The Daily Parker

Whew. Parker is just fine.

The surgeon said everything went very well. She reported he completely tore his meniscus and his right CCL (the doggy equivalent of a human's ACL), and it looked like the result of an acute injury, not age-related deterioration. This is good news because it means he has a much lower risk of doing this to his left leg than we worried about.

He's recuperating from the operation right now and will remain overnight for observation. He should be home after lunch tomorrow, with a healthy quantity of drugs and probably a really sharp appetite.

Recovery should take 6-8 weeks, though he should be able to go for actual walks within about 2 weeks. But wow, he's not going to like those two weeks.

Stay tuned. Photo tomorrow, I expect.

Day 3 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge brings us to the heart of .NET: the Common Language Runtime (CLR).

Microsoft defines the CLR as the run-time environment which "runs the code and provides services that make the development process easier." That isn't the most helpful definition, so let me try to elaborate.

As I described Sunday and yesterday, the .NET compiler takes your source code from C# or whatever other language you use and compiles it down to one or more managed modules containing intermediate language (IL), which get further compiled into assemblies.

When your program runs, the CLR is the thing running it. It loads your assemblies and then handles all the tasks your program needs to survive, like memory management, thread synchronization, exception handling, security, etc. It actually does this through Just-in-Time compilation (JIT), when it translates the IL into your machine's own language. This means that when an IL instruction is executed for the second time, it runs in native CPU code.

The CLR also manages .NET's common type system (CTS), which "defines how types are declared, used, and managed in the common language runtime," according to Microsoft. Types (my topic for April 23rd) are therefore a part of every .NET program, even (gasp!) Ruby.NET. I'm picking on Ruby because in that language, ever instruction gets interpreted at run time, making it possible to use types that you haven't defined. The CLR and the CTS prevent you from doing that.

To learn a lot more about the CLR, I strongly recommend Jeffrey Richter's CLR via C#, which I mentioned Sunday.

For day 2 of the Blogging A-to-Z challenge, I'm going to talk about the first computer language I learned, which is still alive and kicking in the .NET universe decades after it first appeared on a MS-DOS 1.0 system disk: BASIC.

BASIC stands for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code." The original specification came from John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964. Today it's one of the core .NET languages included with Visual Studio as "VB.NET" (for "Visual BASIC," Microsoft's dialect of BASIC released in 1991).

Yesterday I showed you a "Hello, World" application written in C#. (You can download the source code here.)

Here's the VB.NET version:

Module Program

	Sub Main()
		Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!")
		Console.ReadKey()
	End Sub

End Module

What's different? Well, a lot of things: no braces, no include lines, no semicolon line endings...and that's just for a 2-line program.

But look at what's the same. Because this is a .NET program, the actual guts of it look almost exactly the same. There are two calls to different methods on the Console object, and except for the missing semicolons, they are identical to the calls in C#.

Here's the IL:

.method public static void  Main() cil managed
{
  .entrypoint
  .custom instance void [mscorlib]System.STAThreadAttribute::.ctor() = ( 01 00 00 00 ) 
  // Code size       19 (0x13)
  .maxstack  8
  IL_0000:  nop
  IL_0001:  ldstr      "Hello, World!"
  IL_0006:  call       void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
  IL_000b:  nop
  IL_000c:  call       valuetype [mscorlib]System.ConsoleKeyInfo [mscorlib]System.Console::ReadKey()
  IL_0011:  pop
  IL_0012:  ret
} // end of method Program::Main

Wow. The IL is exactly the same. So both the VB.NET and C# code compile down to functionally identical assemblies.

And that's one of the most important characteristics of .NET: it lets you write code in any language you want (as long as someone has written a compiler for it), and run it on any platform you want (as long as there's a CLR for it).

I worked with Visual BASIC from versions 1 to 6, and then did one project in VB.NET before switching to C# in 2002. You really would need to pay me a lot of money to go back to it. I believe C# is more expressive, more concise, and more able to reflect my intentions than VB.NET.

But there is nothing wrong with VB.NET. If you want to use BASIC, enjoy. With the .NET ecosystem, it's up to you.

The A-to-Z Challenge starts tomorrow, and I'm all set to go with a list of 26 topics on programming with Microsoft .NET.

Now I just need to write the actual posts.

It's interesting to me how vacations don't actually lend themselves to much productivity, even when that's the explicit purpose of the vacation.

