Jeff Key

It works on my machine

My Job

My stuff

Old stuff

Useful Stuff

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TrackBack said:

Scott Hanselman's Weblog : Scott Hanselman's Weblog
# February 24, 2003 11:57 PM

Royo said:

I'd love to some of the code for that... interested in how this was done..
# February 25, 2003 1:44 AM

Jeff said:

I wrote up a very simple sample..here's the link:

http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/misc/propertyinfosample.zip

-jk
# February 25, 2003 1:44 PM

TrackBack said:

GAC Mapping : Robert McLaws' Blog
# February 25, 2003 11:28 PM

Robert McLaws said:

Frickin cool man. This is really handy :).
# February 25, 2003 11:58 PM

Jeff said:

I'm glad someone else found it useful -- especially so quickly!
# February 26, 2003 1:31 AM

TrackBack said:

.NET RSS Aggregators : Dustin Mihalik's Blog
# March 2, 2003 7:33 PM

David Peckham said:

Jeff,

I wrote Wildgrape NewsDesk for .NET. NewsDesk satisfies all of Dare's functional requirements.

Do you have different requirements, or perhaps you aren't happy with the way NewsDesk and other aggregators work?

I appreciate any feedback,

Dave
# March 4, 2003 12:18 PM

Jeff said:

Hi Dave-

The few that I've looked at just haven't felt right to me. They've been capable, just not a pleasure to use.

I hadn't heard of yours before. I'll give it a go when I get home tonight and let you know how it goes. Looks good!

-jk
# March 4, 2003 1:28 PM

Dejan Jelovic said:

Looks useful. Please post the project.
# March 5, 2003 6:21 AM

David Peckham said:

Well? :)
# March 5, 2003 4:00 PM

Ben Richardson said:

Yeah, I'd like to have a look at that.
# March 23, 2003 7:09 PM

Ramesh said:

Looks great... I would definitely have a look at this. pls. post as soon as you can
# April 11, 2003 7:14 AM

Nox said:

Any TIP...

This forum is presented to those interested in discussing the creation of an Anti-Spam plugin for various e-mail clients, including Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Communicator, and others.

URL:
http://4peakstech.com/antispam/index.php
# May 3, 2003 8:12 AM

Ben Richardson said:

Hey Jeff, what do you use to make your icons? They look great, in fact, all your UI work looks very slick.
# May 21, 2003 3:17 AM

Jeff said:

Thanks, Ben :) I usually just search for public domain Mac OSX icons..
# May 21, 2003 8:32 PM

William Rohrbach said:

The Enterprise Solution Patterns URL should be http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3C81C38E-ABFC-484F-A076-CF99B3485754
# June 3, 2003 4:21 PM

anonymous said:

A completed list of all guides/articles from patterns & practices group: http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/type/CompleteList/default.asp
# June 3, 2003 6:36 PM

TrackBack said:

Robert McLaws
# June 3, 2003 8:52 PM

Andrew Roberts said:

I have had the problem with programs blowing away your Visual Studio instalation. In my case I fixed it by re-registering mscoree.dll with regsvr32.

Hope this helps.


Andrew Roberts
# June 4, 2003 3:21 PM

JimS said:

check out the Aqua Data Studio here:

www.aquafold.com

# June 10, 2003 1:41 PM

Jesse said:

[quote]Of course this will be of no use to anyone doing commercial development on .NET[/quote]

Why should it not be possible to use for a commercial product? Just include the J# redist and this addon with the installer and no one will ever know you installed it. You currently ahve to supply the .net framework too as you can't expect for people to have it installed.

It all compiles to IL, so speed should not be an issue :)
# June 23, 2003 5:06 AM

Jeff said:

Sorry, I should've qualified that statement: It's not supported and very likely will never be. I can't imagine anyone taking the risk of shipping commercial software on an unsupported framework (MSFT's Swing in this case).
# June 23, 2003 10:53 AM

Dave Burke said:

Jeff, I really like your .net stuff index page at silver.com. I definitely want to go back there and spend more time. Thanks!
# June 28, 2003 8:01 PM

Chris Pirillo said:

Dude, that is AWESOME!
# June 28, 2003 11:06 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, guys. Gotta love how you can whip up just about anything these days w/.NET in < 30 mins. Joy!
# June 30, 2003 12:23 AM

Ron Green said:

It is not neccessary to "massage" the OPML any longer. The current beta, 1a, will handle the OPML with or without the head tag.
# June 30, 2003 1:23 AM

Jeff Key said:

Good to know. Thanks, Ron.
# June 30, 2003 1:28 AM

Darshan Singh said:

I've been working on a RSS Feed reader using C# .NET. The project RSSConnect with complete source code is available at http://www.PerfectXML.com/RSSConnect. Some of the unique/salient features include ability to export to database and search (phase 1, improvements coming in next release), XSLT skins, check for new feeds, check for RSSConnect application update, Favorites list, OPML import/export, and many other options.

Be sure to check it out: http://www.PerfectXML.com/RSSConnect .

Any comments/suggestions: Please email me at darshan@PerfectXML.com. Thanks.
# June 30, 2003 4:06 AM

Derek said:

Jesse, the library FAQ specifically states that "the Supplemental UI Library is available for academic and other non-professional use only". Therefore I would imagine that there would be licensing issues involved in using it for commercial purposes.
# July 2, 2003 8:47 AM

Addy Santo said:

Have you found any profilers which support cross-domain profiling? The only one I know of is DevPartners, which I don't get along with that well.

# July 2, 2003 9:59 PM

Jeff Key said:

Unfortunately not, as I'm in the same boat as you.
# July 2, 2003 10:03 PM

Roy Osherove said:

I wrote an article about dynamic plugin loading using this technique:
http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/story/8048.aspx

You might also be interested in my .Net debugging resources page:
http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/story/7573.aspx
# July 3, 2003 5:52 AM

SBC said:

Jeff - thanks for the reference.
# July 5, 2003 11:00 AM

sak said:

this is one of excellent knowledge base site.
thanks for this contributuion
# July 11, 2003 5:32 AM

Ron Green said:

A folder name cannot start with a ".".
# July 12, 2003 5:46 PM

sirshannon said:

exactly, that's what the error message should say.
# July 12, 2003 6:34 PM

Dominic Hopton said:

The IE status bar issue isn't quite what you think it is - it's not randomly forgetting it.

Firstly, Under 9x & NT4(With active desktop), IE would by default run InProc with explorer.exe. This mean't that it would save settings only properly when you exited explorer.exe. You could change this by setting an option in tools/Internet Options.

Under 2000, this was the other way by default, and all seemed to be happy unless the last window you closed was a pop-up, which had hidden the status bar - which mean't it got set to off.

Under XP, that problem almost went away - normal ad popops don't screw anything up. But, some pop ups (found on certain forums) do screw it up still. Also, XP has a horrid problem off occsionally (dependant on where the link comes from) from starting IE inproc (back to the 98 problem). Additionally, because of this inprocness, the mix between the status bar showing in IE, and showing in Explorer is linked because of some quatum tunnel.

Needless to say, I understand (from observation) what is going on - I dont lose my status bar - Ever.
# July 13, 2003 8:17 AM

Dominic Hopton said:

Filenames: Filenames & directories CAN start with a . - just create them from a command prompt. It's mearly an explorer "feature" that you can't. I do agree, it's a bit retarded :)
# July 13, 2003 8:19 AM

Jeff Key said:

Dominic: I still consider it a bug; it's a user setting. If I don't turn it off, it shouldn't be saved as such. (Although your status bar history was very informative.)

Ah yes, the command line. It seems like I rarely need to go there for file operations these days. Didn't even think about that. Bravo!
# July 13, 2003 11:09 AM

TrackBack said:

Darrell Norton's Blog
# July 13, 2003 11:31 AM

Richard Tallent said:

Great minds think alike ;), something in the ether made me post last night about another defect/annoyance in My Network Places...

http://www.tallent.us/weblogx/permalink.aspx/ed9bec07-3ca3-4a00-8865-190a570a9b03
# July 13, 2003 1:37 PM

Jerry Dennany said:

Actually, this is a common problem at most retailers. There was recently a radio article here in Atlanta where the investigative journalists went to different major retailers (Target, CVS, etc) and purchased a set list of items. Over half the time they were overcharged on at least one item. At CVS, they were overcharged each and every time they shopped there.
I believe it is more a problem of keeping sales and inventory systems up to date than anything intentional.
# July 13, 2003 3:28 PM

Phil Scott said:

We had two network adapters here at work with the same MACs. They were some pretty generic (i.e. 8 bucks a pop) network cards.

Shut down the whole network somehow. Took a week to figure out. You just don't think "hmmmm, what if two nics have the same MAC address?"
# July 13, 2003 5:17 PM

Phil Scott said:

I worked at Target and I can say that they are pretty concerned about getting the pricing correct. The main thing Target has going for it is image, and price fixing ruins their image. Plus, each department seemingly was moved around weekly, and when that happens new price stickers got put out. Price stickers come from the same computer as what rings up front.

The worst time to shop is on sundays. That's when the ads roll over. So, on saturday night you could very well have a 17 year old kid working chemicals after the store closed flipping all the ads (taking down last weeks, putting up the new ones). That usually gets weeded out by 10am though.

Besides that, I'd say 99.9% of the time someone complaining at our store was trying to rip us off. It was a pain in the ass. People moving clearence stickers was a big problem. We even had some people that would move entire product displays onto a different shelf to make it look like the whole product was mispriced (very sneaky and would work if we didn't have security people).

God I loved working at target :)
# July 13, 2003 5:27 PM

Baby? Bathwater? said:

Of course by reusing only the concept and not the code, you're going to throw out all the little extras that the old codebase had to deal with along the way... gotchas, unknown requirements, bug fixes, etc, etc...
# July 13, 2003 6:23 PM

Jeff Key said:

Good point; however, I've found that the time it takes for someone to sculpt the code into its new context could've been used to write it from scratch. Naturally, this depends on the amount of code. Bug fixes, requirements and the like from the old code may or may not pertain to the code's new home. I've seen this happen too many times. People patch together code from different projects and spend weeks trying to get it to work together because there are so many implementation-specific bits floating around. Of course, YMMV.
# July 13, 2003 6:32 PM

Tim Marman said:

You'd be surprised how often people don't reuse code the way it should be done (ie a class library) and instead copy and paste.

It may save you some up-front development costs, but it sure as hell doesn't help maintenance costs and maintainability in general. In fact, it might even be worse if you have to keep the copy-and-pasted code in sync across different applications.
# July 13, 2003 8:51 PM

Jerry Dennany said:

The IEEE is the governing body for MAC address assignment, just as IANA governs the IP address space. The problem is that some hardware vendors are too cheap (or dumb) to follow the IEEE standard. (I once worked for a vendor that falls into the latter category).
# July 13, 2003 8:53 PM

Jason said:

Nice theory, but I work in the real world. Writing from scratch would be wonderful, but I have clients that pay me to deliver solutions, not continually improve with each and every line of code I right. We make the effort when we can, of course, but sometimes compromises have to be made.

As for general purpose assemblies, my experience is that it's sometimes much more efficient to just copy and paste instead of building "flea market" assemblies containing a raft of often unrelated routines. Again, there are exceptions and when you've got a large number of related routines it of course makes sense to package them up, but code reuse through libraries still has a place as well (esp. when you're talking about javascript or D/HTML snippets). Additionally, I'd suggest you consider that often routines need to be tweaked to fit the situation, and often it's more economical (and easier to maintain) to go to your code library as a starting point instead of generalizing or extending (and regression testing) your assembly routine.
# July 14, 2003 9:33 AM

Jason said:

"right" in my previous post should, of course, be "write". Dammit, it's early here and I destroyed the credibility of a reasonably decent pseudo-rant :(
# July 14, 2003 9:35 AM

John Cavnar-Johnson said:

Dude, It's the major league all-star game. You know, baseball. It's being played in Chicago tonight.
# July 15, 2003 10:01 PM

Jeff Key said:

Ok, so I am working too much. You're right. I'm a hockey guy, and a Wings fan at that. (It's OK since I grew up playing in Michigan.) I liked playing baseball back in the day but am a typical Cubs fan: The only games I watch are at Wrigley.
# July 15, 2003 10:05 PM

Aemca said:

Maybe you should read what Joel has to say about this sort of thing:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com
# July 17, 2003 10:12 AM

clue said:

"Hold down the shift key in the shutdown dialog to change "Stand By" to "Hibernate". "

This is my favourite. Which genius in the UI department at MS thought that this was more intuitive than providing 4 buttons in the shutdown dialog?
# August 2, 2003 6:22 AM

Observer said:

>>I've never completely understood how MSFT benefits from the platform-independent aspect of .NET.<<

Well, at least "more .NET (on Unix/Linux)" is almost equal to "less Java (on Unix/Linux)".
# August 6, 2003 12:33 AM

Fabrice said:

>>I've never completely understood how MSFT benefits from the platform-independent aspect of .NET.<<

To keep Office (and Media Player and...) running on other platforms (such as Mac), and at the same time keep these tools evolving and making benefit of .NET in the future, support for .NET is required on these platforms.

Marketing is even a greater reason: "look people, no lock-in wih .NET".
# August 6, 2003 6:20 AM

Jeff Key said:

Office I could see, but lower-leve stuff like Media Player definitely wouldn't work in this scenario unless there was a multimedia abstraction, and that certainly isn't done yet on any other platforms (AFAIK).

Your Office comment did spark something in my brain. I would be to MSFT's advantage if they could write a purely managed Office that would run on .NET implementations built by others. Interesting concept if they could ever get the WinForms API to work on other platforms; however, from what I've read, this won't happen anytime soon.
# August 6, 2003 11:46 AM

Fabrice said:

I agree with your remarks on Media Player and WinForms.
All this is just assumption, and we are far from seing anything like this soon I guess. But who knows when...
# August 6, 2003 7:14 PM

Michelle said:

Well, my problem is that every 5 times I run my app, one of them my icons doens´t show up at all, ANY icon, in my treevie, toolbar and even property grid.
I dont want to use a manifest cause I would have to do it every time I compile it.
:S
# August 7, 2003 10:21 AM

Jeff Key said:

So that happens _every_ five times? Haven't heard of that one. Ouch. If you can find a way to add a manifest to the bits via the command line, you could create a post-build event to do it.
# August 7, 2003 10:31 AM

HumanCompiler said:

I have a Tablet and love it. Now...could I live without it? Yes...and I think there-in lies the problem...once it gets to the point where people can't live without it (assuming that happens), then you'll see them EVERYWHERE, IMO.
# August 7, 2003 11:55 PM

Mads Nissen said:

Haha! You're right! the only one I've ever seen was in the hands of Microsoft Architect Steve Schwartz at the Architects Tour. I could never used it either, and my palm (even with a keyboard) is extreeemely dusty:)
# August 8, 2003 4:00 AM

Michelle said:

hehe sorry, language problems here.
I was trying to say that this happens a lot, at least _one_ time every five times I run it.
I mean, its very frequent.

And I'm almost giving up EnableVisualStyles. *sigh*
# August 8, 2003 8:15 AM

Rachel Reese said:

I've seen Marcie use hers... does that count? A friend of mine is looking at getting one. He's not a gadget geek like me (he's still on single-finger typing), but wants something easier to cart around than a laptop, where he can quickly write down notes to himself.
# August 8, 2003 12:44 PM

Michelle said:

So I gave up using EnableVisualStyles, and I no longer need to add the manifest after every time I compile cause now I puted the correct name on the manifest. Duh.
:)
# August 12, 2003 8:00 AM

Alex Hoffman said:

Fantastic!
# August 16, 2003 10:04 AM

David Stone said:

Hey that's cool. I hadn't thought about using it like that before. Nice! :)
# August 19, 2003 12:56 PM

Jamie Cansdale said:

I also like the way you can outline an entire assembly. This is a great way to see a summary of the API you're exposing to the world...
# August 19, 2003 1:58 PM

Stephane Rodriguez said:

WinCV.exe does this too. (Wincv.exe is part of the .NET SDK).
But then of course, if a single tool like Ref does this and many other things, I don't see any real objection to favor it.

# August 19, 2003 2:01 PM

Sheldon said:

I get "the application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click on OK to terminate the application." on two different win xp machines.

Any suggestions?

lennoxs_at_lcoinc.com
# August 21, 2003 1:24 AM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

OK, so I'm trying to figure out how you managed to get an hour and a half of video onto a CD-R, when TMPGEnc claims that using VCD, only 70 minutes of video will fit onto a standard CD-R.

Did you modify some of the settings to reduce the amount of data being encoded?
# August 24, 2003 12:02 AM

Jeff Key said:

Oops, should've mentioned that. On the third wizard page in TMPG there is a checkbox labelled "Source Range". Check the box and a new dialog comes up where you can set the range to convert. For the latest .NET Show, which was 1.5 hours, I selected a range of an hour for the first, which happily fit on a CD. The last page in the wizard lets you create another project in which you can have it convert the secon half hour. Once you've done that it'll convert it into the two clips you've specified.
# August 24, 2003 12:06 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 24, 2003 4:27 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Still using the Natural Keyboard pro...it has survived numerous spillages including Battery Acid (don't ask!). Have to agree it is an awesome keyboard - not to everyone's taste, one-fingered typists have a problem with it... You can still find these keyboards on Ebay they're only about $10 there - so buy a couple would be my advice! I use the Wireless Optical Desktop Pro version at work - it is still pretty good, takes about 10 miniutes to get used to the new keyboard layout - try one, you may like it!
# August 24, 2003 6:35 PM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

It figures...I made the effort to get all the software working (the VCDEasy reminded me of why I don't use *nix software, in that it knew what kind of CD burner I had, and knew what driver was necessary for that burner, but required me to manually figure that information out from their web site, and make the setting myself...but I digress), and get a VCD of an episode of the .NET show burned to a CD-R. Great, right? Except for one thing...the XBOX (my DVD player) doesn't play VCDs. Isn't that special?

It was a neat idea, I guess.
# August 24, 2003 8:49 PM

Jeff Key said:

For what it's worth, I have a no-name CD-RW and a Sony DVD player (Sony, of course, is notorious for not supporting much of anything outside of their own standards) and I had zero problems. YMMV.
# August 24, 2003 9:08 PM

Robert A. Wlodarczyk said:

I hear ya... I have had this happen to me before. I now have at home a Natural Keyboard Pro. with all the keys in the right spot, however at work I have one of the new ones. I keep hitting the stupid delete key when i go for the Home or End keys. VERY Annoying. The other thing I hate is the F-Lock. This is annoying. I like Alt-F4. I don't need a single key to close the window (Now the F5 key when not in F-Lock). The other time this had happened to me was back when the second Natural Keyboards came out... the arrow keys were all screwed up. That threw things off for me alot.

