January 2005 - Posts
Honestly, every day is
ReSharper Appreciation Day, but I appreciate it most when I can't use it. I feel physically ill. I'm not kidding. I can't think of a single product that's ever made me so productive[1]. Trying to get anything done without it is like running backward through mud with my hands tied behind my back while balancing a school bus on my nose. Awful.
I get giddy like a schoolgirl with a new dolly when I get to share the my joy with someone that hasn't used it yet. Even people that usually have the "just give me VS and leave me alone" attitude (including me) love it. It's so many things to so many people. It's
everything to me.
ReSharper is so great that the Delfonics wrote a record for it. Dy-no-mite!
[1] I do mean
product, not technology. .NET still holds the extra-special place in my heart
I don't recall ever seeing anything like this before. A resizable dialog that can only be resized by grabbing the lower-right corner. Isn't that how Macs work? What's up with that?
Look at the image below and pinch yourself. It's real!
I still use VSS at home and was
shocked when I got a similar dialog when moving a file from one project to another. I crossed my fingers, tried a rename and waddayaknow.
BAM! It worked. The rename thing is one of (the many) reasons people choose other source control systems. Happy day!
So much has been released about everything .NET 2.0 in the past year and a half that stumbling upon something new is the exception, not the rule. Such was the case for a me and some new ListView features, both available only to XP and 2003: Grouping and Tiles. If you've ever used Windows Explorer you probably know what these are, but I'm going to include a screen shot anyway because it's more fun to see them in action in a .NET app. Easy!
More and more of your life is probably being distilled into 1s and 0s and placed onto the fragile platters inside your computer. Cheap, writable optical drives are far too common to let fear get you down. Do something about it, man!
I recently bought a couple
Sony Dual-Layer DVD writers for the office. That's 8.5GB on a single shiny disc, my friend. If you haven't checked out hardware prices in a while you're probably thinking "Wow, that's some pretty amazing technology. They must sell for several hundred thousand dollars, right?"
WRONG!
These things are $61. ExtremeTech has a
new article about dual-layer DVD burners you may want to check out. Interestingly, the drive technology is more advanced than the media; DL discs are hard to come by, as are 8x DVD+R.
It's also worth noting that
Picasa 2 is out, which is much improved and includes DVD-writing backup functionality. This is especially attractive because it does differential backups.
I haven't done anything particularly interesting with
anonymous methods yet, but the simple fact that they reduce clutter in Windows Forms makes me one happy camper. Consider the following bit of code, something which you've probably seen a thousand times:
And now, the same thing (effectively) using an anonymous method:
You can define all of your event handlers inline in a single method, if you choose, and forward any calls to appropriately named methods.
Does anyone have a favorite book, paper, blogger, whatever on these topics? We have experience writing these things at the application level and that's what most literature focuses on. We've going at it for a while but would like a fresh perspective that really focuses on things at a more granular level.
Thanks!
I spend a lot of time in the MSDN docs, and something that's always frustrated me is that you/re always returned to the top of a page when you press the back arrow.
No more! This is great news.
Seems like that VS 2005 Standard November CTP gets in a funky state once a day and refuses to load. Immediately after launching I get the error below.
To fix this, launch the VS Command Line and run "devenv /resetsettings".
If you or a loved one sent me email on or after Jan 11, you'll want to do it again.
My
superfast Raptor decided to bite the bust ~1,189,920 hours before I expected it to. I've always been religious about daily backups, but was slightly bitten by this one: I'd just installed XP on a new superfast AMD64 and, you guessed it, forgot to set up the daily backup. Woke up to check my email a few days ago and heard the click of death. My most recent backup was from Jan 11, so I'm stuck there for a while until everything gets back up to speed.
Thank you.
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