Anyway, if I do my job today, the first post will hit at noon UTC tomorrow. If I don't do my job today, it'll hit sometime later than that.

On the one hand, I've been really productive on my staycation, having checked off 38 to-do items including a few that came from my need to get Parker repaired.

On the other hand, I've done none of the reading and writing I set out to do. With the A-to-Z challenge starting in two days, I really need to get on that.

But, you know, it's still a vacation. So why not vacate a bit?

I mentioned yesterday that Parker stopped putting weight on one of his legs after hurting himself running up the stairs Saturday night. Turns out, it's pretty bad.

His primary vet says my aging mutt tore his ACL and meniscus, which will require surgery. He's getting X-rays on Monday to confirm the injury but she has very high confidence in the diagnosis. Surgery is scheduled for Tuesday.

He doesn't seem to be in any pain when he's lying down (which, as an old dog, he does 20 hours a day). Walking up and down stairs is not possible, however. (Did I mention he weighs 30 kg?) And he has some discomfort in his usual sitting posture. I've got him on pain meds and a joint supplement, but he's not going to be a happy dog for the next couple of months. No day care, no long walks, and definitely no running, probably until the end of May.

Poor doggie.

I mentioned physical items on my desk that needed sorting. My tasting notes from Whiskyfest comprise some of them.

I'm not going to go into details about the whiskies I tasted; here, instead, is a summary table:

It's important to note that while I tasted all of these whiskies, but I did not drink all of these whiskies. I went with a friend, and we shared tastes; the pours were generally very small; and we went to seminars for three distilleries, spreading those tastings out over 45 minutes each. The whole event lasted four hours.

Also, Whiskyfest provides a metric shit ton (a shite tonne) of food. Good food. Heavy, fatty food.

But now you have more context for why I did nothing of commercial or professional value over the weekend.

And yeah, as much as I want to buy some of these, I'm not likely to shell out the $1,000 for the Laphroaig 27 next time I'm at Binny's.

Man, I've needed this for a while.

It's 11:15 on a Monday, after doing nothing of commercial or professional value for an entire weekend, and I'm finally at Inbox Zero for the first time in months.

My to-do list currently has 30 items (plus 6 already finished) ranging in complexity or duration from "set up coffee with so-and-so" to "45,000 steps." Inbox Zero was not on the main list, but my inbox is itself a to-do list, so that counts too. In a few minutes I'll have finished with the physical items on my desk that need sorting, and then...breathe in.

Meanwhile, Parker is still not putting weight on one of his legs. We'll be stopping by the vet this afternoon. His giardia has cleared up (I think; I haven't looked that closely), and despite whatever is wrong with his leg, he's happy to walk on the three that still work properly.

Also, just a little blog housekeeping: the A-to-Z Challenge starts Sunday, so over the next week I might have fewer general posts so I can get a head start on the longer posts for April.

My #2 alma mater Loyola University Chicago's men's basketball team has done something for the first time in my life:

This marks the first time since 1963’s NCAA championship team that Loyola has remained alive this deep into the season. Wearing their championship rings, Jerry Harkness and several of his teammates sat in the front row at Philips Arena to cheer for the 2018 team.

The program hadn’t been to the NCAA tournament since 1985’s Sweet 16 squad. Now, the Ramblers will face Kansas State, a 61-58 victor over Kentucky, on Saturday in the NCAA South regional final.

Meanwhile, my #3 alma mater, Duke, plays Syracuse tonight.

Crain's reported yesterday on the latest business-school rankings from US News and World Report. University of Chicago tied with Harvard at the top spot and Northwestern landed at #6:

The magazine labels its ranking a year in advance, so this is the 2019 list. While it started the rankings in 1990, it has historical data reaching back only to 1994, but it was confident this was the first No. 1 showing for Booth.

“The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business tied for No. 1 this year due to its strong placement data, meaning it had the highest percentage of employed students at graduation and, among the very top ranked schools, the highest percentage of graduates employed three months after graduation,” Robert Morse, the magazine’s chief data strategist, said in a statement. “The mean starting salary and bonus of Booth graduates was one of the highest among top schools.”

Duke dropped to #11 in the full-time rankings, but stayed at #5 in the Executive MBA list.

I expect they care more about this in Durham than I do here in Chicago.