Anyway, enough complaining on my part. I'm sure that I'll get used to the new keyboard soon. Maybe indeed it *is* more productive once you're used to it. I'll just have to see for myself...
# August 25, 2003 1:23 AM

Damit said:

I can still say that I've been using my Natural Keyboard (can't remember what model) since 1998. =)
# August 25, 2003 4:32 AM

Nicko said:

Having one of the new MS keyboards (natural multimedia grey) I can say that the F-lock issue is a pain in the ass.

However help is at hand:
http://www.mvps.org/jtsang/flock.html

This has a registry hack that remaps all the 'useful' non F-lock keys back to have their F-lock meanings. Now my F keys are F keys regardless of the F-lock setting!!!

Invaluable.

The new Insert/Home/End block is hard to get used to. I actually prefer not having the Insert key, because I never used it for anything. Moving the End key confused me for a while, but now the old layout confuses me!
# August 26, 2003 9:02 AM

Ben Richardson said:

Good one, any chance of a Framework v1.0 version of this?
# August 27, 2003 12:54 AM

Jeff Key said:

Sorry, only have v1.1 on this machine. I just put the source up, so feel free to grab it and recompile.
# August 27, 2003 1:09 AM

Ben Richardson said:

Thanks Jeff!!
# August 27, 2003 1:14 AM

Jeff Key said:

Not feeling as bad about the inevitable now. Thanks for the feedback!
# August 27, 2003 1:30 AM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

OLD news :-)

This was introduced with VS.NET 2003 if I remember right. I stumbled over it like you one day, when I was just looking around IN an event handler. Till then it was kind of hard to get the event, unless you had a handler and assined it to a variable.

I hope MS puts up more nice things like these.
# August 27, 2003 2:04 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 28, 2003 2:38 AM

Clint said:

That's a great point. I've often had to dig in via Anakrino to find out these answers
# August 28, 2003 3:15 AM

Shannon J Hager said:

Yes, the firewall has been enabled for (I think) every connection I've added since it went gold. It caused me quite a bit of trouble the first few times (until I found a list of ports to open for Messenger file transfers).
I've wondered why everyone says it needs to be enabled by default when it always has for me.
# August 29, 2003 3:19 PM

Phil Scott said:

I've always had it enabled by default here at work too.

Perhaps the MSDN bits have it enabled, and the retail (or more likely the OEM) versions don't?
# August 29, 2003 3:27 PM

Paul said:

Visual Assist maybe??
# August 29, 2003 4:58 PM

Fons Sonnemans said:

I use QuickCode!

http://www.dvxp.com/downloads.aspx
# August 29, 2003 5:20 PM

Dan Bright said:

I think this was added with the "Advanced Networking Pack for Windows XP". It was installed via Windows Updae for me.
# August 29, 2003 5:35 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks Fons, I think QuickCode.NET is what I'm looking for!

http://www.dvxp.com/downloads.aspx#QuickCode.NET
# August 29, 2003 6:03 PM

Frans Bouma said:

yeah quickcode is what you need.
# August 29, 2003 6:20 PM

Roy Osherove said:

CodeSmart.Net(axtools.com) does that, plus lots of other things . It's not free though. (I'm planning to write a review about it)
# August 29, 2003 6:22 PM

Dave said:

XP Home.... OEM version on PC bought last October (Dell): nope. No firewall.

XP Home.... Ratail Upgrade version bought last April (upgrading an ME box): nope. No firewall.

XP Pro.... Retail Upgrade bought last January (upgrading a Win2k Pro box): nope. No firewall.

XP Pro.... MSDN Universal subscription version bought last April (upgrading an OEM XP Home box): yes. Firewall defaults.

Seems my experience differs from others. Maybe this is why I've been vocal about this Shannon. All I've asked is for the setup to check for new versions - and ensure this is defaulted. Seems someone in the 55,000 can figure out how to get this done.
# August 29, 2003 9:44 PM

Jeff Key said:

OK, finally making sense. I didn't think it was enabled by default on my home XP Pro box (which I think is retail) when I first got it.
# August 29, 2003 10:07 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

I am still hoping MS will package a XP SR-1 or XP SE or something with the SP1 and other patches rolled in. It is basically impossible for a new user to download and install the needed updates for a freshly installed version of Windows XP if they are on a dial-up. This would solve the problem for all future users, maybe...
For current users, this could be a BIG problem. Adding a firewall for most users is something they won't do so it would have to be done automatically, which means all of a sudden they can't transfer files and other things suddenly stop working. People who can't enable a firewall by themselves certainly can't figure out how to open the ports needed for MSN Messenger file transfers (among other things).
# August 30, 2003 1:43 PM

Jeff Key said:

I agree. The last time I counted I had ~30 hotfixes installed, consisting of who knows how many MB of data. I can't image how long it would take to download on a modem, much less a year from now when who knows how many hotfixes will exist then. The last few days I've read that they're considering pushing up SP2. The beta cycles for SPs are usually pretty long, so if that's the case, they better get on it quickly.

Regarding Messenger, it manages its own ports via UPnP, IIRC. I have no idea how this actually works, but I've been running the XP/Win2k3 firewalls for years and have only had to tweak their settings to let additional stuff like Remote Desktop and FTP through.
# August 30, 2003 1:58 PM

William Bartholomew said:

Also check out http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/hotkee.asp?target=hotkee it does a similar thing but works in all applications.
# August 31, 2003 5:57 PM

TrackBack said:

# September 2, 2003 7:32 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

Messenger never changed any port settings for me. But I have UPnP turned off, of course.

Whenever I add a new connection, I go into the firewall settings and the ports I've added and named are there, I just check them off and everything works again.

Occassionally I get a pop-up that says "C:\Program is trying to change your firewall settings" and I always click "no" but it is almost always due to Media Player 9 (I guess... it never tells me more than "C:\Program", unfortunately).
# September 2, 2003 8:53 PM

Kevin Dente said:

Dexter is another option for you.

http://www.nilgirihouse.com/dexter.htm
# September 3, 2003 1:48 PM

Jeffrey Vanneste said:

<a href="http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/codetemplatenet.asp">Code Template</a> as another option
# September 3, 2003 2:23 PM

Ben Richardson said:

Am I the only one that can't get this work on v1.0 of the Framework? The app loads then disappears straight away, not even an error.
# September 3, 2003 10:51 PM

Jeff Key said:

I posted a config file on the SnippetCompiler page that will force it to use the 1.0 runtime. I don't have a 1.0-only box here or at the office, so I can't test it. (Someone has emailed me that it worked for them.)
# September 4, 2003 8:35 AM

DDD said:

I have the new Blue Natural Multimedia Keyboard. The feel of the keys are great, but the whole concept of remapping the function keys to be shortcuts to tasks that allready have shortcuts already- stupid. Why would I reach all the way up to F2 to undo when I can just hit ctrl-z and not even have to leave home row? We shouldnt have to change a registry setting, it should be a function of intellitype. The lack of the 2 usb ports on the back is also irritating, what would be better is 4 USB 2.0 ports.
# September 4, 2003 8:18 PM

Matevz Gacnik said:

+1!
# September 5, 2003 3:47 AM

Roy Osherove said:

Syntax Highlighting! :)
# September 5, 2003 5:59 AM

Anto said:

Thanks for a good utility application.
Option to set different credentials like the one availabe with NetworkDriveInfo will be very useful.
# September 5, 2003 6:05 AM

Matt Hawley said:

Maybe a little extreme, but intellisense?
# September 5, 2003 8:38 AM

Jason Alexander said:

SnippetCompiler is freaking awesome, first off.

+1 to intellisense, but I know that's brutal.

But, it'd be really nice if you could support a web form. It'd be difficult, but I think you could do it creatively. ;)
# September 5, 2003 9:17 AM

Jeff Key said:

Does anyone know where I could get a free syntax-highlighting textbox? Syncfusion and Actipro have some really nice looking ones, but they're $300. I started working on a syntax highlighted/intellisense textbox last year, but ran out of time. It's a pretty significant undertaking and my time is really limited.
# September 5, 2003 11:22 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

A webform might not be too bad...just need to integrate cassini :)

http://asp.net/Default.aspx?tabindex=7&tabid=41

Regardless, this just rocks. Great job Jeff!

-Scott
# September 5, 2003 1:42 PM

TrackBack said:

A new version of SnippetCompiler
# September 5, 2003 1:45 PM

Matt Hawley said:

I like the idea of incorporating WebForms (was thinking this too)
# September 5, 2003 2:21 PM

TrackBack said:

Quick and dirty time interval tests
# September 5, 2003 5:08 PM

Jeff Key said:

I've had a few people ask for ASP.NET via email, too, so I'll work on that. Thanks again for the suggestions!
# September 5, 2003 6:41 PM

scott said:

Try syntaxbox here:
http://www.compona.com/WikiEngine/WikiPageViewer.ascx?ID=5
# September 6, 2003 12:34 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Scott, but that's $155 too expensive. ;)
# September 6, 2003 12:47 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Agree completely, Slashdot is one of the worst offenders in this regard, any comment on anything Microsoft related leads to tirades of idiotic comments (many just based on blind prejudice rather than educated comment). The SCO lawsuit has shaken some of the more vociferous open source advocates of late, some are finally realising that a large company can provide a buffer between the increasingly litigious IT industry and the user.
The Java argument won't go away (remember in the early days of Java, a similar attack came from the Smalltalk community!).
Big companies not using .NET is interesting and somethign that I expect to change in the next year or so - basically many of the large app server vendors locked these companies in to 3 year maintainance contracts - they're due to expire for many large corps pretty soon...
# September 6, 2003 1:20 PM

Dave said:

I agree, but every corner of the web has their faults like this. Consider the weblogs here. I deleted all my subscriptions to individual weblogs and only chose the main feed. Stupid me. I thought that would help weed out the noise. You see, I want the main feed because I'm interested in .NET coding tricks I can use today. Because many here claim that's what weblogs@asp.net is all about. But:

(1) Why does everybody and their sister need to waste my RSS bandwidth on telling me they are posting the "See you at the PDC logo!"?

(2) Why do a dozen bloggers here need to tell me what Matrix character they are, or what Simsons character, or the latest stupid psyche poll they all seem to find at the same time?

(3) Now that they all have a place to blog from, why do these PDC postings continue to be a significant portion of my daily weedout at all?

Get my drift? Every single above item is also lack of content and noise to me. But I decided a while back this is the price to pay to find that one priceless nugget daily. Now, as for misinformation, don't get me started on that - to me, another word for misinformation is hype. Both are similar in content/noise ratio and in my use for it. And especially right now when weblogs@asp.net is so dominated by leaders who are so excited over the PDC and these quality products that are sooooooo far away from RTM.....
# September 6, 2003 6:28 PM

Scott Galloway said:

Have you looked at the SharpDevelop http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/ source code (there's also a book on the development of this product) - it has all the features and is open source (GPL). It's also developed in a very modular way so you should have no problem using the code in your own app (just honour the GPL and it'd be cool)
# September 7, 2003 5:02 PM

Russell Pooley said:

I have looked at syntax highlighting editors and found the following, which after a little investigation worked better than the SyncFusion version here is the link: http://www.actiprosoftware.com/Products/DotNet/SyntaxEditor/Default.aspx

my post also has some comments regarding editors, the post is at : http://weblogs.asp.net/rpooley/posts/26361.aspx
# September 7, 2003 5:31 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks. I'm currently re-evaluating SharpDevelop's. Russell, I'm curious why you prefer ActiPro's. I tried their demo and found the editor was a bit awkward. I didn't play with any settings, so the it could be the issues I had were configurable.
# September 7, 2003 5:40 PM

Dan Bright said:

FYI, Ive been using the TextArea from #Develop in Sharpedit for a while, and for some reason the latest version has problems compiling as standalone. The only version that I've found to actually work is the compiled one in my CVS repository.

Feel free to check out my code & grab the DLL here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sharpedit
# September 7, 2003 7:32 PM

Jeff Key said:

Funny you mention that, Dan; I just spent a bit of time trying to do exactly that. I'll check your stuff out. Thanks!
# September 7, 2003 8:15 PM

Jeff Key said:

I've spent some time integrating the SharpDevelop editor, but am having some problems, particularly that I can't change the font (setting the Font property isn't changing it), and when adding a new snippet, only the first line of the snippet's text is shown. Going to another tab and back fixes this. (I tried Refresh, Invalidate, App.DoEvents, etc. to no avail.) I don't know when I'll get a chance to work on it again, so I posted what I have to the web site (1.16 alpha) since it has the multi-snippet compiling, ASP.NET support, etc. http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/snippetcompiler
# September 7, 2003 11:05 PM

Jeff Key said:

I wound up fixing the text not showing issue and added red sqiggly error lines. Good stuff! Hopefully I can get the Font issue resolved, as it works in #D, but not in my little test app. I'll need to dig into their code and see what they're doing.
# September 8, 2003 12:55 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 8, 2003 4:08 AM

Simon Steele said:

You need Scintilla: http://www.scintilla.org/ with the ScintillaNet bindings. The bindings aren't 100% complete, but make the control quite usable from .NET from what I've heard. Best thing is the price - completely free with source. There's also a mailing list to help you to use it. If SnippetCompiler were open source, I'd have put Scintilla in there already!
# September 8, 2003 4:48 AM

Roy Osherove said:

You can also check out CodeMax and CodeSense: although they are OCX s(COM) they are very good. CodeSense is CodeMax + Intellisense support. Very cool.
# September 8, 2003 9:47 AM

James Avery said:

You might want to drop Syncfusion a line, I bet they would give you a free copy if stuck there name under it or something... or maybe just in the about box. You could get a free control, and they could get some great publicity.

-James
# September 8, 2003 12:01 PM

Neil Weber said:

Your comments don't add anything either and do not address the items in your bullet list. In particular,

.NET/C# is a copy of Java: The Java language was obviously based on C++ as stated by its creator. But, there are huge differences between Java and C++. There are only minor differences between Java and C#. C++, though, has nothing like the Java class libraries. I haven't used Smalltalk or Lisp in years but I don't think they have anything similar to the Java class libraries either. .NET, on the other hand, hugely follows the Java class libraries.

Using Microsoft results in vendor lock-in: You avoid the issue here and inaccurately too. Every Java shop I know of develops on Windows and deploys on Solaris or HP. This is not an academic problem. It works great.
# September 8, 2003 12:02 PM

Jeff Key said:

I was thinking about that, James, until Scott mentioned #D. I still do prefer commercial things over open source simply because _someone_ is accountable. If I find a bug, I can get it fixed rather than having to waste my time trying to fix it or wait on someone else to do it in their free time. I lost several hours yesterday trying to get the #D stuff to work and will need to spend several more going through their code trying to find out why setting the Font property does nothing. Humbug.

Anyway, I'm still going to try to get Syncfusion's. I'll drop them a line in the next few days. Thanks for speaking up..I probably would've dropped it otherwise.
# September 8, 2003 1:38 PM

Jeff Key said:

It's been stated several times by the designers of .NET/C# that it was influenced by Java. No doubt about that. However, COM libraries for MTS/COM+, IIS, file system, etc., etc. have been around for years.

You mention OS vendor lock-in. This is exactly what I'm talking about; sure, you're not locked into an OS, but you're locked into an application server, VMs, etc. I'm not claiming that those of us in the .NET camp aren't locked into MS servers, but the claim that Java's write once, run anywhere is rubbish. Of course, some would claim that our "being locked in" is a benefit..there is no question what we're deploying to now, what we'll be deploying to in the future, and so on. One less thing to worry about, and that's a good thing. I'm not a Java guy, so I could be wrong, but from what I read in the Java rags, this is indeed an issue.

Anyway, my intent was not to start a religious conversation. I think Java's great. My beef is with "journalists" that spout on and on again and again displaying that they do not know what they're talking about. When you're on our side of the fence, it's not a good time. Everyone has a beef with Microsoft in one way or another. I would be much more impressed with these "journalists" if they either addressed these issues or touch on topics that are valid and haven't been beaten to death in every publication for years.
# September 8, 2003 10:27 PM

Dan Bright said:

Great stuff Jeff. This is turning into a tool I can't live without!
# September 9, 2003 3:16 AM

Yosi Taguri said:

same here, great work
# September 9, 2003 4:16 AM

Dylan Greene said:

Is this using Windows XP-only functionality? If so, what happens when this control is used on previous versions of the OS? What would happen if the code was run using Mono/DotGNU? (I'm still evaluating the .net platform so I'm wondering how these sort of features will degrade.)
# September 9, 2003 1:39 PM

Jeff Key said:

It's using PInvoke to call SendMessageA, so it shouldn't work on anything but Windows. IIRC, if it's called on a version of windows < XP, nothing happens. When I use it, I check the Windows version and if it's < 5.2.2600, I show a message box, if not, I show the balloon.
# September 9, 2003 2:19 PM

Jeff Key said:

My first bug! :) Thanks to William Bartholomew for finding a little bug that's since been fixed.
# September 9, 2003 10:20 PM

TrackBack said:

Damn..again :)
# September 9, 2003 10:32 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks gents and thanks for everyone's great ideas!
# September 9, 2003 11:27 PM

Richard Tallent said:

Good job... love the VB and ASP.NET support, thanks!
# September 10, 2003 1:32 AM

Daniel Fisher said:

I'm using QuickCode for some time now - it's great.

Look at my CollectionClassTemplate

<a href="http://www.lennybacon.com/2003-09-10T131031.aspx">http://www.lennybacon.com/2003-09-10T131031.aspx</a>
# September 10, 2003 7:10 AM

Daniel Fisher said:

http://www.lennybacon.com/2003-09-10T131031.aspx
# September 10, 2003 7:10 AM

Jeff Key said:

Wow, bravo!
# September 10, 2003 9:31 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 10, 2003 10:54 PM

Jeff Key said:

Just got #2.
# September 10, 2003 11:20 PM

Sam Gentile said:

Nice work! This made into my toolbox yesterday
# September 11, 2003 9:05 AM

ewb said:

Keeps getting better. Appreciate your efforts (and the efforts of all those that have helped).

Ran into an unhandled IO.FileNotFound exception today when I decided to move snippet's directory. The TemplatesPath Registry entry still pointed at the old directory. First tried clearing this Registry entry, but the Settings.get_TemplatesPath then returned a zero-length string (it apparently only checks for the existence of the Registry entry, not whether it actually has anything in it).

In any case, a simple try/catch around the MainForm.LoadFile stream IO would be helpful.

Thanks again!
# September 11, 2003 2:57 PM

Jeff Key said:

You're exactly right: It's checking for the entry and returns a default (the default path) if it doesn't exist. I'll handle this more gracefully. (Someone else ran into this earlier today, too.) Thanks.

Also, Syncfusion emailed me today and they're donating their Edit control. Thank you, Syncfusion! I'm in the process of getting the donations back to those that donated and will start integrating it in the next day or two.
# September 11, 2003 3:02 PM

Pete said:

Firstly, it's a fantastic program. Thanks for making it free(ish).

I've got some requests for you:

1) Ability to open (and therefore compile) vs.net solutions/projects -- there's no other tool out there now to do this without vs (don't even talk to me about nant's plugin).

