July 2004 - Posts
This is the second day in a row where I have to delete a massive amount of comments full with just URLs to obscure sex sites and other crap 
, so enough is enough: for now comments are disabled. Personally I don't like this situation of not offering the ability for the reader to leave a comment, but at the moment there is no other option.
Until .text is updated with a better system for comments (i.e.: not being anonymous), I'll leave comments off. Sorry for that.
Doom III is done! It was confirmed by Todd H. of Id Software earlier today! 
. In stores around August 6th (Europe). Now, let's find myself a decent Ati Radeon 9800 Pro 
A couple of days ago I blogged about VS.NET lacking a multi-line search/replace feature. I filed it as a suggestion in the MSDN feedback center. And I did receive a response:
Resolved as Won't Fix by Microsoft on 7/12/2004 at 11:31 PM
We LOVE this suggestion. I remember the alpha chat that we had almost a year ago and remember you making the suggestion and loved it back then. As you've noticed, we have made huge progress on the Find UI since this alpha release. Unfortunately, this work didn't allow us enough time to add this suggestion. It ranks highly on our list of requests for the next version of VS and we hope to get it to you then. We're also planning a chat in the near future and hope that you can make it. Stay tuned to our team blog for details.
Thanks,
Sean Laberee
http://blogs.msdn.com/vseditor
Now, what disapoints me the most is that a year ago, they already knew this was a great feature to add, that a lot of the editors available have such a feature and it really helps development and that today VS.NET 2005 is almost a year away plus that it seems that two years apparently aren't enough to add a feature to search/replace multiple lines of text. It might be a little more complex than editorContents.Replace(from, to); but how hard can it possibly be?
A year ago I joined the Whidbey Alpha program because I thought it would give me some, maybe even a little, influence on the future version of VS.NET. Apparently not. What's the use of joining these kind of programs then? The thrill of being able to peek into the kitchen where Chef Microsoft bakes 'the next version' ? Why bother? Why invest time testing versions, supplying suggestions while all you are really able to do is looking? If you want feedback Microsoft, do something with it or tell the community to not provide feedback at all.
"We LOVE this suggestion.". So do we, Sean, for a heck of a long time already. However why on earth should we even bother with spending time on giving you suggestions? It is not as if I was late at the party giving you the suggestion, so it wasn't possible to add the feature. The whole search dialog was in development at that time, nothing was finalized.
"It ranks highly on our list of requests for the next version of VS and we hope to get it to you then.". Sean, perhaps you don't realize this, but for us, outside MS, the next version is VS.NET 2005, not VS.NET 2007
You know what I'd really love to see, Sean? Some honesty. I'd have loved the honesty from you and your team back then and now why you couldn't add a multi-line replace routine in a full year and one year before shipment. Saying that you love the feature, you already did a year ago and still have it high on your list is a little hard to match with the cold reality of having a tool without a multi-line search routine. Was the feature scrapped because of the fact that it might not be that useful? It's high on lists at the moment, so I don't think that's the reason.
(paragraph removed)
It might be me who thought it would be added, considering your reactions back then. Perhaps that's my perception of the matter, I don't know. It's just very frustrating, looking back at the whole process from participating in the alpha group and now the end result. But perhaps it's me and were my expectations simply irrealistic, however I don't think they are, not now, not back then.
But I give up for now. I hope others have more luck with their suggestions and bugreports, or should I rephrase that to "I hope others have any luck with their suggestions and bugreports"... it seems so.
I filed it here, so you can vote on it 
. Early in the whidbey alpha program proposed screenshots were posted of the new search/replace dialogs. I then mentioned it would be great (because I ran into this limitation a couple of times) if the find/replace dialog would accept multi-line search and replace strings, so you could search for 2 lines for example and / or replace with a multi-line string. A lot of people in the whidbey alpha group agreed.
To my surprise however, I saw in the VC# Express product that the find/replace dialog is single line only. There is no way to search for multi-line strings or replace something with a multi-line string. Perhaps this is a limitation of the Express product line, as I don't have the latest whidbey full installed so I can't test it there. If it is, forgive me, if it isn't (so whidbey full version has this same limitation), please make the search/replace dialog accept multi-line strings. A lot of the editors out there can do this already, as it is very handy to have .
