I've been doing some work to reduce the number of assemblies (from outside the Global Assembly Cache (GAC)) we load before posting a loading message. While doing this I discovered that mscorlib doesn't have its GlobalAssemblyCache property set to true. Why? If you look in "C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322" (this directory is the GAC) I see mscorlib.dll. If I do a gacutil /l mscorlib is not registered. Why isn't part of the GAC? What is different?
Update: An embarrassing mistake, I got the location of the GAC wrong. The GAC is found in %WINDOWS%/Assembly. However this still begs the question in .NET 1.0/1.1 mscorlib isn't part of the GAC. Why?
With Whidbey it will be.
Isn't it odd that almost 50 years after the creation of modern compiled languages (Fortran ~1957), we're still editing text and discussing name conventions.
On one of my mailing lists in the past couple of days there has been a discussion around lightweight Hungarian notations. Specifically the use of this.someMemberVariable vs m_someMemberVariable etc. This made me think (a rare event), about why we need textual conventions when the IDE could just give the information we need.
It seems the underlying problem is that our IDE's don't automatically tell us what the scope of these variables are. If member variables, statics, consts, params were all highlighted differently - we could get rid of many of these textual conventions.
In the best of all possible worlds we would have graphical editors[1], [2], [3] that allowed us to edit our parse trees directly. There would never again a formatting argument - we could all format our code the way we want. If we wanted Hungarian naming that would also be personal choice. Most sytnax errors would be a thing of the past. How do we get there from here?
Does anyone MS research/Sun/IBM want to hire me for this project??
BTW I know that JetBrains ReSharper and Whole Tomato's Visual Assist do some of the job, but they just improve our text file editors
Update: I noticed this article was getting referrals from Jon Udell on del.icio.us. Jon had also linked to another article from Greg Wilson “Extensible Programming for the 21st Century“ which does a better job of describing what I'm looking for.
In addition Sergey Dmitriev mentions his article “Language Oriented Programming“ which I forgot to mention.
[1] Whidbey May Miss the Next Coding Revolution
[2] Graphical Source Code Editors
[3] Source Code in Database essay