2) ClearType support -- I'm sure sharpdevelop supports antialiasing, can this not be added? I'm not too sure about the commercial editor, they don't seem to support xp style scrollbars (from the screenshots). Looks are important ;)

3) Columns in the errors tab need to resize with the window. Otherwise going from normal size to full screen is a pain.

Great program, keep up the good work :)

PS this is now my main editor for c# programs
# September 11, 2003 3:53 PM

Pete said:

Oh.. a couple more things: :)

4) Can we have a toolbar for opening/saving please? The best versions of the standard toolbar icons (that I've seen) are included in Genghis, available from gotdotnet or Chris Sells's site.

5) Use of IsolatedStorage instead of registry to store settings.

Thanks
# September 11, 2003 4:07 PM

Jeff Julian said:

Trust in Drew. He did an excellent job with TechEDBloggers on not posting dups.
# September 11, 2003 4:41 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Pete. (Considering Syncfusion donated the Edit control today, it is officially free again. I'm returning the money to the people that donated.)

1) Interesting idea, I'll take a look at it.
2) The SharpDevelop textbox's antialiased fonts are pretty nasty looking, so I left it off. I also couldn't change the font. Now that we have the Syncfusion textbox, these are no longer issues.
3) Good idea.
4) Another good idea.
5) This is an interesting one. I was thinking about extracting an interface from my RegistrySettings class and making it a generic settings provider interface, then creating an XML settings provider which would be stored in the app's folder. This would allow settings to be easily copied. On the other hand, storing it in isolated storage would work with roaming profiles (IIRC). I guess an argument could be made for either..

Thanks!
# September 11, 2003 4:41 PM

Pete said:

Cool thanks.

I've actually got one more thing for you (I'd hate to think you might run out of stuff to do :) ). The GUI doesn't respond while your (winforms) snippet is running.. even dragging the snippet's form around leaves a trail over SnippetCompiler.
# September 11, 2003 4:52 PM

Drew Robbins said:

Thanks Jeff Julian. Nice quote. :)

Look for a big change in the website this weekend. The list of bloggers will be better organized and we will introduce the categorization scheme and start aggregating content from member blogs.

Organization by track, session, technology and blogger as well as some other fun stuff. Hopefully, tt will start to make sense what we are trying to achieve with PDC Bloggers.

You're feedback is very much appreciated. Let me know if you have any other ideas. Our feature set will be flexible up to and through the PDC so we can provide the absolute most value to both the bloggers and readers.

Carpe diem.

# September 11, 2003 5:33 PM

Robert Scoble said:

Yeah, Drew is the man! Plus, I'll be pointing to cool stuff that you should watch as well. Get your news aggregator and get ready to rumble!
# September 11, 2003 5:33 PM

Pete said:

Just one last issues.. Could you make the tabs case-sensitive (I use caps in my filenames and it appears all lowercase).

That's it (I promise) :)
# September 11, 2003 5:36 PM

Jeff Key said:

Sounds great, Drew! Thanks for the info.

Yow, Scoble in overdrive. I'll have plenty of Gatorade and Red Bull on hand.
# September 11, 2003 6:05 PM

DonXML said:

I'll be mostly covering the new UI stuff in Longhorn, and their relationship to SVG. Plus, I'll cover the parties at the Whilshire.

DonXML
# September 11, 2003 7:49 PM

Jeff Key said:

Update: Syncfusion has donated their excellent textbox, so I'm working on incorporating that at the moment and am not taking any more donations. Thanks to everyone that donated! (If you donated via credit card, I cancelled those transactions this morning and am working on the direct transfers now.)
# September 12, 2003 12:53 AM

Jeff Key said:

Another example, same thing. This time from Path.GetPathRoot:

string path = @"\mydir\";
string fileName = "myfile.ext";
string fullPath = @"C:\mydir\myfile.ext";
string pathRoot;

pathRoot = Path.GetPathRoot(path);
Console.WriteLine("GetPathRoot('{0}') returns '{1}'",
path, pathRoot);

pathRoot = Path.GetPathRoot(fileName);
Console.WriteLine("GetPathRoot('{0}') returns '{1}'",
fileName, pathRoot);

pathRoot = Path.GetPathRoot(fullPath);
Console.WriteLine("GetPathRoot('{0}') returns '{1}'",
fullPath, pathRoot);
# September 12, 2003 3:20 AM

Jeff Key said:

FYI: 1 (projects, not solutions), 2, 3 and the caseing on the tabs are done. Regarding GUI not responding: You're probably redirecting output to the Output tab, so the Snippet Compiler thread is blocked until you shut down the snippet's exe. I can probably start it on another thread to get around this. (I added it to the list.)
# September 12, 2003 4:42 AM

Pete said:

Great, thanks!
# September 12, 2003 5:26 AM

Pete said:

Okay I've been using it for a while and there's a few more things that I've noticed:

2.1) It would be good to have an option to generate the xml docs

2.2) Could we have some indication of whether a file is changed since last save or not on it's tab? Doesn't matter if it's a simple "*" next to the name, or having the name in green/red.. whatever.

2.3) Can we have a save all command, please?

2.4) A close button on each tab, or a button by the tabs to close the current one.

2.5) A file-not-saved warning on program close

2.6) Persisting the location of the code view to error view splitter to isolatedstorage (or wherever -- preferably not the registry)

2.7) Could you make the error tabcontrol optional? Maybe from a view menu or something.. Maybe even automatic (show on errors.. remove if it compiles okay).

Are these suggestions helpful at all? I could send them by email if it's easier.. or not at all if you'd prefer.
# September 12, 2003 9:34 AM

Pete said:

I always seem to press submit, then think of more things:

2.8) Ability to drag and reorder tabs.. there's an example on codeproject (doesn't look at all difficult)

2.9) *Most important* - a "created with SnippetCompiler" graphics for peoples websites ;)
# September 12, 2003 9:43 AM

Jeff Key said:

Pete's a maniac!

1, 2, 3: Good ideas.
4: You can right-click on a tab for a context menu to close it.
5: I was wondering how long before someone asked for that. ;)
6: Good idea.
7: Hm, maybe.
8: Interesting. I'll check out codeproject for inspiration.
9: Haha! If someone makes one, I'll gladly make it available.

Keep the suggestions coming..they're great! Send them however you'd like.
# September 13, 2003 12:08 AM

Jeff Key said:

FYI: I did the tab dragging thing (cool idea!) and optimized the guy's code so they don't flicker like crazy (he was removing all of tab pages, then re-adding them). I added a comment w/the code:

http://www.codeproject.com/cs/miscctrl/draggabletabcontrol.asp?target=drag%7Cdrop%7Ctab%7Ccontrol
# September 13, 2003 3:11 AM

Thomas Lee said:

Fantastic update - way cool!
# September 13, 2003 12:05 PM

Pete said:

Awesome!

Okay just a few points (tell me you weren't expecting that :) ).

- Getting a file not found unhandled exception when I click on Help.

- Is the Syncfusion outlining manual only? It's cool to have manual outlining without the need for regions, but I miss the automatic stuff from the sharpdevelop edit control (never thought I'd be saying that).

I expect I'll have more suggestions if I can get to use it more (damn Star Wars KOTOR eats up my time like you wouldn't believe :) ).
# September 14, 2003 6:23 AM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks!

1. Oops, was using a relative path and the working directory got shifted around. Fixed.
2. Unfortunately yes. I could do it programmatically, but apparently Syncfusion is rewriting the control and that is one of the features.
# September 14, 2003 2:55 PM

Michael Hensen said:

You can count me in..

M.Hensen@bookmark.nl
# September 15, 2003 5:51 AM

Pete said:

Me too. pvidler@gawab.com.
# September 15, 2003 9:43 AM

Ron Green said:

I would love to help.
rgreen3@kc.rr.com
# September 15, 2003 12:32 PM

Pete said:

Hmm.. just looking at what you said about wanting to keep the original intent versus turning towards ide style features.

Why not go with a big change and allow the addition of plugins? If you could allow them to change the interface then the user could have exactly what they want from their specific install of SnippetCompiler.

For example, have a toolbar as a plugin for those that want it. Enabling a plugin system that is flexible enough to create toolbar(s) with will allow other people to extend you app in ways that might suprise you :).

I guess you would need to provide hooks into your existing code for this sort of thing though.. I can't wrap my head around exactly how it could be implemented (I can't seem to express what I'm thinking, either).

I'll probably post something more tomorrow when my brain's working again.
# September 15, 2003 1:34 PM

Jason Mark said:

I'll help.
JM
# September 15, 2003 2:54 PM

Jeff Key said:

I'm all for plugins; check out NetPing. :) The application itself is more or less a container for plugins. Every column but the Address column and every one of the nine context menu options are all plugins (you can see this by removing the sliver.NetPing.Addins.dll from the Addins folder of NetPing).

To create an infrastructure for addins you need to have services to expose to the addins. I'm not sure what exactly I would expose at this point, and I'd love to hear what potential addin writers would like to do. As things progress and the design of the app changes to deal with new requirements, a clearer picture is forming regarding things I may expose as services. I will definitely add plugin support sometime, it's just a matter of when it becomes appropriate.

Regarding IDE-like features, I'm all for them, but keep those features turned off by default. I've thrown in a messagebox on first run to let the user know that SC is pretty configurable and that they should check out the Options.

BTW, the lastest build has a toolbar. ;) http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/snippetcompiler/snippetcompilerbeta.zip

I'm looking forward to more suggestions!
# September 15, 2003 3:13 PM

marko rangel said:

I'll help too. jkeyblog_at_markorangel_dot_com
# September 15, 2003 3:38 PM

TrackBack said:


Paul Edwards
# September 15, 2003 4:43 PM

James Avery said:

I don't want to test it, but I will volunteer to implement the application updater block for you. :)

-James
# September 15, 2003 6:10 PM

Pete said:

Fantastic! Just a few minor points (with the beta): :)

1) Got an unhandled exception once when turning on method information for intellisense. Something about unable to find Intellisense\XmlDocs. Unable to reproduce though.

2) Intellisense for "Console.w" goes straight to "Console.WriteLine" in the popup -- what about "Console.Write"?

3) Start All as WinForms no longer seems to work for an existing project, I get the error: "Invalid target type for /target: must specify 'exe', 'winexe', 'library', or 'module'". Only seems to happen when create xml docs is selected.

4) Not too sure about the way multi-line tabs are displayed. I prefer them to single line with those annoying arrows, but multi-line don't quite display/behave right. Not sure exactly how and I can't seem to find one in normal windows (in it's natural habitat :) ).

4b) I worked out what was bothering me.. when you have a full row of tabs and a single tab on another line, pull the single tab to the front and the full row no longer looks correct. Not sure how it should look normally though.

5) Weird behaviour when dragging tabs across lines when multi-line tabs are used (same situation as in 4b).

6) Could you change the separate run behaviour for console/winforms? Something specified for the project, or maybe autodetect? (just spotted this in the TODO.txt :) )

7) Good call on the commandbar and menubar stuff, looks cool.. but do we really need to be able to drag the menu (or the toolbar for that matter)?

8) Undo/redo are active even when there are no actions peformed. Starting up, default.cs displays, pressing undo clears the buffer. Similarly, save doesn't need to be active when current buffer is unchanged (could use a "save all" on the toolbar, too).

Well that's all I can find for now ;)

I'll probably post some more when I get around to using this thing for longer.
# September 15, 2003 7:27 PM

Pete said:

One more idea.. slightly bigger than the others.

Is it possible to embed the ink stuff (tablet pc support) to allow annotation of code (like in the new office 2003)? Maybe store the locations of all your scribblings in the project xml file, and have the ink stuff serialize to whatever file format it prefers.

You could also provide some way of combining source, ink and project files for easy emailing and distribution.

Just a thought.
# September 15, 2003 7:41 PM

Jeff Key said:

Haha thanks, James. I've added it to my todo list and will get back to you on that. ;)
# September 15, 2003 9:34 PM

Jeff Key said:

I've set up a GotDotNet workspace so people can enter bugs as well as see known issues. I'll also post the test bits there. I'll post the next test build after I get most/all of the bugs/todo up there so you won't waste any of your time reporting things I already know about.

http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=35660c7b-61ac-4c27-bda8-71f6aad98dcb

Moving forward I'll send emails via gotdotnet, so be sure to sign up if you'd like to participate.

Thanks for your help!
# September 16, 2003 2:33 AM

Jeff Key said:

As always, thanks for the excellent feedback, Pete!

1) That's since been fixed.
2) That's a known issue. I've reproduced w/the Syncfusion control outside of Snippet Compiler so I submitted a support ticket. (I tell it what to display and it does the dirty work.)
3) Great catch! I forgot to prepend a compiler option with a space. Fixed.
4) I don't like it either. Those are the stock tabs that come w/.NET (which, I think, are wrappers for the Win common controls [I custom draw the tabpage contents, but not the tabs themselves]). If you find a way to make them behave better, let me know.
5) Yup. Haven't looked into that, though, as I figured it was a pretty low priority.
6) I need to think about some project-specific settings and how to implement them so users aren't immediately put into a project situation as they are with VS.NET. Perhaps we could have a "Project Mode" where things like project settings would apply. When the user loads a project, they're put into project mode. If they have some snippets open and want to create a project, they simply save them as a project and they get into project mode. Could also have a simple toggle on a menu somewhere. Or a combination. We'll see...
7) Probably not. ;)
8) That's high up on my todo list (see the GDN workspace link from another blog or the Snippet Compiler page on sliver)
9) Send me a TablePC to test it on and I'll get on it ASAP!
# September 16, 2003 3:45 AM

Jeff Key said:

(Oh, and Save All has been added.)
# September 16, 2003 3:45 AM

Pete said:

You don't need a tablet pc (I don't have one myself). Ink works just fine on ordinary winxp or 2000 (using the mouse), the only advantage in the tablet pc is handwriting recognition.

I was thinking more along the lines of adding the ability to put hand-drawn scribbles along with code.

There are loads of examples on msdn.. here's a few good ones:

http://tinyurl.com/nj49
http://tinyurl.com/nj4f
http://tinyurl.com/nj4k
http://tinyurl.com/nj4p

It would be a great feature -- I've always hated how you have to describe code with text comments.. now I could draw my own pics.

On a side note.. just embedding ordinary pictures would be a cool addition too.. but for that I'd think you'd have to have access to the syncfusion edit internals. With ink I think you just put it on top (an overlay).
# September 16, 2003 9:07 AM

Pete said:

While I'm here I've got one more thing.. correct support for readonly files (i.e. do not allow any editing at all). It would be quite annoying to make mods to a file and then find out that I can't just save it.
# September 16, 2003 9:51 AM

Jeff Key said:

TabletPC stuff: I think it's beyond the scope of the app.

ReadOnly: I just changed it so you can edit read-only files (as you can in VS.NET) but when you attempt to save it offers to remove the read-only attribute and save.
# September 16, 2003 7:35 PM

Pete said:

I've added a bunch of stuff to the bug tracker thing.. should we be setting the "assigned to" thing to our own names, or yours? I've gone with yours for now.

As for the tabletpc, I think you'd be missing out not to add it. It would be very useful to be able to write snippets and add my own diagrams to them for emailing to other people. The example code looks pretty simple too.
# September 17, 2003 8:02 AM

Jeff Key said:

Update: The workspace can't accept any more members at the moment. I've requested more resources, but don't know when they'll be available.
# September 18, 2003 4:45 PM

Phil Scott said:

You are simply the man Jeff.

One suggestion, not sure how well it would work though. What would you think about a background compile kina like VB.NET

The high performance timing templates rock btw.
# September 18, 2003 11:13 PM

Jeff Key said:

Haha thanks, Phil. I've considered that and may implement it in the future after I get the rest of the IntelliSense going. I changed Build|Current and Build|All to compile w/o running or building a binary (which you can still do via Start or Build to File, respectfully), so you can quickly get the error info and squiggles while coding by pressing CTRL+Shift+B (which is the shortcut for Build|Current).
# September 18, 2003 11:22 PM

Eric W. Bachtal said:

You slay me. As much as I dig this tool (and I do, I pop it up a dozen times a day to try something or other), I'd love to read a little about your experience writing it. Are you flat out coding? Couple of over-nighters? Are there some folks helping? How are you building and testing? Discover any interesting things about .NET along the way? Or, if not (and I can imagine you're pretty busy), I'll be content with the product of your efforts. Either way, thanks so much!
# September 18, 2003 11:32 PM

Jeff Key said:

That's definitely a unique request. :) Here are the short answers to your questions:

1) Flat out coding: Not quite sure what you mean, but I am going hardcore if that's what you're asking.
2) Couple of over-nighters: I've been going at it for a couple weeks now and get a few hours in per night usually, sometimes more on the weekends.
3) Folks helping: No one else is coding, but really that's the easy part. A bunch of people are testing and making great suggestions and that helps more than anything. The thing changes so much as different requests come in that it would be impractical if anyone else was involved in writing it.
4) Build/test: I'm just doing a normal VS.NET 2003 build using a post-compilation script to do some cleaning up. The only testing is real-world use. It did get to the point where I was adding enough stuff between releases that I thought it would be best to get more people involved in testing, so I set up a GDN workspace for people that were interested in tolerating beta code and would submit bug reports. The compile code really needs to be refactored, so when I do that I'll add unit tests.
5) Discover anything interesting: Not really. I've been doing .NET development full time (and I mean FULL time!) since the beta, so there isn't much that surprises me these days. I still do stumble upon things every now and again that make me think "they thought of everything!". What's really great is that it's possible to create things like Snippet Compiler so quickly. Programming is fun again.

Happy coding!
# September 19, 2003 12:09 AM

Rory Becker said:

This tool really is GREAT. I'm really impressed. one small( I hope ) thing

Any chance of block completion?
To put in place the closing brace in c#
or the closing For..Next, Sub..End Sub, Function..End Function in VB.Net?

Keep up the 'Very' Good Work.

Rory
# September 19, 2003 5:20 AM

Rory Becker said:

Oh yeah one other thing.

Hows about a checkbox option to show hide c#/vb.net templates and Console/Win/Web templates?

Cheers

Rory
# September 19, 2003 5:22 AM

Rory Becker said:

Sorry About this Jeff. Me again

Any chance of allowing for a Search path for Other DLLs that I might already have that I could then (Import/using)

Rory
# September 19, 2003 5:27 AM

Eric W. Bachtal said:

I'll be sure and check out the GDN site. Thanks again for taking the time!
# September 19, 2003 5:41 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 19, 2003 6:15 AM

Steve said:

Looks really slick having with the new toolbar.
# September 19, 2003 6:38 AM

Jeff Key said:

All good suggestions, Rory. Regarding the search path, I'm going to redo the References such that it will drive not only references, but the files used for IntelliSense, etc.
# September 19, 2003 4:31 PM

achu said:

hi..
i'm a student in the National University of Singapore. We're required to write a user manual for the AllNetic Time Tracker program, as part of our project.
We find it quite confusing due to the absence of a help file. Would you be able to explain how the program is supposed to be used? What is the 'selling' point of this software? And what it is used for by most people..
Thank you very much..