(note: I know with regular expressions it is possible, but I don't see how converting a search string and replace string into a regexp is 'productive', while a multi-line search/replace box is (like Homesite already has for years for example)
I filed a suggestion last week about the fact that a lot of the VS.NET 2005 dialogs are fixed size and often (read: always) too small to show all the content they contain and that these dialogs should be made resizable.
Here's the response I got:
Thanks for the suggestion. This is a know limitation of our current architecture, and one of the first things I want to tackle in the next version.
I'm not sure, but VS.NET 2005 is a year away from release, and I can't be the first who has reported the burden of the size of a lot of dialogs (and the lack of a resizing feature). I know that making resizing code working in VC++ is a bit of a pain sometimes, but it now seems that it is the user's problem that the dialogs are too small and the user has to click and scroll and click and scroll etc... Why is it so hard for a company with 56,000 employees to create some resizing logic in the VS.NET 2005 architecture?
There are a couple of dialogs which are resizable, but often dialogs are not. I find it disturbing that a company which has strong guidelines about how to design an application, how user interfaces should be constructed, creates a next version of its major development tool where a lot of the dialogs are simply not resizable. Please, walk through the formatting settings for C# in the options dialog (or other settings in the options dialog). Isn't it nice, that you have scrollbars all over the place so you can scroll the content in that tiny window on your 1600x1200 screen?
I filed another suggestion for dialog resizing: the SqlExpress dialogs are often so incredibly tiny, show half the content of a fixed set of properties and force the user to scroll up and down in that tiny dialog which is of course not resizable also. It's still under review, but I have a feeling the architecture limitation will also be the cause of those dialogs not being resizable.
Sorry, but for me this is a serious issue. In VS.NET 2003 I already found the dialogs horrible and the lack of a resizing feature disturbing, but what can you do?. For VS.NET 2005 I expected this to be fixed, after all, it's a product for 2005. Apparently that was too good to be true...
I've made some screenshots of the options dialog I'm talking about, which show the limitations of the current design. Keep in mind that the VC# team did made their dialogs resizable, it's the other dialogs which are not resizable.
sshot1
sshot2
sshot3
Time flies!
Tech-ed 2004 is my first Tech-ed / Microsoft conference ever, I didn't know what to expect
however it turned out to be really cool. It's Thursday evening now, just before the party starts.
Yesterday I hosted the O/R mapper BoF session and it went really well. At first I had to warm
the audience up a little, most people were waiting for others to answer the questions. What
surprised me was that so little people had actually worked with an O/R mapper, about 15% or so
of the audience of roughly 50-60 people. The number one issue most people seemed to have was
what are the advantages of an O/R mapper over the dataset approach. Related to that was the
discussion about which situations are best for an O/R mapper and which situations are probably
better handled with a more set based approach. The session progressed really well after the
slow start (which I filled with a short lecture about O/R mapping in general) and it turned
out there wasn't enough time to handle all the questions people had. A session worth repeating!
Currently I'm typing this on my laptop in one of the wireless work areas on Tech-ed, and it's
also my first experience with wireless networking, which was kind of a struggle at first, due
to me not having configurated my VPN settings correctly, ah well ;)
The network is very good, a little slow sometimes, but that's fine. At least there aren't any
situations like we had in the old days on demoparties where your computer suddenly switched
off because some person pulled the power plug out of the socket, forgetting that his
powersocket block was powering a whole set of computers next to him. :).
The sessions are nice and there is a truckload of different material to choose from. They
graded the sessions with numbers so you can see if a session is at the level you expect it
to be (so you don't end up in a session where they try to explain what an object is when you
expect some lowlevel CLR hacking info and vice versa). Not always are these levels matching the
real session level but that's ok. Overall there is always something to learn.
In the MVP lounge I met Thomas Tomiczek of EntityBroker and we had some nice discussions about
O/R mapping, C# and .NET. It was great to meet him. I also ran into Lorenzo Barbieri, a fellow
weblogs.asp.net blogger, great to see the faces behind the names you see and discuss with
every day :)
Ok, I'm a little exhausted now so I'll end this little Tech-ed impression by showing a picture
of the main hall where we have our lunch. :)
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