Andy Smith's Blog

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April 2003 - Posts

vstudio and clutter

datagridgirl brought something up that really used to bug me too...

Dislikes:

  • All the boxes of "stuff" around my code.  I did VB 5 and 6 for about 5 years, so I'm used to the IDE, but TextPad has spoiled me into wanting my coding area maximized.  Particularly since I write more than half of my code on a small laptop screen, I want/need this space.

http://dotnetweblogs.com/DatagridGirl/posts/5824.aspx

And then I found the magic of Shift+Alt+Enter
For those of you too lazy to find out what it is... it toggles "Fullscreen" mode.

Posted: Apr 18 2003, 10:11 AM by Andy Smith | with 1 comment(s)
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my clippy story

Check out: http://www16.brinkster.com/rachelreese/merlin.aspx 
By the way, I know some of you folks played around with this a little... any stories?
[Rachel Reese]

I once made an addin for an IRC client where I used an Agent to read the incoming chat text for me. It was kinda neat, as I could just be sitting at my desk, and if i needed to get up and do something but didn't want to miss the conversation, i just hit a key, and the chat was read to me until I got back.

I don't use that irc client anymore, and haven't bothered to make one for my current client, but it was fun while it lasted. Used it quite frequently, actually.

Posted: Apr 10 2003, 03:50 PM by Andy Smith | with 1 comment(s)
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ya, metabuilders is down

I just installed windows 2k3 from scratch on the machine that runs metabuilders, which hadn't had a completely fresh windows install since windows 2k pro when i moved from nt4.

The install itself went fine, but I couldn't find my cd for sql server... so metabuilders will be down until i either find that cd or I un-database the site temporarily.

At any rate, I don't expect more than a day of downtime.

why do people hate third-party code

Quite often when I post to forums, newsgroups, or lists, I am posting a link to one of the custom  controls or components on my site. And usually, the person uses the control and moves on with their app.

But every once in a while, i see somebody say something like, "I don't want to use a dll", or "can't I do this with my own code?". Now, I don't really mind if somebody doesn't want to use my stuff... it's not like metabuilders puts food on my table... but I really just Don't Get It.©

Why do some people favor adding dozens of lines of complex code to their pages, multiple times, when there is a tested solution, pre compiled, with source code, available for free? Whenever I see that comment left by somebody, regardless of if it was after a link to mine or somebody else's code... I can't help but feel like the "code reuse" lightbulb shines rather dim for them.

propertygrid, the hidden jewel

Steve Sharrock recently found the wonder that is the property grid, and I thought that those who haven't read this article on codeproject yet... should. It's got an example of using a PropertyBag class to specify the items in the property grid, which gets around the "surrogate class" and "ugly property names" issues of using the property grid in an end-user interface.
I haven't actually used the article's code yet, but it seems well thought-out and useful.

a change to c# that I wasn't aware of

Now that msdn has an rss feed i was just kinda looking at it and I saw a chat transcript on c# that I hadn't noticed before.

The only bit that I hadn't heard before is this little snippet.

Host: Anders (Microsoft)
Q: Will separate access specifiers for getting and setting properties become a part of the language?

A: Regarding different accessibility of get and set assessors of a property, yes, we will support that in the Whidbey release of C#.

I have no idea how they are going to do this without drasticly changing how properties are written, but hey, it sounds good to me.

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