Regards
Achudhan

PS : my email address is : achudhans@yahoo.com
# September 20, 2003 10:37 AM

Ray Jezek said:

You can also rip the icons out of shell32 (or any other dll for that matter) by dragging the dll into VS.NET. When you drag it into VS it pretty much lets you extract any of the embedded resources.

# September 20, 2003 5:05 PM

Jeff Key said:

Oops, I should've mentioned that I was talking about runtime (I've updated the post to reflect that). Good suggestion, regardless. Is there anything VS.NET doesn't do?

FWIW, I use Axialis Icon Workshop for my icon work, including pulling icons from binaries. It's really a fantastic little app.

http://www.axialis.com/axicons/
# September 20, 2003 5:26 PM

Alex said:

Thanks for the tip - I was totally unaware of this too!
# September 21, 2003 10:04 PM

Justin King said:

You Rock!!!

I tried the Tools >> Options route but never quite seemed to work the way I wanted.

Even worse is ASP.NET pages that bring up page designer but can't as you created fully from code.

Thanks
# September 21, 2003 11:04 PM

Lorenzo Barbieri said:

Thanks!!!
# September 22, 2003 3:45 AM

Ray Jezek said:

That's a sweet program. Will definately have to pick that one up.

thanks for the link.
# September 22, 2003 11:18 AM

Jesse Ezell said:

nope. don't worry too much about it.
# September 23, 2003 1:00 AM

Jeff Key said:

I'm not. Although they both got equal space, I was much more "wow, cool" rather than "oh, no". :)
# September 23, 2003 1:07 AM

Pete said:

"Used for evil"??!?
# September 23, 2003 6:11 AM

Pete said:

So win2k3 slows down over just a weekend? Or are you saying you had two sessions open?
# September 23, 2003 6:12 AM

Jeff Key said:

I had the console and one TS session active. Not a huge deal, but I had VS.NET, Outlook and some other stuff in the TS session.
# September 23, 2003 9:29 AM

Jeff Key said:

Tongue-in-cheek.
# September 23, 2003 2:12 PM

The Jeff said:

Have you seen the <A HREF="http://www.go-l.com/monitors/grand_canyon/features/index.htm">Grand Canyon</A>? <DROOOOOOOLLLLL>
# September 25, 2003 12:37 AM

The Jeff said:

Ok, so that didn't work, let's see if this works:

http://www.go-l.com/monitors/grand_canyon/features/index.htm
# September 25, 2003 12:38 AM

Jeff Key said:

Sure did. Did you see the price for the 92"?

$17,499.99

I've never spent that much on anything.
# September 25, 2003 12:41 AM

The Jeff said:

Well, If you want to compare the value, I think that the 92" monitor is worth it compared to the $25,000 I spent on four years of college.
# September 25, 2003 12:51 AM

Pete said:

Am I the only person that thinks you'd strain your neck looking at one of those monitors? How far away from it would you have to be to see it all at once?

The start button is way over at the left -- probably have to turn your head quite far to even see it.

That's my excuse for not buying one and I'm sticking to it :)
# September 25, 2003 6:23 AM

TrackBack said:

# September 25, 2003 8:40 AM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

Did you look at their laptops? Wow!
# September 26, 2003 12:59 AM

rooo said:

cooooooooooooooooooooolllllllllllll
# September 29, 2003 1:36 PM

Tom said:

He doesen't know football either... Ha Ha Ha
# September 30, 2003 12:22 AM

senkwe said:

I'm no expert but I thought VS.NET was pretty pluggable. I guess I'm reading your post as a grudging affirmation that the Java/Open Source crowd is alot more inventive than the .Net/Open Source?? crowd. I know it's easier when you have the source at your disposal, but is it impossible to "plug in" a community brewed tool for code refactoring?
# September 30, 2003 2:07 AM

Jeff Key said:

I love VS.NET. I just wonder why they can't build more useful code tools into the product rather than all of the drag-n-drop stuff.

I'm only aware of one refactoring plugin, and each time I've tried it there were too many bugs to make it a permanent addition to the toolbox.

As for who is more inventive, I wouldn't dare open that can of worms. ;) (I honestly have no opinion on it.) I do think that VS.NET is good enough that any any alternatives aren't yet worthwhile. Anyone trying to compete with VS.NET would certainly have their hands full!
# September 30, 2003 2:18 AM

Marc Brooks said:

Correct on all fronts, but if F12 really bugs you, http://www.wholetomato.com is calling your name... join the Visual Assist .Net dark side.
# September 30, 2003 6:15 PM

Oleg Tkachenko said:

Your title is wrong, GetHashCode()always equals to GetHashCode().
But the point is that if a!=b, below may be true:
a.GetHashCode() == b.GetHashCode()
# October 1, 2003 2:47 AM

bilbo baggins said:

it don't work for me mate :(

I had opera running and it hangs and nothing kills it.. i have to reboot
# October 1, 2003 4:39 AM

Jeff Key said:

I was referring to the GetHashCode()s in the current (1.0, 1.1) frameworks vs the next framework (1.2?). a.GetHashCode() will be return a different value in v.Next than it does now.
# October 1, 2003 8:36 AM

Jeff Key said:

I've had that happen a couple times, too, but it does seem to work 98% of the time. Not sure what puts some apps in a state where they can't be killed. Would be interesting to find out.
# October 1, 2003 8:38 AM

Bernard Vander Beken said:

A similar 'trick' can be used to use VS.NET as a hex editor:

1. Select Menu File > Open > File....
2. Select a file (single-click). Do not open the file yet.
3. Launch the Open With Dialog Box by clicking the arrow next to Open.
4. Select Binary Editor.
5. Select Open.
# October 1, 2003 9:43 AM

Bernard Vander Beken said:

Jeff,

I am happy about the quality of the C# Refactory [1] plugin, a shareware product.

[1] http://www.xtreme-simplicity.net
# October 1, 2003 9:47 AM

Jeff Key said:

I've tried that a couple times, Bernard, and I liked it. Unfortunately, over time I would start getting weird errors and ultimately had to uninstall it. The first time, I had to completely reinstall VS.NET, which was a huge pain. The second time I didn't have to reinstall VS.NET, but was disappointed that the bugs hadn't been fixed.

I just checked the website and it looks like it hasn't been updated in a long time. Do you know if that's the case?
# October 1, 2003 8:40 PM

Jon Galloway said:

You'd better stop there or a Microsoft hit squad may come after you to prevent competition with Visual Studio... Just lay low on the drag and drop databinding and you might last to version 1.3.

Thanks for the coolest tool in my c:\utils!
# October 2, 2003 12:22 AM

The Jeff said:

I booked the Holiday Inn City Center a few days ago, you have to call them though.

www.holiday-inn.com
# October 2, 2003 1:31 AM

Jon Cortez said:

Try the Holiday Inn Downtown
# October 2, 2003 5:00 AM

Dave Bettin said:

Call the PDC Reservation number.. They just confirmed some rooms at the Sheraton Universal. Just think, you can stumble back to your room after the attendee party.
# October 2, 2003 8:49 AM

Ray Jezek said:

Jeff, i posted in my blog about how I got a room in the Westin by calling the reservation help desk number at the bottom of the PDC reservation:

Microsoft PDC 2003 Registration Headquarters
1-800-443-4780 Canada and US only
(636) 827-5096 Worldwide
(636) 827-3658 Fax
E-mail us at: pdc2003@travelhq.com

The registration info said they were all booked on wed night but the lady there is in constant communication with all of the hotels in the area and can swing some things if she is able... they will work to try and help you so it might be worth a shot if you havent called them yet. PLUS if they book it for you they get the conference deal too.
# October 2, 2003 12:38 PM

Tim Sneath said:

Wonderful - just wonderful. I use it for demos and for testing little snippets of code, because it allows you to focus on the important stuff. Keep up the good work!
# October 2, 2003 3:45 PM

Phil Weber said:

Try http://losangeles.conventioncenterhotelsguide.com/
# October 2, 2003 6:07 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks!
# October 2, 2003 7:49 PM

Jeff Key said:

I think the forms designer will have to wait for a couple versions. ;) Thanks for the comments!
# October 2, 2003 11:13 PM

Matthew Reynolds said:

I recently bought a years subscription to the service.

It really very, very good.
# October 3, 2003 2:20 AM

Eric W. Bachtal said:

Having recently emailed you, I got to experience SpamArrest for the first time, and I can report that it was fine experience. I got a nice message from SpamArrest, with a personal note from you, indicating why my email needed additional attention. Their message included a link that took me to a simple page where I typed a masked graphic word, and that was it - my email was on the way. I was so impressed with the service, I went back to their site and have decided to sign up myself. A great idea well implemented.

You've probably seen this, but here's another great idea involving spam-thwarting:

http://www.mailinator.com/

Good for those one-off on-line registrations that require an email address.
# October 3, 2003 2:22 AM

julie lerman said:

hmmm... maybe i'll try that one next. Using SpamNet, but for me the problemis that Outlook still has to process all emails, which also means a) Norton has to check them b) my rules has to check them and c) spamnet has to check them. With the recent horrid huge numbers of spam (mostly the fake patch emails), it actually makes my computer hang while downloading emails. So if I can catch them BEFORE -- well that may be what I need. Thanks for the indepth review. I've certainly seen spamarrest a lot (on the receiving end).
# October 3, 2003 8:33 AM

Jeff Gonzalez said:

I find SAProxy to be even better. It is built on Spam Assassin technology. It uses a bayesian filter to weigh each email that comes in, and rewrites the header if the email is over a certain score (5.0 is the default i believe). I have only had a few false positives, mostly being related to newsletters I have signed up for, but had not allowed through yet. Best of all, it is completely free.
http://saproxy.bloomba.com
# October 3, 2003 10:05 AM

Jeff Key said:

Eric: Glad you liked it. I'm still worried that people will be offended or put off by it. Haven't had any backlash yet.

Julie: Yes! That was exactly my problem, too. I don't want that stuff anywhere near my computer.

Jeff: Sounds cool. If SpamArrest ever fails me, I'll check it out.
# October 3, 2003 2:53 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks everyone. I scored a room at the Los Angeles Athletic Club through Phil's link. Seemed pretty affordable, too.
# October 3, 2003 4:10 PM

Brisemec said:

It seems that calling Application.DoEvents() after calling Application.EnableVisualStyles() fixes some problems.
# October 6, 2003 11:05 AM

William Bartholomew said:

I've been meaning to write an app that polls URL's and informs you when they've changed, shouldn't be hard just haven't got round to it.
# October 6, 2003 10:52 PM

Jeff Key said:

Same here. ;)

If I ever get the time, I'll write something that does that and works as a POP3 -> RSS server. I subscribe to a bunch of email newsletters that don't have RSS feeds. The idea is that this app would poll the POP account that the newsletters are sent to, then present those emails as RSS feeds (one feed per newsletter). I know I could essentially do the same thing with Outlook rules, but this just seems a little cooler.
# October 6, 2003 11:00 PM

Dylan Greene said:

I wonder if JetBrains is concerned that Eclipse may kill the comercial Java IDE market simply because it's free and extendable.
# October 6, 2003 11:55 PM

William Bartholomew said:

Maybe a generic system that has plug-ins that implement a single interface to retrieve data from third-party sources via a variety of protocols and then republish them as an RSS feed would be the way to go...
# October 7, 2003 1:50 AM

Pete said:

From what I've seen of both products, I doubt JetBrains have anything to worry about. Eclipse is pants compared to IntelliJ.

I'm very disappointed in this news. I was hoping JetBrains would be developing a full IDE of their own for C# straight away, not starting with a plugin.
# October 7, 2003 6:41 AM

Mike said:

Hey Jeff ... in reference to "Maybe it's time to try to figure out how to subscribe to web pages in IE", such a thing already exists on your machine. Right click on your desktop choose ->Display Properties->Desktop->Customize Desktop->Web

You should be able to figure it out from here :-)
# October 7, 2003 8:26 AM

Mark said:

No it doesn't. There is no option for selecting win2003 and the others (winxp,win2k,winnt) don't work. You end up downloading the same file anyhow (so i don't understand why the os selection option is there) and it says it doesn't work with 2003. The latest version i downloaded was 2.22.

So if I'm wrong, please respond. I'd really like to get it working on 2003.
# October 7, 2003 3:58 PM

Jeff Key said:

Well, it worked for me. I'm running v5.00.174.0. Prior to that, nothing would install.

I don't remember if Win2k3 was an option, but if it wasn't, I would've picked WinXP. Maybe the keyboard you picked doesn't support 2003, although I thought the the IT software was the same for all.
# October 7, 2003 4:56 PM

Mark said:

My keyboard is wireless optical desktop (keyboard mouse combo). I wonder which options you selected, and if the software is different, if it would work with my hardware. I'd give it a try if you can remember the options you selected. Thanks.
# October 8, 2003 5:44 AM

Jason said:

Try this little app guys... http://www.markwell.btinternet.co.uk/webmon/
# October 8, 2003 2:57 PM

Jeff Key said:

I have a Natural Keyboard Pro.
# October 8, 2003 9:28 PM

Jeff Key said:

Looks cool, Jason!
# October 8, 2003 9:48 PM

Kenneth LeFebvre said:

Not still, but again. Since I got FrontPage 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services, I've been using them together. They work great together!
# October 13, 2003 11:27 PM

Omar Shahine said:

I just started again after years of not. I find it awesome now. It doesn't touch your code, has nice tools and support for layout etc. I really like it.

Of course if you use WSS (windows sharepoint services) it's a must have tool.
# October 14, 2003 12:16 AM

Jeff Key said:

I'm glad you guys mentioned SharePoint; I'd read about the integration, but subsequently forgot about it. Looking forward to seeing what it can do!
# October 14, 2003 1:24 AM

senkwe chanda said:

hehe, a true diplomat eh? I think it's actually *very* relevant. I'm interested in seeing how those companies do in the long run, but I my gut feel is that they'll be pleasantly surprised.
# October 14, 2003 1:47 AM

Robert McLaws said:

I love Frontpage 2003. It's new layout tools are a must-have for any developer. It does a fabulous job cleaning up HTML, and it's new Find-and-Replace dialog set the standard for other MS Developer tools <cough> **VS.NET**.
# October 14, 2003 7:31 AM

Dumky said:

Maybe this data changes every hour or something, because right now the Netcraft link only shows 1 in the top 6 (the 6th...).

# October 14, 2003 1:48 PM

Jeff Key said:

Good observation, Dumky. Just checked out the chart and not only are you right, it looks like they update it every fifteen minutes.
# October 14, 2003 3:29 PM

Dumky said:

Since it keeps changing, it may not be wise to just look at the top 6.
# October 14, 2003 3:43 PM

Jeff Key said:

Hey, I was just quoting the article. ;)

They did mention the total numbers for the month in the article, so I think the stat is valid, but the page displays realtime rather than aggregate numbers.
# October 14, 2003 6:03 PM

Pete said:

"include a new version of Windows Update, and new memory management code for defeating common buffer overrun attacks"

Woohoo! God I hope that's not just marketing crap. I still remember struggling to remove blaster from my parents machine -- at the time there was no info on it to be found (that soon changed).
# October 15, 2003 3:11 PM

Pete said:

Damn, I've never heard of any of those searches!
# October 17, 2003 7:36 AM

Jason said:

What stuff are you looking for? I thought the same when dealing with Underground Hip-Hop and some of the darker IDM/DnB tracks, but I found 'em.
# October 17, 2003 8:22 AM

Steve said:

One thing I did in the apple version when using the store was to just download a bunch of songs, then burn them to disk. Then, to get them onto the PC, just ripped the disk to MP3. Works great.
# October 17, 2003 9:46 AM

Jeff Key said:

The stuff I searched for was pretty typical indie/post rock. What IDM/DnB did you find? I just did a search for Amon Tobin, Autechre, DJ Spooky, Icebreaker, Mouse on Mars and Squarepusher and got no love...
# October 17, 2003 9:51 AM

Jeff Key said:

Glad to hear it, Steve, I thought of the same thing. My main concern is the clarity since the music is compressed twice, not to mention that it's a lot of work! :) Maybe I'll give it a test run on the new Stereolab.
# October 17, 2003 10:03 AM

Ryan said:

I just think you need to listen to some better music!
# October 18, 2003 2:09 PM

Jeff Key said:

Well, if you consider Barenaked Ladies, Edie Brickell, 2Pac, Miss Elliott, Rod Stewart, Sheryl Crow, Counting Crows and Linkin Park better music, I'll pass. ;) (Those were the selections on the iTunes home page.)
# October 18, 2003 2:13 PM

Ryan said:

Point taken, but show me two different songs from Linkin Park. I think iTunes is giving a service to the masses and since you are not one of those, you really should not bitch about it.
# October 18, 2003 2:25 PM

Jeff Key said:

Where did I complain about anything? I simply stated my experience. I think iTunes is great, but not for me (yet). They (mostly) don't have the music I like and it's in a format my media player and portable player don't support.
# October 18, 2003 2:55 PM

Robert Serafini said:

AAC is NOT proprietary - WMA is. Why do you begin your analysis by accepting WMP as your axiomatic "preferred media player"? Hundreds of Windows users in public forums (ArsTechnica, OSNews, and others) have declared their preference for iTunes over WMP after giving the Apple program a try. So you reach a conclusion that is driven by the door you enter. Unless, of course, you really DO prefer WMP. And given the size of the Windows world, I bet that WMA will be hacked into iTunes in a matter of weeks.
# October 19, 2003 12:17 AM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks for the info, I appreciate your candor. For some reason I was under the impression AAC was proprietary. I apologize for the inaccuracy and I updated my post to reflect it.

If you'll reread my post, you'll note that I'm writing about me, my experiences, my preferences and so on. At the same time, I'm not recommending anything to anyone; simply stating my opinion. Therefore, it would be silly of me to NOT state that WMP is my preferred media player, because it is. I'm sure there are better ones out there for any number of reasons, but WMP does what I want and I've never run into a situation that made me look for something else. I'll bet that I'm in the majority of Windows users, although that's irrelevant.

I ripped several hundred CDs to WMA. (I wish I would've ripped them to MP3 now; I've noticed MP3 at higher bitrates sounds better than WMA.) If I can't play them in iTunes, I'm not going to use iTunes. Likewise, my portable media player plays MP3 and WMA, as most do, I believe. As I understand it, only the iPod plays AAC. That doesn't work for me either.

I'll be the first to admit that I know little about all of the great sound formats, cool media players, and so on. Again, I think I'm in the majority, and my experience probably isn't uncommon. I think iTunes is great and I may use it in the future if they support the more common formats.

