June 2004 - Posts

• Windows XP Royale theme

  Thought I'd mention this, just because I like the look so much. Somebody snagged the windows theme from media center edition and it's been posted on winbeta.org. It's basically a lickable version of the standard blue/green xp theme. Very nice. Posted Jun 30 2004, 06:39 PM by Andy Smith with 22 comment(s)

• Materials from my usergroup presentation

  It's taken me a while to remember to do this... I gave a presentation on monday to the denver .net user group on developing asp.net server controls and i'm positing the presentation materials on for those that want it. So anyway, grab the powerpoint and code from my presentation if you want it. Posted Jun 30 2004, 06:16 PM by Andy Smith with 1 comment(s) Filed under: asp.net controls

• Visual Web Developer 2005 Won't Install

  You know, I'd love to try out the new Beta1 of Visual Web Developer, but I can't. Setup just yells at me and stops. You see, i had the May CTP installed previously, so I uninstalled it before running the setup. However I get this message from the setup: --------------------------- Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Beta - English Setup --------------------------- Setup has detected that previous versions of the following product(s) are currently installed. Uninstall these applications before continuing with Setup. For more information, see the readme.htm file. This file can be found at the root of the DVD or CD1, on the Web download site for the product, or on a network share, depending on how you install the product. - Visual Studio .NET Prerequisites - English --------------------------- OK --------------------------- There is no entry in the "add/remove programs" control panel with this name. So this dialog is not extremely useful to me. As for the readme.htm file, i have no idea where to look for this hypothetical file. UPDATE Wally helped my fixed this first problem. However, now it just gets farther before it dies. Now I just says that the download of the "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta" component failed. With no reason given. How Useful for me... Posted Jun 29 2004, 05:03 AM by Andy Smith with 11 comment(s)

• MetaBuilders is in bussiness, yay!

  After a whole lot of work, MetaBuilders has MultiViewBar available, my first commercial control. And with that, I felt that the first site redesign was in order. By far, the hardest part of doing this was the business setup stuff. Forms... Accounts... Business Plans... it's a mountain. Anyway, MetaBuilders is now an LLC, and everybody should expect more commercial controls to be availble very soon. The development is so much easier than the business side. :) Posted Jun 21 2004, 05:40 PM by Andy Smith with 2 comment(s) Filed under: asp.net controls

• mp3s, album art, and c#

  So I was messing around with Winamp and this plugin which pops up some toast when the track changes. The latest version will use the windows xp “folder.jpg” feature to show the album art for the track if it can. I thought this was pretty cool, but with so many folders of tracks, it would be way to much work to download the album art for each one. So, a bit of googling later... and I found that somebody had thought this would be a good idea as well. Str8dog wrote MP3 Album Art Downloader in c# using an Amazon.com webservice to download the images. Just drop it in your main tunes folder, run it (command line), and a few seconds later all (YMMV) your folders will have album art. Sweet. Posted Jun 12 2004, 08:12 AM by Andy Smith with 1 comment(s) Filed under: rambling

• The return of Pine

  This is great. Dan Fernandez points to a MSDN article on creating an Outlook addin in c#. Besides the fact that it looked like a good article after scanning it quickly... it’s that you can download the product of the article, which is a clone of the oldskool email client, Pine! Boy, that brings back some bittersweet memories. Posted Jun 08 2004, 04:23 PM by Andy Smith with 4 comment(s)

• Short and Succinct

  This is the best argument against Hungarian notation I’ve ever seen. “prepBut nI vrbLike adjHungarian! qWhat's artThe adjBig nProblem?” Posted Jun 08 2004, 03:29 AM by Andy Smith with 3 comment(s)

• WMP 10

  WARNING: RANT AHEAD So, ya, Windows Media Player 10 is coming out soon. Yawn. Come on Microsoft, add Ogg Vorbis support. The format is completely open. Heck, somebody even already made the directshow filter for ogg. Andy wants tag/media library support. Until then, WMP is fairly useless to so many of us. Guess I’ll use and recommend Winamp instead. Hey, Media Player team, see how that works? Nullsoft doesn’t mind supporting more than the bare minimum of audio formats, and they get my screen space. All the Device Sync and Store Integration features in the world don’t mean anything if the player isn’t running. And also, don’t even start thinking about suggesting I convert my oggs to wma. Transcoding from one lossy format to another just isn’t going to happen. One of the big things a media player should do make it completely IRRELEVANT what format the media is in. Hey, I can understand it if there’s a patent or licensing issue, but completely ignoring an open format for so long... it smells... either crappy political games... or the team just doesn’t care about making the most useful app because theirs already comes with Windows. Either way, the users lose. Posted Jun 03 2004, 03:32 AM by Andy Smith with 3 comment(s) Filed under: rambling