It’s been a very strange season this year. A cold start, then some massive heat waves. autumn is shaping up to feel normal, and also lovely weather.
The hot spells brought some veggies season to an early end: in particular beans and peas. But the good news is I got plenty of seed from them:
That’s beetroot seed, garlic cloves, broad beans, carrot seed, bush beans and mixed snow pea seeds. I need not worry about the seed viability as many of them have self sown with nice crops of beans, broad beans, slenderette beans and carrots on the way. This adds to the wild lots of potatoes, silver beet, lettuce, beetroot and parsley.
The garden is remaining very self productive :)
Tomatoes are in main season now:
as well as the cherry tomatoes:
and Tom Thumb tomatoes:
And what would tomatoes bee without lots of basil :
I’m leaving a lot of the basil to go to seed this year as well. The bees are busy pollinating them at present. (see how many bees you can see in this photo :) )
And there’s cucumbers (almost finished for the year) and lots of sweet corn. I kept the early crop for seed as it was an older open pollinated variety with a rich flavour (like corn use to have) instead of these sweeter hybrids that are common these days. The zucchini as slowing down. The capsicums are just starting… only had three or four so far.
The pumpkins have gone crazy and are not only taking over half the veggie patch they are also climbing the fence and escaped onto the lawn. I grew some heirloom varieties this year along with the queesland blue that sprouted in the compost. I’m not sure what the name of this one is, but despite the strange outer appearance it’s a nice eating pumpkin:
Elsewhere in the orchard it’s the end of the apples and the beginning of the pears. Chestnuts still a month or more away. The apples and pears make lovely desert :)
I was reading yet another VB versus C# rant: I don’t want to get sucked into wading into that, but I will say that anyone who thinks folks that use VB can’t use C# has really got things back the front. Most people who use VB can read and write C# quite well; they choose VB knowing both. Whereas so many C# developers I’ve met have absolutely no idea about VB or concepts such as declarative event handling etc, etc. For them they don’t have the basis of choice.
The reason VB folk have to read and write in C# is because a lot of SDK’s etc are all in C# originally. Even things like the enterprise library provide source code only in C#; this even after Soma promised to do better in regard to that. So for VB folks there is a real need to learn C#.
The big problem though is if you want to use C# source code in your VB project: you often have to re-write it or separate into different assemblies. That’s not productive. What I want is for VB to like C# and vice versa. I don’t mean make them the same, I mean for them to like each other; to get along well inside the same project. I’d like to be able to add a C# class to my VB project and happily compile it. And I bet some C# folk would love to have some concurrent basic or XML literals in their C# projects without all the current barriers.
Maybe the talk of compilers as a service type thing will give us that true cross language project, where VB and C# like each other so much that they then are free to diverge again :)
Back in April 2006, I blogged about a nasty JIT compiler optimisation that would cause String.IsNullOrEmpty to throw a null reference exception; ironic really given that is the very thing you’d use the IsNullOrEmpty method to check against. Well since then, due to popular demand on the connect site, this bug has been fixed in .NET 2.0 SP1 (which implies .NET 3.0 and 3.5)
940900 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940900/ ) FIX: You receive the NullReferenceException exception when you call the String.IsNullOrEmpty function in an application that is built on the .NET Framework 2.0