It's fantastic that so many Windows users are using iTunes. I've never liked the religious issues surrounding the computer industry. I don't care what OS/media player/browser/etc people use. I care about what I use and if something doesn't work w/my configuration, that's OK, I just won't use it. Makes my life just a bit less stressful (and the last thing I need is more stress).
# October 19, 2003 12:53 AM

Get a clue said:

iTunes DOES support MP3... you can even rip CD's using the MP3 encoder!
# October 19, 2003 2:30 AM

Jeff Key said:

iTunes, the service, does not support MP3. As I've mentioned, this presents a problem to my portable. iPods are great, but I'm not buying one; I have too many albums to keep on them, even the newer ones.

This is all irrelevant anyway due to the fact that there isn't much on the service for me to buy. They simply don't have much in the way of independent labels. I'm sure this will change over time. Maybe then I'll buy an iPod, get a Mac, re-rip all of my CDs, and curse everything Microsoft. In the meantime I'm stuck in my world where it just isn't useful to ME.
# October 19, 2003 2:56 AM

Tony Yaku said:

AAC == Mpeg 4. Mpeg 4 is of greater quality that mp3 of course. If you convert m4a to mp3 you would of couse get something similar to a quality had the file originally been in mp3 to begin with.
# October 19, 2003 4:39 AM

JaseyBaby said:

http://www.apple-x.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=563&mode=thread&order=1&thold=0

You really need to read the third post on the above...

Long live macs and great software
# October 19, 2003 10:21 AM

Jeff Key said:

Jasey: Very cool. It's unfortunate they won't play in my Rio, DVD player or boombox (all of which play MP3/WMA).
# October 19, 2003 10:51 AM

Carlos said:

iTunes, the program, plays MP3 just fine. iTunes Music Store uses MP4/AAC, which has digital rights management built-in to an industry standard.

WMA is a Microsoft proprietary technology, so it's unlikely Apple is going to pay licensing to Microsoft to be able to use it.

Other software like WinAMP and other digital players could play AAC songs if they choose to support QuickTime, I believe.
# October 19, 2003 11:01 AM

ash said:

i think you're actually making it more work than it is worth - i use a ipod and tunes just go on that and, blam u go, u got music... if ur rippin to WMV it aint worth it
# October 19, 2003 12:04 PM

Jeff Key said:

Disclaimer: I'm not partial to WMA. Since ripping most of my CDs to WMA (>40GB), I've noticed MP3 is warmer at the higher bitrates. If I had to do it over again, I'd rip to something beside WMA. I'm your typical Joe User when it comes to stuff like this; WMP did exactly what I wanted, so I used it. You guys need to remember that you're in the minority. Not everyone knows everything about all of the codecs, players, etc. The issues I had may be a result of my ignorance of this topic, but they will be experienced by many, many more people: The "I just want it to work w/o having to futz around with it" crowd.

Carlos: AFAIK, most other media players play WMA. If I didn't have over 40GB of stuff in WMA it wouldn't be an issue. Also, why would other players need to support QuickTime if they chose to play AAC? Isn't AAC a standard?

ash: If it was only that easy! :) The biggest iPod available is 40GB. It's $500.00. I have over 40GB of music. I have a portable player that plays my music. Even if I had < 40GB of music, why in the world would I spend $500 on a player to replace one that already works? Not only that, I would need to re-rip 11,568 tracks off of my CDs. All of this so I could use the iTunes service, which doesn't really have any music that I like anyway. I'll pass. ;)
# October 19, 2003 12:56 PM

Tony Yaku said:

Who on earth would want to lock themselves into using a proprietary file type such as WMA?
# October 19, 2003 2:32 PM

Anonymous said:

Dude, take another look...iTunes supports MP3s from the very beginning. Under Preferences->Importing you'll see some choices as to the encoder you'd like to use when ripping a CD.

If you purchase music through the iTMS, it'll be in AAC format (because of the DRM scheme being used). If you want to convert to MP3, then you''l have to burn to CD and re-rip to WMA. Hint: if you do it that way, make a MP3 CD rather than an audio CD so you'll fit more on the CD; an audio CD will retain higher fidelity, but you'll have to judge that for yourself.)
# October 19, 2003 2:35 PM

Jeff Key said:

Tony: Millions of us already have.

Anon: Dude, I have >40GB of WMA files already. What am I going to do w/those? I don't have the time to re-rip 11,568 files, although I would love to since I prefer higher bitrate MPx files, as I've mentioned previously. Unfortunately, it won't let you burn an MP3 CD with M4P files, nor will it let you convert M4P to MP3.
# October 19, 2003 3:22 PM

cossmo said:

Here is a copy of that explanation of AAC files vs. WMA and mp3 from apple-x:

People need to understand that the AAC files on the iTunes Music Store are not encoded from CD albums themselves. They are "ripped" from the 24 bit audio master--the same master from which CDs are created. So the lossy compression AAC file resulting is usually equal to, or higher in sound quality than what you find on a CD due to the modern compression algorithm being utilized. The music contained on CD albums have been re-sampled to 16-bit audio. In both instances sound information is lost. Too many people think that the iTunes Music Store files are ripped from CDs, thus implying the sound quality is degraded. So statements such as, "Besides, iTMS music files are too[sic] low quality for me." make absolutely no sense whatsoever, except to show that such person has no business providing reviews.

Furthermore, audio on CDs is sampled at 44.1kHz, so ripping songs from one's CD collection into 320kbps 48kHZ (not 48000) goes on to show this person has no understanding of audio and mp3 compression whatsoever. Encoding something with source of 44.1kHz into something else with 48kHz makes absolutely no sense and the result isn't going to be pretty. Furthermore compressing the file to 320kbps using the mp3 algorithm is stupid as you neglect any benefit for which the mp3 compression was intended. Anyway, this goes to further support my claim that reviewers should be limited to those who are knowlegeable about what they are reviewing before making comments to a broad audience, some comments of which may be inaccurate and misleading.
# October 19, 2003 3:47 PM

Jeff Key said:

Tony: As I've said several times before, I could care less about formats and I'm certainly not emotionally tied to WMA. I just can't stomach posts like yours. Here's the poop: WMA at lower bitrates sounds better than MP3 and the files are smaller. WMA is supported by almost every media player, portable, etc. So what if it's proprietary? I can play WMA on my computer, on my Rio, in my DVD player, etc. M4A/P isn't proprietary. I can't play it on my Rio, I can't play it in my DVD player, my boombox, etc. How is that better? I can't find a way to have iTunes talk to my Rio. How is that better? Isn't Apple locking me in by only supporting iPod?

I'm now convinced M4A/P is the way to go. BUT nothing I use, other than computer media players, support it, so I can't go with it yet. Sure, I could re-rip everything to MP3, but what's the point? I can do all that with WMP. I actually like some of the stuff in WMP that iTunes doesn't have, like the AMG info, etc. I really like using iTunes, but it just doesn't work in my current situation.

One simple thing would make me switch: If iTunes supported WMA playback (like everyone else). I could live with copying things to my Rio manually. If iTunes supported my existing library I could much, much more easily transition to using MPA for my private collection and make iTunes my permanent player. I still wouldn't be able to play the things I downloaded on my Rio, DVD player, etc., but considering I have 11,568 other song to choose from, that's not a huge issue.
# October 19, 2003 3:52 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks cossmo. Regarding the comments about "reviewers": I blogged my experience, which I think is valid. I'm a typical user. I use the free stuff Microsoft gives out, just like millions of other Windows users. My experience is valid to the majority of my peers.

Anyway, I haven't debated the quality of AAC. I think it's great and I've stated that several times. If my Rio, DVD player, etc. supported it, I'd use it.
# October 19, 2003 3:59 PM

cossmo said:

This issue of WMA versus the higher quality AAC open format reminds me a little (just a very little) about my friend having a huge vinyl collection with his expensive turntable and cartridge needles who moved into CDs kicking and screaming. Not an easy thing for your to do Jeff, since you have 11,000+ songs in WMA. Maybe a suggestion is for you to jump to AAC with any new songs you acquire and slowly convert the ones you listen to into mp3. Nothing says you have to convert everything over, but this seems to be the deliema we all face not just with sound files, but with documents created years ago that most new pieces of equipment can't read. Such is life.

BTW, the article I sent was to explain the differences in the quality, not to flame you. I thought about editing, but decided to just leave it as originally posted on apple-x.
# October 19, 2003 4:09 PM

Jeff Key said:

Sorry if I came off harshly; I've quickly become accustomed to getting flamed. :)

Anyway, I agree completely. If iTunes supported WMA, I could switch over immediately. I wouldn't make sense for me to re-rip things over time to MP3 and still use two players in the process (WMP for WMA and iTunes for everything else). One of the reasons I ripped everything was so I could have an "ultimate shuffle". I'm rediscovering things I haven't listened to in years. Some albums sound fine in WMA, but some are lacking depth. I don't have a problem re-ripping those that require better quality if I'm using a single player.

Regardless of players, formats, etc., the fact that the iTunes service doesn't carry most of the music I listen to makes this whole thread moot. I'll revisit this topic in a few months and see what they offer. If their catalog is more robust I'll certainly reconsider. If I can make most/all of my music purchases through them it would surely alter my position.
# October 19, 2003 4:25 PM

MacBuddy said:

AAC was developed by Dolby. I would think that they know something about sound, no?

The DRM that Apple uses - 'Fairplay' - has LESS restrictions thAn M$s DRM.

iTunes has ALWAYS supported mp3. And STILL does.
# October 19, 2003 5:33 PM

Jeff Key said:

MacBuddy: AAC is great. What's your point?
# October 19, 2003 5:43 PM

Squinty said:

To convert a non-MP3 file to MP3 in iTunes, set MP3 as your Importing format (Preferences > Importing > Import Using), select the song(s) and then pull down the Advanced menu and select "Convert Selection to MP3." No need to double convert or burn any CDs.

If you set AAC as your importing format, the Advanced selection will be "Convert Selection to AAC."
# October 19, 2003 6:14 PM

pixelguru said:

iTunes doesn't support WMA because it is a closed Microsoft format. If your player doesn't support open formats like AAC, maybe you should consider getting a better player before bashing iTunes???

...just a thought
# October 19, 2003 7:53 PM

Jeff Key said:

pixelguru: Have I bashed iTunes? No. Have you read any of my responses? Apparently not. Did you miss "iTunes: Great program" and "..iTunes clearly shines".

Come on guys, I've responded to all this already, several times. This is my last post in this thread. If you're actually reading this and plan on flaming me, please read this whole thread before doing so. I'm not bashing Apple or AAC or anything else, for that matter. I had a bad experience. It happens. Even with Apple stuff. Thanks for your input.

To summarize:
- I think iTunes is great.
- AAC/M4A/M4P are great formats, better than WMA.
- I have 11,568 WMA files. Other formats are better. I realize this. If you want to re-rip hundreds of my CDs for me to M4A, come on over. I don't have time, but I'll pay for beer.
- iTunes doesn't support WMA, therefore it's not a good solution for ME. Now.
- iTunes doesn't carry music I like, therefore there's really not much for me to buy.
- I've used Macs since the early days when you could stuff the little box in a bag. I think they're great.
- I love each and every one of you.
# October 19, 2003 8:14 PM

MacBuddy said:

You've voiced your (current?) preference for WMA, AND your unwillingness to to re-rip your 11k+ songs. Yet you complain that Apple doesn't support WMA.

You 'chose' MS's solution, yet you want Apple to 'fix' it? Had you 'chosen' the 'open' mp3 format - at a decent bitrate - you may not be in this situation today.

BTW, does MS support (Apple's choice of) Dolby's AAC?

Does Chevy support Ford engines ?
# October 19, 2003 9:15 PM

Wet Willie Willy said:

The question that the folks on board should have been asking isnt whether AAC or WMA is superior to one or another, but why the other portable players do not support AAC.

I mean, how difficult is it to support an open standard? The codes are there, the licensing scheme is there, everything under the Huwawa Sun is there.

Rather than bitching at Apple for not supporting WMA, a closed standard, how about bitching about Roxio and the other mofos about not supporting open standard. This goes against the spirit of many platforms that have emerged in the past. . . that being. . an open standard always seems to win out.

Why not have those commodities support dual standards? WMA, AAC, and other linux sampling compressions? Is it difficult? I doubt it.

Either way, why did Roxio and the other mofos committ their souls to WMA? It doesnt make sense, theyre in the business to make money. .so why lock themselves into one single code? On the other hand, with Apple, its understandable. . they want to sell as many iPods as possible, and they encoded the iTunes so it would only play AAC.

The funny thing is. . if Roxio and the other mofos started to support AAC, the advantage of the iPod other than its design, would disappear.

Go figure.
# October 19, 2003 9:17 PM

Charles Gaba said:

"So what if it's proprietary?"

"'m a typical user. I use the free stuff Microsoft gives out, just like millions of other Windows users."

Jeff--

I know you said that you won't be responding anymore to this thread, but I'm hoping that you're still at least *reading* the additional posts, because I think that the two quotes above (from two separate posts of yours in this thread) are at the heart of the issue.

You're right, millions of Windows users, haven't given a rat's ass about Microsoft's closed, proprietary formats for years--whether it's Office formats like .doc, .xls, .ppt or media formats like .wmv and .wma, or even their corrupted version of Java. This is at the heart of the DOJ's failed-even-though-they-won antitrust case against Microsoft: they've abused their frightening position (over 90% market share) in one field by cramming their own versions of "standards" down the throats of everyone else (see the formats above). THIS is what's illegal, immoral and unethical, NOT having the operating system monopoly in the first place.

Here's the way it works in a nutshell:

--an independant group of unbiased experts in a given technology will come up with a particular set of standards for a given format, which every company (except Microsoft) agrees is the highest quality, most customizable, and most consumer-beneficial available.

--Microsoft will come out with it's own format which is usually of lesser quality, less customizable, and less consumer-beneficial than the agreed-upon standard.

--Microsoft will then flood the OS market (which it owns over 90% of) with it's often inferior, usually buggy, always proprietary format. It will offer the "first hit for free" of course, to guarantee that most people use it. It will then proceed to strongarm all of it's vendors/customers into using it's format (and ONLY it's format), under penalty of being destroyed, bought out, or driven out of the marketplace by the mighty Microsoft.

--as a result, you end up having a constant pattern of dueling formats: a high-quality one agreed upon by the general community, and a lesser-quality one crammed down everyone's throat by Microsoft. In most cases, unfortunately, Microsoft wins by brute force.

This time, the battle is between AAC (open, higher-quality) and WMA (closed, lower-quality). AAC has the open standards groups, Apple, the iPod, and the iTMS in it's corner (all of which are there voluntarily). WMA has Microsoft and a plethora of iTMS wannabes in it's corner (some of whom are there only out of fear of being squashed by Microsoft if they don't tow the line).

It will be interesting to see who prevails this time...
# October 19, 2003 10:36 PM

Kristofer Baxter said:

Jeff, I have a simple idea for you, go to download.com and pick up a free copy of dbPower AMP.

This software will convert your proprietary WMAs to mp2,mp3,m4p, using a large set of different encoders. Be sure to download the wma codec plug-in from their page and give iTunes a fair chance with the converted music.

This won't solve the problem with putting music from the Apple Music Store on your mp3 player, but it is a start.
# October 19, 2003 11:38 PM

Kristofer Baxter said:

Furthermore, email me if you need more help with the process.
# October 19, 2003 11:40 PM

MacBuddy said:

BTW, which of these might be a 'cheaper' solution for 'Apple'?

a) You invite some folks over for an all weekend Beer and Pizza, then Beer and ChineseFood, mp3-ripping, sleep-over.

Or...

b) Apple has a team of 4-5 people incorporate the WMA codecs into iTunes & the iPod over a work week and post them on their website, plus have some of their lawyers pound out 'the deal' with TheBomber for licensing.

# October 20, 2003 1:25 AM

David said:

Jeff

There are shareware programs that convert WMA to MP3 format. Having never used them I can't recommend one over another, but it might be worth a try to convert a couple and see how they sound. I find that iTunes sound quality is better than WMP.

Go to http://www.versiontracker.com and search on WMA.
# October 20, 2003 6:08 AM

rickag said:

Some one, I forget who, mentioned that the iPod is the only player that uses AAC. Albeit there aren't as many, yet, they do exist.

Do a google search, it may surprise you.

Some manufacturers I found.
.... Panasonic
.... Creative Labs
.... Samsung
.... Pogo flipster

AAC is realatively new and will only gain in acceptance for compressed music.
# October 20, 2003 9:37 AM

Shane Bauer said:

wow man, 31 comments. Did your blog entry get linked from a Mac fan site like my iPod entry did?
# October 20, 2003 8:32 PM

cossmo said:

Charles Gaba-- I do like your summary of what this monopoly has created. Trouble with situations like this is MS is also in the position to do some "funny stuff". Awhile back, many windows users were getting lots of error messages when using Quicktime, so the majority of them got so frustrated and uninstalled it in favor of WMA or realplayer. In fact there was nothing wrong with QT but it was caused by MS. But your explanation is right on -- this is always the argument I have with my brother's who stays with windows in that doing so perpetuates this kind of illegal activity. There should be much more competition out there to always stimulate higher and higher quality products. We should be open to other formats like Linux and others.

Now that 1 million versions of iTunes and 1 million songs have been sold during the first 3 days, I think music devices will quickly adapt to AAC, making it the defacto standard. I really believe that all of discussion will be moot in a couple of months.
# October 20, 2003 10:47 PM

finn said:

fwiw, Apple is working with the indies to get a broader selection of music online. they started with just the big five labels, but know they need to expand what they have available. for example, if you'd searched a month ago you wouldn't have found pavement or yo la tengo either since matador didn't have their music up yet.
# October 21, 2003 3:23 PM

Brad Wilson said:

By the way, I don't think that Jeff is trying to push Apple to license WMA into the iPod (although the lack of WMA is what's stopping me from buying one). All he wanted, I think, was to have iTunes be able to play WMAs. Given that the WMA playback code is free and freely redistributable on Windows, I don't think it's much of a stretch to ask Apple to support WMA playback on iTunes for Windows.
# October 22, 2003 8:33 AM

Robert Scoble said:

He loves the attention!
# October 22, 2003 11:38 PM

Eric W. Bachtal said:

Gee whiz. The FUD-o-meter just popped its stack. If he really believes all that (and the emphatic tone suggests he does), he's living in a whole different wacky universe from me. Egads,

"dangerous software buried inside"
"dangers of Microsoft Office 2003"
"change anything on your computer at anytime"
"foisted onto computer users"
"forcing consumers to accept"
"limit your ability [and] restrict choices"
"cripple other software"
"you will be forced to use"

and on and on. Then he suggests all of this stems from MS now giving "its users the ability to control who can read and edit certain documents". Whoa, are they insane?!

Wait. You mean they aren't "forcing" users to do it? They aren't "limiting" users' ability not to do it? They aren't stealing first-borns and plundering villages and destroying all that is holy and dear?

