon Affiliate links; as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Further information can be found in my disclaimer and privacy policy. I have been thinking about the economics of Online Games MMORPGs for some time. Most of my interest comes from writing my undergraduate dissertation which was more of an overview of the future of MMOGs than any specific focus. Lately, and most importantly with EVE Online, economics has shot into the public eye. ...