Phew. For a minute there I thought I might have to get me a copy of that there super cheapo Lindows and go hunker in my bunker.
# October 23, 2003 12:17 AM

Doug Thews said:

Jeez, and the Linux community thinks that pro-Microsoft people are off the deep end.
# October 23, 2003 12:37 AM

Jeff Key said:

Anti-flame disclaimer (required after my recent iTunes-related beating): I know the spell checker for .Text is a third party util and therefore there really is no irony.
# October 23, 2003 2:54 AM

Shane Bauer said:

It's amazing that people like himself run companies. Anyone want Lindows?
# October 23, 2003 10:34 AM

Eric said:

Jeff,
Believe it or not, someone already has a patent or trademark on the smiley face. I used to have an email message about it, but I cannot find the message.

Later,

Eric
# October 23, 2003 10:10 PM

Jeff Key said:

That's no good. Maybe I'll go for a Good Vibes™ web service.
# October 23, 2003 10:41 PM

Philip Scott said:

My big VB3 app had the rocket ship icon from the Icons folder. I can't believe the same icons from VB3 are still included. I think all they've added are some crappy Win95 toolbar bitmaps for us to "leverage."

And the snippetcompiler definitely put a hop in my step, so the icon is perfect.
# October 23, 2003 11:37 PM

Jeffrey McManus said:

I'm going to need a beer or three after my BOF on Monday night. Come find me and we'll knock some back!
# October 24, 2003 1:24 PM

Tim Marman said:

I'm so jealous.

Make sure you guys find Faisal (http://weblogs.asp.net/fmohamood) and make him drink with you :)
# October 24, 2003 2:37 PM

Rich C said:

Ahh! That is why I got into VMWare this summer. I am going to have to find a way to go without sleep even more now!
# October 24, 2003 5:01 PM

Jeff Key said:

Will do, Jeffrey!
# October 24, 2003 5:57 PM

n4cer said:

Jeff, this suggestion won't be of immediate benefit, but should help in the long run. The main caveat is that it requires more storage space than you may like.

Whenever you get around to re-ripping your audio from the original source material (CD, etc.), rip it to a compressed, but lossless format such as WMA Lossless (or others like Monkey's Audio, etc., whatever your preference).

Keep this lossless media on you harddrive as an archive of the content that is smaller than the original wav audio, but retains the exact same quality.

Then, you can transcode the content from lossless format to whatever lossy format is currently popular for whatever portable device you have at the time. This will save you from ever having to re-rip from the original CD or other source (barring harddrive failure, accidental erasure, etc.).

Also, if you used WMA Lossless, for example, and MS developed Windows Media 10 and was able to improve the compression ratio of the lossless codec, or there was another lossless format that offered better compression, etc., and you wanted to convert your archive to that format for the increased benefits, you could transcode to the new format directly (with available tools) without loss in quality. Or, if necessary, you can convert the WMA Lossless back to wav, then encode in the new lossless format while still retaining original quality.

Microsoft has a commandline tool

Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless to PCM Converter

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/encoder/utilities.aspx

to convert WMA Lossless files back to wav, and, of course, WMP can produce Lossless content from the original source and transcode from the lossless media in your library to a lossy format for your portable.

Monkey's Audio can also be converted back and forth or transcoded.
http://www.monkeysaudio.com/index.html

Also, dbPowerAmp is a good (and free) tool for conversion between a number of formats (including WMA and Monkey's Audio)

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm
# October 26, 2003 12:56 AM

Pete said:

It's been leaked anyway:

http://www.winbeta.org/winbeta/

more specifically:

http://www.winbeta.org/winbeta/forums/index.php?s=8a9a8d757f442e42507d259c65b71a98&showtopic=1036
# October 26, 2003 3:08 PM

Mark belles said:

YES! Application.EnableVisualStyles is the mother of SEHException(s)... I recently stumbled upon the call and quickly did away with my mananifest file, however I also became aware of this strange new feature of my application. It miraculously has decided that after months of coding, it will now kindly throw a SEHException after I use ShowDialog() to show any form over the form passed to Application.Run(). This happens 10/10 times for me. I'm calling EnableVisualStyles(); DoEvent(); in the first lines of my code, well before any controls or windows are created. I'm pretty sure that this is the source of my problems. I'm gonna run and comment that shit out and see what happens. I'll post back with the results, as I've been debugging this for like 6 hours, and have had no damn sleep this is fresh on my mind... grrrrr.
# October 30, 2003 9:38 AM

Mark Belles said:

Yup, commented that code out, and my app runs like the champ i new it was! I'm gonna do some further testing and pinpoint this, will post back with the results.
# October 30, 2003 9:42 AM

Ralph said:

I agree with all...How can we contact Microsoft in regards to this and get these issues straight?!?!?!?
# October 31, 2003 11:13 AM

Kartal Guner said:

would they call it Google.NET?
# October 31, 2003 5:46 PM

The Jeff said:

Sad, very very sad.
# October 31, 2003 7:14 PM

James Avery said:

The funny thing is that Google might make about 25B from an IPO, and Microsoft actually has anough cash to match that.

-James
# October 31, 2003 10:11 PM

julie lerman said:

Here here. The power of two! Great job guys.
# October 31, 2003 11:21 PM

Ingo Rammer said:

So what about the beer? ;-)

-Ingo
# November 1, 2003 1:34 AM

Jeff Key said:

Perhaps that's a better question for Christoph... :)
# November 1, 2003 1:42 AM

Ingo Rammer said:

Hehehe ... let's see if I can find some of the photos of this night ...

-Ingo
# November 1, 2003 2:02 AM

Jeff Key said:

Forgot to mention that I have a 2.4Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM, so the computer isn't exactly a slouch. IIRC, the VPC bits are still early beta, so that's probably the issue.
# November 1, 2003 3:33 AM

Pete said:

Sounds like it only occurs with a very specific device.. probably more of a firmware problem than Apples.

Still a nasty one though, but I've seen worse things happen in windows.
# November 1, 2003 9:47 AM

Tim Marman said:

Longhorn itself installed very quickly for me (like 20 minutes)... it's starting up that seems to take awhile :)

The only problem I've run into so far is that it seems the drivers for my printer aren't compatible, and now I can't run the OS with the printer installed.
# November 1, 2003 1:15 PM

Jeff Key said:

Holy cow! That wasn't in Virtual PC, was it? I installed LH onto a separate partition on my main computer and that took .5 hour or so. Not so bad.

I'm glad I'm not the only one seeing the startup issue. Not only that, once I get to the desktop the processor is pegged at 100% for 10 minutes or so while SLSRV.EXE does something very important. Not that I'm complaining..I'm happy just to have the bits!
# November 1, 2003 3:25 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 1, 2003 10:33 PM

Dan said:

I was at PDC and have "the goods" CD pack. Where is the product key for Virtual PC? I have one for Longhorn from the windowsbeta website, but that one doesn't work for VPC, nor does the one from the MS VPC website.

Thanks for any directions.
# November 2, 2003 12:24 PM

Jeff Key said:

When you insert the DVD with VirtualPC on it, an autorun HTML page should load. The product ID is on that page (in red) near the bottom.
# November 2, 2003 8:00 PM

Dave said:

Interesting. My own experience speaks to the validity of 4 of these so-called myths.

Windows _is_ less scalable than Unix/Linux if you define a major component of scalable to be needing less horsepower to do the same job.

Windows servers have improved greatly since NT4, but still need bouncing the box much more frequently than any other OS out there.

MS refuses to put out a coherant and unobtrusive system of patches (SP2 anybody?) and instead continues to put out several a month - many requiring a (DAMMIT) reboot.

MS has also improved greatly in the last 18 months, but please don't try to convince me that they STILL have a large price to pay to shore up their woeful past of unconcern of security over functionality.

Do these mean you should "bar" Windows from the Enterprise? Absolutely not. But they are not myths nor should they be something to forget when you use Windows in the Enterprise.
# November 3, 2003 6:58 AM

Jason Mark said:

Having not been lucky enough to be at PDC this year, I await my MSDN shipment w/ the previews. I presume that VPC 2004 was distributed at PDC as well? I can only manage to find Connectix 5.2 on the MSDN site unless I'm blind which is always a possibility! :) Anyone?
# November 3, 2003 12:35 PM

Jeff Key said:

Jason: Yes, it was, and I think it's the only way they've distributed it to the public thus far. Don't start worrying about your eyes yet!
# November 3, 2003 12:42 PM

yvision said:

will be interesting to see what format the dell players are going to support when they come to market. my guess is that they support wma mp2 mp3 and m4a but unless msft improves wma dramtically it is still a gonner except as an archive
# November 3, 2003 1:43 PM

John Stites said:

I get so tired of people complaining about microsoft and the security patches they put out. If you announce to the world that you have a puzzle and that you think nobody in the world can solve it, you're going to get a lot of people working on the same problem.

Well microsoft has done just that - they put out an OS and said "this is secure." You're going to get every hack and lunatic trying their damndest to deface and damage the OS that a great majority of the population relies on. (Let's go after the electrical grid while we're at it) With such a large surface area, there's going to be security threats. No this-or-that about it. There will be holes.

But instead of shirking the issue, microsoft instantly writes a patch and includes it in the windows update service so you can easily apply it and continue on your merry way.

Linux is great. Find a security hole there, you have to submit it to open source to fix it. You'll instantly have 57 different implementations to fix the hole from 57 different jacko's out there with too much time on their hands. Sounds great, sign me up.
# November 4, 2003 11:48 AM

Philip Rieck said:

Heh... you found the ExStencil folder (As did I - just today.. in fact was going to write _This_ blog entry, until you beat me to it)

Now what? The only thing I could do was modify the existing file. Adding more seemed to do nothing, and I couldn't figure out where / how to "register" new expansion files. Let me know if you do.
# November 6, 2003 11:22 PM

HumanCompiler said:

It would definitely make sense to be a system wide setting that you could turn on or off. I would think it would necessary for people to be able to turn it off or it would be really intrusive, IMHO.
# November 7, 2003 9:59 AM

Maxim V. Karpov said:

Yea, I saw it. What I gather from all of the PDC posts and articles. It looks like MS is trying to bake into OS a lot of things. At the moment CLR (managed) provides a nice transition for MS from XP OS to LongHorn. Our Apps in managed enviroments should be able to run just fine in new OS, or at least it is a desire. I want to keep the same seperation between OS and Managed Enviroment as it is right now. So, I guess it does matter if LongHorn is being developed in managed enviroment!

My two cents, Maxim
# November 7, 2003 1:03 PM

Sigurdur G. Gunnarsson said:

What I'd like to know is.. does WinFX rely on Win32 and wrap a lot of unmanaged code like the current Framework does, and will there be a time in the future when it won't? :)
# November 7, 2003 1:30 PM

Jay @ Microsoft said:

I'm glad to see our work is being so well received. We're pretty exited about it, too!

You can add new expansions, but you have to get the syntax just right. Try copying an existing one to start with, and making incremental modifications to get the result you want. The only thing that *must* change is the "shortcut" which has to be unique for each expansion.

Remember that all of this can, and probably will, change, vanish, etc. before the final release.
# November 7, 2003 2:15 PM

G. Andrew Duthie said:

Actually, that might be all it would take for me to use IE instead of Firebird...that, and tabbed browsing. :-)
# November 7, 2003 5:45 PM

Jeff Key said:

Tabbed browsing would be excellent. If Longhorn's IE is any indication (since it has popup blocking, download manager, etc), then it won't. Sadness.
# November 7, 2003 6:40 PM

Jason Nadal said:

Actually, from what I've read, it's alpha...If this is alpha, then I really look forward to beta!
# November 7, 2003 11:09 PM

Jeff Key said:

Whew, thank goodness. ;) v1 went through a very long beta and with a realease of v2 in 1H of 2004, I made the assumption based on time. I, too, can't wait to see beta! Hopefully they'll post it on MSDN.
# November 7, 2003 11:17 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Jay. I finally got one working:

http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/posts/36500.aspx
# November 8, 2003 2:07 AM

Don Box said:

There is no "unmanaged" Indigo or Avalon underneath the CLR assemblies. I'll defer to ChrisAn wrt Avalon, but Indigo is built in managed code on top of System.Xml, System.IO, and System.Net.

System.Xml is 100% managed.

System.IO and System.Net are a mix of interop + some CLR and BCL magic.

# November 9, 2003 5:57 PM

Markus The said:

Have you ever had a look at QuickCode.NET? It does this without requiring you to edit an XML file...And it *will* stay stable between VS.NET releases! ;-)

(I know, I know, this is a beta of Whidbey)

# November 10, 2003 2:26 AM

Jeff Key said:

I have, Markus. Good stuff! It was lacking one feature I was looking for, I forget what now, so I wrote my own.
# November 10, 2003 5:06 AM

Pete said:

Why not just use Avant Browser? It uses the same engine as ie, but adds popup blocking, tabs, and more. I've been using it for a while and aside from one or two annoyances (more thanks to the ie component than avant) it's been great.
# November 10, 2003 10:43 AM

Markus The said:

I'd really like to know what that feature was, in case you remember. Because we're going to have to stay (at least) one step ahead of Whidbey, won't we?

BTW: I still don't know if I should be flattered or feel threatened by this Stencil feature. Imitation *could* be the sincerest form of flattery (or am I imagining things?). On the other hand it could just be someone breathing down your neck!
# November 10, 2003 4:34 PM

Meghan Perez - VS Core Editor said:

I'm happy to see the positive energy around this feature. We are updating this feature right now quite a bit and I hope you'll be happy with the results.

I'd suggest that you wait until future updates to spend *too* much time writing your own templates. The format has changed, although not drastically, which will force you to recreate these.
# November 11, 2003 2:39 AM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Meghan, good to know. :)
# November 11, 2003 8:41 AM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Pete, I'll check that out.
# November 11, 2003 8:42 AM

Allen Prescott said:

Oh Meghan stop being a wet blanket! Let everyone party on the extencils guilt free:-)

I think that you should all encourage Meghan to write a converter for the ones that you are writing now...
# November 12, 2003 3:03 AM

damien morton said:

There are some attacks based on causing lots of hashcode collisions. These are called algorithmic complexity attacks.

The defene against them is to "key" the hash function so that between executions, or even between hashtable resizes, the hashcode returned is unpredictable. It will still fullfill the contract that if a == b then a.GetHashCode() == b.GetHashCode().

Basically, relying on other properties of GetHashCode is a mistake. Frankly, the object identity that GetHashCode returns is also a mistake; they could have at least incremented their counter by some big number instead of 1, or multiply their dequence number by a large prime before returning Object.GetHashCode().
# November 14, 2003 5:58 PM

SBC said:

some more stuff on SQL Server -
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1379610,00.asp
# November 14, 2003 11:47 PM

Rico Mariani said:

I love the tutorial, it has excellent examples of usage but also has some information on some things that go wrong and what you see in CLR Profiler when they do. This doc is so good I recommend it even if you never plan to use the tool just for the pictures and insight.
# November 15, 2003 2:44 AM

Adam Kinney said:

Hey thanks for the heads up, looks a good blog to follow.
# November 15, 2003 1:05 PM

Tru said:

Thank you so much for the information about the F Lock issue.
http://www.mvps.org/jtsang/flock.html

Much better.
# November 16, 2003 3:25 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 17, 2003 10:08 PM

xtraa said:

This is what it looks like :D I made it a few weeks ago...

http://www.xyborx.dk/humor/msgoogle.gif

Good laughs and greetz from Hamburg,

xtraa
# November 22, 2003 7:36 PM

Phil Scott said:

How the noise level on that sucker. I was thinking of picking a couple of them up and run them in RAID, but I was afraid the thing would sound like an air plane taking off.
# November 22, 2003 8:08 PM

Jeff Key said:

It's not at all noticeable. Every once in a while I'll hear something, but it's no louder than the 7,200 ATA drive. I can't recommend it enough!
# November 22, 2003 8:14 PM

M. Keith Warren said:

I am striping two WD SATA Raptors; best upgrade I have ever done!
# November 22, 2003 10:18 PM

Michael Campbell said:

Now if we could only get these pigs in laptops! :D Glad to see these numbers... and the best number of all is the 11 minutes for an install of XP (now that's a number I can instantly relate to).
# November 22, 2003 10:55 PM

Avonelle Lovhaug said:

Right on the money!
# November 23, 2003 2:09 AM

Steven Smith said:

I'm with Michael - I want one for my laptop. Although I might want it to be able to run slower when I'm on batteries, since I think it must certainly be a power hog... Arg, the constant conflict between mobility and RAW POWER...
# November 23, 2003 3:13 AM

Jeff Key said:

A guy I work with recently got a 7,200 RPM drive for his ThinkPad. Not too shabby; I didn't know they broke the 5,400 barrier..
# November 23, 2003 3:45 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Don't forget the larger cache (probably 8MB vs the 2MB on your older drive) and 33% higher rotation speed which are likely the cause of the higher overall speed you got with the SATA drive. (and they can handle more throughput, but don't forget: an ATA100 drive can theoretically have a throughput of 100MB/sec, but will average on 30, 33MB / sec max.)
# November 23, 2003 5:59 AM

julie lerman said:

Hey Jeff-
See http://weblogs.asp.net/jlerman/posts/38819.aspx
# November 23, 2003 9:05 AM

julie lerman said:

p.s. - more importantly - the comments of the above post....
# November 23, 2003 9:09 AM

greg said:

I've got s-ata, too. But how to install longhorn onto it? I couldn't succeed. Any tips?
# November 23, 2003 4:17 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Julie. I agree that it would be great if they could parse out what was indeed text and somehow leave the images in relatively the same place. Considering how amazing the handwriting recognition is, I bet they can do it. ;)
# November 23, 2003 6:02 PM

Jeff Key said:

Greg: Don't know about that one. I've decided to stick with Longhorn in a VPC until the beta, so I haven't tried.
# November 23, 2003 6:03 PM

Justin Rudd said:

How about -

OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID(N'mytable'),N'IsUserTable')

Returns 1 if it is a user table, 0 if it is not a user table, and NULL if the object doesn't exist.
# November 23, 2003 10:11 PM

Darrell said:

That's correct, as long as Microsoft follows through with it. The view does provide a layer of abstraction from changes to the sysobjects table, which Microsoft can and does change.
# November 23, 2003 10:32 PM

TrackBack said:

# November 23, 2003 11:16 PM

Garrett Serack said:

Hey Simon :)

ScintillaNET is working quite great actually. You can find a recent build of it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/scide , and our mailing lists are at http://www.scide.net . You may wish to check it out.

It is still undergoing some changes, but is certianly usable.

Garrett
# November 26, 2003 9:48 AM

TrackBack said:

# November 26, 2003 1:58 PM

Jeff Key said:

Forgot to mention I got the link from Gunnersonsan: http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/EricGu/permalink.aspx/ec3e6df8-fddb-4ec1-9766-f7b0f165da55
# November 28, 2003 6:17 PM

brad abrams said:

Thanks for the plug Jeff... Yes, we do spend HOURS everyday discussing these issues... I have recently found it VERY handy to use comments and quotes from folks off from my blog in these discussions... Clearly helping us build a better platform API...
# November 28, 2003 7:51 PM

HumanCompiler said:

I don't think people who have been using VB.NET for a while use them anyway...I know I don't. Didn't know the technical details of it though...thanks for the read :)
# November 28, 2003 9:46 PM

SBC said:

I take a more "English grammarian" approach - basing the properties & methods by classifying the 'adjectives' and 'verbs' of the 'nouns' (objects/classes).. worked so far.. (touch wood)..
# November 29, 2003 7:28 PM

Shahn Hogan said:

I could absolutely use this type of utility. I'm getting ready to purchase a new drive myself. I'm sort of reluctant to do so, mostly because of the drive letter confusion for my wife. If you release it you'd have at least one download.

# November 29, 2003 10:33 PM

Jeff Key said:

Haha oops! I forgot to include the download link to the debug bits. I've since updated the post. Sorry about that!
# November 29, 2003 10:35 PM

Brian Desmond said:

Well, if you've got someplace to back all your stuff up, you can convert the disks to dyanmic disks in Computer Management, and create a RAID0 where all the drives are striped together as one. I forget what the limit is on the max # of GB in a partition, but its a decent size.

The better solution, but more expensive is to get an IDE RAID controller. They're not terribly expensive, and they're also a hell of a lot faster than Windows software RAID.
# November 29, 2003 10:41 PM

Jeff Key said:

Regarding the wife problem, if she sticks with "My Documents" as her file repository, you should be all set. Since My Documents is a logical folder, you can put it anywhere, including the new drive, and she'll never know. (Unless she's playing around in the command prompt, and if that's the case you've plenty of other things to worry about...)
# November 29, 2003 10:45 PM

Brian Grunkemeyer said:

That's a good workaround. However, you should consider using TextWriter.Null instead of writing your own class. We were thinking ahead in V1, providing it for this exact purpose. (Unfortunately it is a static field, not a property. We forgot to fix once properties were supported by our compilers. But you can of course still use it, probably with identical syntax.)

- Brian
CLR Base Class Libraries team
# November 30, 2003 4:55 AM

Jeff Key said:

Wouldn't you know it. I don't have my beloved MSDN docs installed locally for a couple days and look what happens. Glad to know it's there for next next. Thanks!
# November 30, 2003 5:03 AM

AsbjornM said:

Should we post bugs here?

System.IO.PathTooLongException: The path is too long after being fully qualified. Make sure path is less than 260 characters.
at System.IO.Path.nGetFullPathHelper(String path, Char[] invalidPathChars, Char[] whitespaceChars, Char directorySeparator, Char altDirectorySeparator, Char volumeSeparator, Boolean fullCheck, String& newPath)
at System.IO.Path.GetFullPathInternal(String path)
at System.Security.Util.StringExpressionSet.CanonicalizePath(String path, Boolean needFullPath)
at System.Security.Util.StringExpressionSet.AddExpressions(String[] str, Boolean checkForDuplicates, Boolean needFullPath)
at System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission.AddPathList(FileIOPermissionAccess access, String[] pathListOrig, Boolean checkForDuplicates, Boolean needFullPath, Boolean copyPathList)
at System.Security.Permissions.FileIOPermission..ctor(FileIOPermissionAccess access, String path)
at System.IO.FileSystemInfo.get_FullName()
at SingleDrive.MainForm.PopulateDirectory(TreeNode node) in D:\Documents and Settings\Jeff\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\sliver\SingleDrive\_Project\MainForm.cs:line 519
at SingleDrive.MainForm.tv_AfterSelect(Object sender, TreeViewEventArgs e) in D:\Documents and Settings\Jeff\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\sliver\SingleDrive\_Project\MainForm.cs:line 582
at System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.OnAfterSelect(TreeViewEventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.TvnSelected(NMTREEVIEW* nmtv)
at System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.WmNotify(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.TreeView.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)
# November 30, 2003 8:17 AM

Wallym said:

Oracle has a similar problem.

Wally
# November 30, 2003 9:24 AM

Shahn Hogan said:

Jeff,
Yeah I try to keep our stuff in the MyDocuments, but sometimes I move our music around and that doesn't go over to well. :) Thanks for the download, I'll check it out today.
# November 30, 2003 11:02 AM

Tobias Luetke said:

But you do know that windows NT has this functionallity build in on filesystem level?

You can mount hard drives into the file system of your main harddrive in the Disk manager.
# November 30, 2003 11:13 AM

Jeff Key said:

Tobias: AFAIK you can't do that w/mapped drives, and that's what I really needed since more than half of my drives are on my server, not my workstation.
# November 30, 2003 1:08 PM

HumanCompiler said:

Very cool, Jeff! *thumbsup*

Isn't LongHorn doing something like this too eventually?
# November 30, 2003 1:11 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Eric. Regarding Longhorn: Kind of. WinFS is a layer of abstraction above your logical drives, but doesn't necessarily consist of each entire drive. Currently, only a couple "folders" in Longhorn are backed by WinFS (Documents, etc.). I've read that WinFS supports some pretty cool replication, but I'm not sure if you can transparently include metadata for files or objects that don't exist on your machine.

Disclaimer: I haven't been able to keep up my Longhorn reading lately so I may be completely wrong.
# November 30, 2003 1:40 PM

Dave Dustin said:

Very nice little application.

About the only thing I can think of that is also needed in it is the ability to move files/folders around inside the folders.
# November 30, 2003 3:32 PM

Thomas Williams said:

G'day Jeff, thanks for the utility mate! Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, would it be difficult to add:
- copy/paste
- icon/list views
- "real" right-click menu for each file
The potential for this utility reminds me of an old file manager XTreeGold...
# November 30, 2003 6:32 PM

John Frazier (Borland) said:

You should never install any Java application to a path that has spaces. Whenever one of these paths has to be resolved to the classpath, bad things happen and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) has problems. Since OptimizeIt is mostly written in Java, it is subject to this same precaution.
# December 1, 2003 5:22 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, John, I had no idea. You may want to enforce that requirement in the installer, as I chose a folder with spaces (assuming the installer was from another era) and it let me proceed.
# December 1, 2003 5:28 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks for the comments. Hopefully I'll get some free time over the next week or two to add those things and get the source out.
# December 1, 2003 5:38 PM

Mel Grubb said:

You know you can detach the tool windows, right? SImply Un-pin a tool window like the server explorer for example. Once it's unpinned, you can grab the title bar and drag it around the screen, or if you really want a lot of space, onto a second monitor.
# December 2, 2003 4:28 PM

Ryan Rinaldi said:

Here Here! This counts as my vote for sepereate instances. VS.NET is a wonderful IDE, but I don't need everything under the sun running in it.
# December 2, 2003 4:39 PM

Paschal said:

I vote too for separation and better I vote for separate machines (if youc can)
# December 2, 2003 4:41 PM

Mike Gunderloy said:

Of course, you get more from XMLSPY integration than just avoiding the Alt-Tab. If you're used to XMLSPY, it's nice to double-click an XML file in Solution Explorer and have it open with the editing environment you prefer, rather than the somewhat pathetic tools that VS .NET natively supplies.
# December 2, 2003 4:48 PM

Jeff Key said:

Mel: Yup, I always have the call stack, immediate and debug tool windows on another monitor. Unfortunately, you can't "undock" code/content windows, which most of these things (data windows, for example) use.

Mike: Can't you set VS.NET's "Open With" to open XML Spy instead? I prefer to have the code referencing the doc and the doc itself both visible at the same time, thus my argument. Horizontal tab groups are an option, but not one that I like.
# December 2, 2003 5:20 PM

Paul Wilson said:

I too like separate apps.
# December 2, 2003 9:37 PM

Marc LaFleur said:

It really depends on the product. XML spy makes some sense. Others on the other hand feel shoe-horned into the IDE.
# December 3, 2003 8:16 AM

Dan Bright said:

Actually my friend tells me that Pro won't run on Server 2003, and Diskeeper Server is in the $225-$300 range.
# December 3, 2003 7:32 PM

marko said:

Winternals has some good disk tools. You may also want to check out Sysinternals for free stuff.

http://www.winternals.com/
# December 4, 2003 1:10 AM

Matt Berther said:

My favorite now is Raxco's PerfectDisk...

http://www.perfectdisk.com/
# December 4, 2003 2:19 AM

John McGrath said:

I do not think the issue has anything to do with modernity ("What year is this?"), but rather with compatibility. Optimizeit must run other programs that do not deal well with spaces in file names, and it must pass them the names of files that are within its own directory tree. If it is installed into a directory that contains a space, those programs will not work properly.

Many of those programs were originally written on other operating systems such as *nix, where spaces are often used as delimeters so they do not work well in file names. Windows programs have similar (actually more) restrictions with other characters, such as ":", ";", and "\".
# December 4, 2003 3:13 AM

Lorenzo Barbieri said:

Go to PerfectDisk... it's a lot better!!!
# December 4, 2003 3:34 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Beware, removing signatures from assemblies is easy using ilasm / ildasm. Once the signature is removed, the 'protection' is gone. (also check out sn -Vr, which will make that your assembly's signature will not be checked, so you can tamper the code.

I learned this the hard way, as I used this protection to make all code in my product be used only by one tool and not by other software. However some people took 5 minutes and removed the signatures and with that the protection and then could use the code in any other tool.
# December 4, 2003 4:00 AM

Darrell said:

Yeah, and PerfectDisk costs just as much as diskkeeper (~$45 for workstation, ~$200+ for server). So take your pick, but you won't save any money.
# December 4, 2003 8:07 AM

Chris Frazier said:

Yeah! Way to stick it to the man, you rebel you!

(disclaimer: the writer of this comment means this in jest. Jeff, you're awesome:)
# December 5, 2003 2:21 AM

SBC said:

Does one have a performance improvement (or hit) over the other or are both the same? I think it'll be upto the compiler and what code it generates.. That'd be good to test...
# December 5, 2003 8:03 AM

Phil Weber said:

> "...a list of statement-expressions separated by commas"

Funny, I don't see any commas in your sample code. Who wrote that spec?! ;-)
# December 5, 2003 9:02 AM

Jeff Key said:

No spec. The sample above was done using the XP methodology. I (the customer) needed an example for this post, so I worked on a simple use case with me, pair programmed it with myself and wound up with that. It was beautiful!
# December 5, 2003 9:25 AM

Andrew said:

Eeek, it ain't the man who would get stuck, its the guy a the next desk :P

Im a real stickler for "visually parsed easily" and the {} around the contents of the loop are definitely optimized out.
# December 5, 2003 9:29 AM

Ken Hirsch said:

Either one is a bad idea because the value of i in shares[i] may or may not be incremented. It's undefined by the C standard what the order of evaluation is.
# December 5, 2003 1:28 PM

Scott Cate, kbAlertz.com said:

i use quickcode in VS and I love it. I can't imagine replacing it, even in whidbey. Even if it does the same thing, i love my ALT+Q.

I also LOVE that I can copy/paste others items from the forums on their website.
# December 5, 2003 4:41 PM

Dylan Greene said:

I blog about this too.. http://www.dylangreene.com/blog.asp?blogID=277
# December 6, 2003 3:19 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

With a good aggreator and commentRSS you should be able to keep up with what's going on...but I agree it should be much much easier :)

On another note, .Text 0.95 will allow you to turn comments off on a post by post basis.

-Scott
# December 6, 2003 9:14 AM

Andrew said:

I've always seen blogs as an unthreaded forum / messageboard with a recent posts page.

This makes it very difficult to have a dicussion, we all just spout what we think.
# December 6, 2003 11:25 AM

Michael Flanakin said:

I can think of two solutions to this...

1. Turn comments off on a post.

2. Turn comments off on a post and add a comments redirection link - a link to the originating blog's comment section.

3. When posting comments (in blog A), allow people to post a URL to their blog post (in blog B) on the same topic. This could also be handled if the blogger (of B) adds a link to his/her post, which would be tracked back in the comments (of blog A). The only reason to do this is if blog B's post was before blog A's post.

I hope this made sense :-) I think all three would be good solutions. Very flexible.
# December 7, 2003 4:10 AM

Michael Earls said:

What about blogs that do not have a comment system?
I feel that the trackback is for this purpose. You should be able to click on the Trackback link of the original entry and track it all the way back to the most distant comment.

I'm not sure that your solution is the best (read only) because it prevents others from exapnding on the thought.

Perhaps we should look more closely at the root problem... we need to be able to read all comments about a specific entry. So, we establish GUID-based Permalinks and we establish that comments should use the trackback link provided by your server. Then, wehn someone uses your trackback link when they post their comments, your server could serve up a special page that contains all the entries that tracked back to yours. Your server can figure it out based on track backs.

But, of course, that requires that the comment creator uses the trackback. I'd venture to guess that you might find more people willing to do that than to not post a comment at all.

After all, they're introducing their little circle of friends/readers to your original post. I don't see any problem with tacking on some editorial. If the readers didn't like it, they wouldn't read it, they would have found out about your original link on their own.

When I link to technical entries, I sometimes add a little background or information before linking off to the original post.

I think we need a better way to track those activities, not do away with them completely.

Again, this is especially important for those weblogs out there that do not provide a commenting system.
# December 8, 2003 7:02 PM

Michael Earls said:

I broke your rule and blogged about you breaking your rule about blogging about another blogging entry.

http://www.cerkit.com/cerkitBlog/Trackback.aspx?guid=965f1f9a-af2e-42cb-9dc8-2cc0c32bef14
# December 8, 2003 7:10 PM

MercuryCrest said:

I've been having a funny little problem. Let me first ask which version of WMP you are using. I've just d/l the latest, and everytime I try to burn a CD in iTunes, WMP pops up and the whole operation freezes. It seems as though there is some sort of conflict between the two. Although the idea of Microsoft and Apple battling it out on my PC is amusing, I don't have the patience for it. Right now I am trying to find something other than iTunes which can read those files and burn a CD, hopefully without complication. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
-MC
# December 9, 2003 1:14 AM

JosephCooney said:

I seem to remember Alan Cooper or Tog or some other "usability expert" shooting down the idea of "expert mode". I can't find a URL but I seem to remember the argument going something like "expert mode" hides an arbitrary set of functionality away from users. Users are often ill equiped to judge if they are expert or not. They may be an expert in a particular domain (like an expert at Excel), so when they open up something unrelated (e.g. SQL Server) they may feel they should turn on "expert mode" and be over-whelmed with options they don't understand. In other words there IS no "Advanced User". Also having an "expert mode" can be bad because in order to change an "expert setting" they have to go to some other place utterly unrelated to what they want to do. They may not even know those settings exist, and thus miss out on features they could benefit from. I wish I could find a link.....
# December 9, 2003 9:18 PM

JosephCooney said:

I just saw this related entry in Raymond Chen's blog
http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/raymondc/permalink.aspx/cc8dd84f-7605-4145-bd4b-26413e507b02
# December 9, 2003 9:24 PM

JosephCooney said:

Doh! That Raymond Chen item is linked in the comments on Scoble's blog....sorry for all the spam.
# December 9, 2003 9:26 PM

SBC said:

one possible solution - http://radio.weblogs.com/0112769/2003/12/09.html#a307
# December 9, 2003 10:33 PM

Darrell said:

I forget who this happened to, but some programmers on slashdot or whatever got the *physical mailing address* for one of the worst spammers, and signed him up for every direct mail catalog in the US. The post office was backing up trucks to deliver junk mail to him every day. And when interviewed, he said that what the programmers did was "illegal." Poetic justice reigns supreme.
# December 9, 2003 11:47 PM

Jon Galloway said:

Scoble is insane (http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/posts/42381.aspx) and Michael Robertson is a crackhead (http://weblogs.asp.net/jkey/posts/33053.aspx). I'm gonna try to stay off Jeff's "axis of evil" list.

I like this approach to fighting Spam: http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/10/12/SpamPlan27. I'm cheap as hell, and I'd still pay a penny an e-mail to stop getting 200 spams a day.
# December 10, 2003 1:27 AM

Jeff Key said:

SBC: Definitely an interesting angle.

Darrell: Are you sure that's not an urban legend? If not, that's darn funny. Too bad they didn't sign him up for tons of manure.

Jon: You can't argue with the facts! :) Scoble's a good guy, he's just an easy target.

Thanks for the link. The thing that worries me about money-based spam deterrents is that I hear it's relatively easy for these guys to get stolen credit card info. Then, not only are the victims (the spammed) getting additional charges, but you wind up with new victims -- those whose cards are illegally being used to pay for the spam.

As for using the existing infrastructure, I actually favor the digital signature method, as it's been in a good number of mail clients for a while (at least MSFT ones), as he mentioned. Add to that a SpamNet-like "vote away spam" button and you're set. SpamNet was pretty effective for me, but it used some unknown technology to fingerprint the emails, which is getting harder and harder to do. With digital signatures, you pay for the _identity_, which is constant. Once you vote a _sender's certificate_ as a spammer, it works like a primary key and there's no question as to whether or not the sender is a spammer. Of course you run the risk of blacklisting legitimate folks like catalogs and whatnot, and that problem exists today with SpamNet. If the process of obtaining a digital ID is hard enough, it may make it ineffective to try to get a new one every time their certificate is banned.

The best solution I've used in the real world so far is SpamArrest. I've been using it for a couple months now and it's stopped over 6,500 spam and not let a single one through. Yes, I need to check what it didn't let through once a day to make sure something legitimate hasn't been stopped. BUT, having to do that is a heck of a lot better than dealing with false positives and false negatives.
# December 10, 2003 8:03 AM

Eric Gunnerson said:

Hmm. I'm not sure that "touching" is really what I was trying for, but I appreciate the link.
# December 10, 2003 2:11 PM

Shahn Hogan said:

Thanks, I'm setting this up for my wife. I appreciate you spending extra time to add some of those feature requests.
# December 11, 2003 8:38 AM

Pete said:

I used to love tape drives. Time for a cup of tea while you wait for it to load.
# December 11, 2003 10:40 AM

Jeff Key said:

I hadn't thought of that, but then again I wasn't drinking tea at that age. I can imagine full meals while using punch card machines...
# December 11, 2003 11:20 AM

Jeff Key said:

Good luck, Shahn!
# December 11, 2003 10:04 PM

TrackBack said:

# December 13, 2003 11:38 PM

Phil Scott said:

Very impressive little tool. Now I want to debug something to be able to use it.
# December 14, 2003 12:28 AM

Jon Galloway said:

Wow. The slashdot effect hits quick on an XBox. Server timeout. Next oddity of science: an XBox webfarm?
# December 14, 2003 2:04 AM

Rana said:

Hi,
I agree spamming has to be stopped!Period.
# December 14, 2003 2:13 AM

Frans Bouma said:

The form is great!, it would however be more usable if you added a strong name, so it can be referenced by signed apps/assemblies. :)

Perhaps it's 'sunday morning' but I can't seem to find a way to load the assembly dynamically. (well, loading is fine, putting the object tree to browse into the form is not possible, because the code requires to know the interface of the form, and I don't want to put the assembly in the references, because it's for debugging, not for distribution :).

You could perhaps rework this by reading the object to browse from the 'Tag' of the form. This way a developer could load the form dynamically, using 'Form' as the interface of the instance, set the tag with the object to browse and show the form. :)
# December 14, 2003 7:02 AM

Kirsty said:

I got ..

Service unavailable
Description: Error processing request.
Error Message: Service unavailable

Stack Trace: System.Web.HttpException: Service unavailable


# December 14, 2003 8:04 AM

Evain Jb said:

It should work again, until everybody connect and make it crash... :D

Stupid xbox ;D
# December 14, 2003 1:45 PM

Jeff Key said:

I'm just looking forward to the day XBoxes are hijacked and used as spam bots.
# December 14, 2003 3:44 PM

Zertox said:

i try stuff like that all the time ^o)
# December 14, 2003 4:07 PM

Evain Jb said:

My xbox can't bear this new celebrity.
The hard disk seems to be dead, maybe it is just the integrity of the root partitions, maybe it is the hardware ( 100 days of uptime ... )

Don't know if I'll be able to save it...

# December 14, 2003 4:26 PM

Jeff Key said:

Great idea, Frans! Unfortunately, the Tag property is not virtual(!). I changed it around a bit so now the control and form implement the new IStateBrowser interface, as well as strong-naming it. I've also included a sample project that loads the assembly dynamically, creates the form, sets the ObjectToBrowse property then shows the form. I've updated the website with the new zip.
# December 14, 2003 4:29 PM

TrackBack said:

# December 14, 2003 7:02 PM

Mike said:

Probably a bit cheeky to ask, but is there any chance you could post the source for this great little tool ?
# December 15, 2003 4:22 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Thanks, Jeff!
# December 15, 2003 4:48 AM

Frans Bouma said:

Btw, you can read the tag property in the derived form (base.Tag :)) and just put that object in the control, or am I mistaken?
# December 15, 2003 4:49 AM

Rory Becker said:

My worst is Ctrl + [Space] in 'Word' to hoping for a list of words that begin with whatever i've just typed :)
# December 15, 2003 6:09 AM

Jeff Key said:

Ah yes, Ctrl+Space is one of my favorites. Someone needs to write an Office plug-in to do just that!
# December 15, 2003 10:03 AM

Jeff Key said:

Mike: Sure, I just need to clean up the code. This is one of those things I threw together quickly, so there aren't any comments, it's a bit untidy, etc.

Frans: It's not a matter of reading the property, but rather knowing when it's called. There is no TagChanged event or OnTagChanged method, so I would need to periodically check the Tag property to see if it had changed. Not very pretty. ;)
# December 15, 2003 10:12 AM

Ted said:

Hi,

Good work, well done
# December 15, 2003 3:26 PM

Ilya Ryzhenkov said:

My favorite is trying CTRL-ALT-L to go to list of folders in Outlook :)
# December 15, 2003 7:57 PM

Luke Hutteman said:

And you know you've spent to much time in firebird when...

You try to close applications by mid-clicking their button on the taskbar.
# December 16, 2003 12:45 AM

Karl VonWinkle said:

Why not just use, Windows 2k/XP, Change Drive letter and Path?

With Diskmanager, you can map a directory C:\My Documents, to be a whole disk drive..

Or am I missing something?

Karl
# December 16, 2003 2:04 PM

Jeff Key said:

Karl,

Two things:
1) You can only do that for local drives; most of my "stuff" is on other computers.
2) I have the same folder structure on most of these machines:

X:+-Documents and Settings
+-Program Files
+-Windows

With SingleDrive, I have a single tree that shows a single instance of each Docs and Settings, ProgramFiles, etc.
# December 16, 2003 2:11 PM

TrackBack said:

# December 17, 2003 1:47 AM

TrackBack said:

# December 18, 2003 6:04 PM

Alex Hoffman said:

Great - I have exactly the same problem and this solves it perfectly!
# December 18, 2003 7:25 PM

Stuart said:

> everytime I try to burn a CD in iTunes, WMP pops up and the whole operation freezes

Have you got your PC configured to play CDs in WMP on insertion? Maybe when iTunes creates a recognisable CD, Windows tries to play it in WMP.
# December 19, 2003 7:17 AM

Robert McLaws said:

AMEN!
# December 19, 2003 8:11 PM

Raymond Chen said:

Even if it doesn't have a default button, if it has keyboard shortcuts you're still at risk. Support you were typing the word "bye" when the dialog popped up. The "b" goes to the dialog and beeps, then the "y" pushes the "Yes" button. Oops, you just allowed an unknown app to get through your firewall.
# December 19, 2003 8:50 PM

Drew Marsh said:

I agree. However, I would beg developers to stop using pop up windows all together. Find an alternate solution such as sticking a notification icon in the task tray with a pop-up balloon. Longhorn offers a built in notification API which totally rocks and standardizes things making it even easier for the user to handle notifications such as these. Ultimately though, the problem is that today's Windows still lets this happen.
# December 19, 2003 9:11 PM

Raymond Chen said:

At each new version, Windows has made it harder and harder for apps to steal focus, but on the other hand, developers are becoming more and more resourceful in finding ways to get around each layer of block we add. Just do a google search for the words (setforeground behavior) and you'll find gobs of people who don't like the behavior and are looking for ways around it.

Every developer thinks their program is "so important that the rules don't apply to me".
# December 19, 2003 9:51 PM

gimp said:

amen brother! preach the word!
# December 19, 2003 11:21 PM

Jeff Key said:

Good point about the shortcuts, Raymond. Microsoft is guilty of this, too, and the craziest thing just happened: As I was typing that, Outlook 2003 popped up a dialog letting me know it couldn't retrieve email from one of my accounts, stealing focus while I was typing. Also, the popup that was the inspiration for the initial post was a Microsoft product. :)
# December 20, 2003 12:20 AM

Shannon J Hager said:

manual trackback to my thoughts/frustrations with this issue: http://hdconsultants.us/posts/326.aspx
# December 20, 2003 12:39 AM

matthew said:

that's what you get for using ZoneAlarm!
# December 20, 2003 5:31 AM

Michael said:

Oh yes, I hope somebody from the SUS-Team will read this so they change their update-client so it doesn't request a reboot with a default-OK button.
# December 20, 2003 6:28 AM

Doug Reilly said:

One clarification:

"Not necessary. The runtime knows when objects are no longer used, even within the body of a method. For example:

1 MyObject o = new MyObject();
2 o.DoSomething();
3 DoSomethingElse();

If a GC occurs at line three, the object referenced by "o" may be garbage collected. (Note that this does not apply when a debugger is attached to the process.)"


The note actually applies to debug code, whether or not a debugger is attached.
# December 20, 2003 10:45 AM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Doug. I couldn't remember where I'd read/heard that (PDC?) and couldn't confirm.
# December 20, 2003 10:50 AM

Paul Wilson said:

Good document, although I can't stand the one about using spaces instead of tabs! Configuring VS.NET to use tabs means everyone can make the indents "appear" to be 2 or 3 or 4 spaces, thus allowing room for personal preference, without messing up file diffs in VSS. Using spaces on the other hand, if people use different values (and they always want to) means that diffs are impossible for all practical purposes!
# December 20, 2003 11:29 AM

Darrell said:

I second what Paul said! Also note that Visual Studio can take spaces and turn them into tabs and vice versa (Edit-Advanced-Tabify/Untabify) or even format code your way, with curly braces on a new line or trailing the IF statement. That will work, but it will still hose up your file diffs.
# December 20, 2003 12:03 PM

Brian Noyes said:

If you would like another coding standard to compare against, we have posted one on our site at http://www.idesign.net. This was authored by Juval Lowy, the principal of our company and one of the Microsoft dubbed "Software Legends". He works closely with the C# team in Redmond, and the standards he has in our coding standards are being used a significant portion of the Microsoft .NET team as well.
# December 20, 2003 3:07 PM

Basil Hawkins said:

Is single Drive compatible with Windows XP? I can't get it operating. Error report says "cannot initialize"
# December 20, 2003 3:31 PM

Jeff Key said:

Yes, Basil, it is. Do you have the .NET Framework installed?
# December 20, 2003 3:36 PM

Ilya Ryzhenkov said:

Another reason to nullify local variables could be preventing misuse of outdated information. For example, if some method call invalidates local variable value (e.g cached data), it makes sense to set it to null.
# December 21, 2003 9:19 AM

Jorge Curioso said:

http://www.priceline.com/ is your friend
# December 21, 2003 9:17 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Jorge. I finally got something through Expedia. I'll give Priceline a shot next time.
# December 23, 2003 12:08 AM

Darrell said:

Yeah, there's a furniture store in the Richmond and Hampton Roads area called Haynes (and some of their subsidiaries) that have the "lowest price you'll find on furniture anywhere this weekend... at Haynes." Oooooh, let me hurry up and get there! It's not like they don't have a sale *every* weekend, holiday, every other Wednesday, and sometimes Thursday too.

And guess what, they make really shitty furniture!
# December 23, 2003 8:52 AM

Darrell said:

More interesting tips on making your Win2k3 server "workstation-friendly" available here (http://www.msfn.org/win2k3/).
# December 23, 2003 8:54 AM

Ed Kaim said:

Yeah, I got shafted when I went furniture shopping for my first job after college. I was a little less understanding: http://www.postget.com/get/article.php?newsid=79699.
# December 23, 2003 5:26 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Darrell. Excluding the DirectX stuff, that's my mental checklist! (The mental checklist is missing the screenshots.)
# December 23, 2003 7:08 PM

SBC said:

hmm.. regarding the rebates: who do you send the *original* UPC and receipts to? TDK or buy.com? sometimes these rebates are puzzling..
# December 23, 2003 7:28 PM

Paul Bartlett said:

I had a spate of trying to close Word with :wq. I'm sure a few of my docs even ended up with it hidden in them somewhere...
# December 24, 2003 4:57 AM

DZee said:

Jeff: I believe as a beginner and intermediate computer user this sounds like a great protentional idea. Keep up the good work here. Never let anyone discourage you from making a new program. Do accept constructive critizim of how to improve the program. I will down load this program and give it a try. Any up grades to it let us know and I will down load any improvements.

Looking forward to a great relationship here.

Many thanks, Jeff.

From,

DZee.
# December 24, 2003 7:52 AM

Jeff Key said:

Holy cow. What a mess! Seems like you read about this stuff every week these days. I'm sure my number will be up sooner or later.
# December 24, 2003 10:10 AM

Jeff Key said:

Good question. Unfortunately, Best Buy just put a store in the ground floor of a new condo a couple blocks from here and I've been spending too much time (money) there. If you buy something with a rebate, you get an additional "rebate receipt" (or two). Not sure about the UPC. Seems like not everyone is requiring it like they used to.
# December 24, 2003 10:14 AM

Amy and Nick said:

Jeff, we unlike so many here, actually understand your point and sympathize about the fact that you have had to deal with sooo many brainless idiots that can't understand simple reasoning. You handled them all very well!!
# December 25, 2003 9:35 PM

BAS said:

To follow up on the same problem, I am trying to convert my AAC files to any format my iRiver will support. Neither iTunes nor dbPowerAmp supports the conversion from AAC to MP3. Any suggestions on a program that does?
# December 29, 2003 2:13 AM

Richard Thompson said:

Thank you. Thank you.

Now I can let my head recover from that stone wall.
# December 29, 2003 1:09 PM

Jon Galloway said:

If you do use Priceline, check www.biddingfortravel.com first. Public board where people post their winning bids so you can get an idea of what the going rates are.

Orbitz gets me with the bait and switch all the time. Agree that an evil presence is likely involved.
# December 29, 2003 11:48 PM

ravenmeifter said:

try System mechanic, its an all in 1 app also does context menu defragging.. i run the 30 day trial of it and it had no spyware or other smacktard stuff in it!

You decide i think the url is www.iolo.com

# December 31, 2003 1:29 PM

Greg Duncan said:

Thank you for the sanity check! (i.e. I'm glad it's not just me :)

I run into this problem ALL the time when printing from MSDN... and I too get pretty pissed off when I print a bunch of articles only to have to reprint them so I can actually read them (though the "I bet this line ends with" game can be fun sometimes).

# December 31, 2003 4:11 PM

bertcord said:

how are you printing? I didnt look at this entire article but.....

If you print by goign to file rint the page is cut off. IF you click the print icon on the top of the main page it does not apear to be cut off
# December 31, 2003 4:14 PM

Jeff Key said:

I was printing by clicking the "print this page". Interesting about the Print toolbar item. I'll give that a shot next time I print something. Thanks.
# January 2, 2004 11:32 AM

Darrell said:

I hate to say I scooped you both! :)

My (short) list of predictions is here (http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/darrell.norton/posts/4827.aspx), posted on Dec 22, 2003.
# January 4, 2004 8:08 PM

Brent Morgan said:

Welcome to my world?? Haha
# January 5, 2004 2:28 AM

Ben Lower said:

Of course MS is susceptible to blunders, but $50 million is nothing to them. The very end of the ieee article hints that maybe SPOT is just a way to test the waters for bigger plans.

Maybe MS is just looking at this as a research project. They have succeeded in piecing together a network that covers a large number of people using "worthless" (= cheap) FM radio spectrum. So maybe we'll see Intel start integrating the receiver for the SPOT network into its Centrino chips and architecture. Just one more network option to use to get data...
# January 5, 2004 2:06 PM

Pum said:

Which drive is the data saved to?
# January 5, 2004 10:16 PM

Pum said:

Nevermind...
# January 5, 2004 10:16 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Amy and Nick. :)

BAS: Sorry, don't know. I've stopped ripping to AAC because of this, although I do prefer it. I need something my MPIO will play, which is either WMA or MP3.
# January 6, 2004 12:19 AM

Duncan said:

Thanks for the link - I have signed up.
Unfortunately the European price is EUR320 (approx $400) but it is still a significant saving.
# January 6, 2004 6:16 AM

Michael Earls said:

Thanks for posting this. The Microsoft Action Pack is exactly what I've been looking for.
# January 6, 2004 9:15 AM

Shannon J Hager said:

Be sure to read the part where is says that the license is for 1 year only. At the end of the year you must either uninstall the software or renew your subscription if available. That part scared me away from signing up because they make it clear that you may not be able to renew the subscription which would mean you have to uninstall the software or buy retail licenses.
# January 6, 2004 11:47 AM

in distress! said:

i couldnt use this program because it gave me an error!!
# January 6, 2004 12:39 PM

Jeff Key said:

Distress: Do you have the .NET Framework installed? If so, what was the error?
# January 6, 2004 1:11 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks for the info, Shannon, I didn't notice that. Considering the risk, I still think it's a great deal if you're like me and take advantage of more than a product or two. At home I have my home machine on XP, an old box w/Win2k3 EE + SQL Server 2000, Office 2k3, etc., etc. Even if it's only for a year, $300 for all that stuff is amazing. I don't have time while at the office to do research and keep up to speed on all the latest and greatest stuff, so it's a win-win for everyone: I can learn and test just about anything my heart desires when I have time and MSFT gets another soldier in the field designing solutions using more of their products, resulting in more license revenue. Unless people abuse the program, I think it's in MSFT's best interest to keep this thing alive.
# January 6, 2004 1:24 PM

Chip said:

Check out this program for ISVs:

http://members.microsoft.com/partner/isv/empower/default.aspx

This includes 1 MSDN Subscription (5 Licenses). This is certainly a great deal for small companies.

I find it strange that neither of these programs have been promoted very well. Especially after a recent coversation on Scoble's blog (he's since deleted his comments).
# January 6, 2004 5:34 PM

Buc Rogers said:

3.2.2: For public fields and constants, I use Pascal not camel - in part so that if a public field or constant later gets converted to a property, public interface stays the same. But I also recognize that 7.2.1 is a good idea (don't have public fields in the first place). 10.2.4 shows public constants in Pascal case...

3.2.2 I also use the leading _ for member variables that JK and sourceforge projects including NAnt use.

4.2.5: I find the <list> tag useful for documenting preconditions and postconditions within the <remarks> block, with a <para> header saying "Preconditions" or "Postconditions". Note that NDoc does support <list>. This complements in-code assertion checking described in 7.2.7, 7.2.8.

5.2.2: I avoid the ? : operator because it's too cryptic, agreeing with the SourceForge NAnt coding standard, except in member-field initialization expressions.

5.2.6: I agree with JK that this is not necessary for GC, but do sometimes do this in the Ilya scenario.

8.2.7: I always try to throw custom exceptions only out of public interfaces, derived from ApplicationException, which may include inner .NET exceptions. I also use an enum "Code" field sometimes within an exception type such as "CustomComponentException", rather than typing every exception.

8.2.10: My understanding is that ApplicationException is intended for use as a base for all app custom exception, differentiated from Exception which is the base for all that come out of the framework. The MS Exception Block included exception derives from ApplicationException, I believe for this reason.

# January 6, 2004 11:43 PM

Jeff Key said:

Wow, that is nice. What's the deal w/Scoble deleting comments?
# January 7, 2004 1:10 AM

Shannon J Hager said:

He moved his comment system away from haloscan and lost all his comments.
# January 7, 2004 1:46 AM

Jeff Key said:

Gotcha, thanks. I was looking for a controversy. ;)
# January 7, 2004 1:48 AM

Jif Johnson said:

Al Michaels is a genius.

In other news: They forgave the short shorts, the tart tops and even the juicy smooch with Madonna but the confiscation and slaughter continued today in Guangdong Province, where officials trying to prevent a new outbreak of Britney Spears fans also announced plans for a "patriotic campaign" to eradicate teenagers.

The sweep came as health officials in the Philippines announced that a woman quarantined as a suspected case slinks behind a wall of publicists—without cause. "She loves cornbread," said Hu Jintao, whose wife runs the Civet Basket, “Where the hell am I supposed to get cornbread? Next the kids will want cheese.”

In Guangdong Province, the 32-year-old man who became mainland China's first male Britney fan of the winter told the Chinese news media that he had never eaten cornbread, and that his only symptom was occasionally wearing tart tops. One Guangdong newspaper quoted him as saying he had handled Justin Timberlake with chopsticks.

The flurry of activity this week comes as Chinese officials are severely disappointed after Britney Spears married a hometown boy last Saturday and then cut him loose after 55 hours saying, “Let's do something wild and crazy.”

The confiscation of teenagers began in earnest on Tuesday, and the state news media reported that workers were drowning them in disinfectant. The World Health Organization has cautioned that such a slaughter must be carried out carefully to avoid the risk of causing more infections or contamination.

Guangdong officials have estimated that they plan to confiscate and kill about 10,000 teenagers by Saturday. The exact number put to death so far is not known, but the official New China News Agency reported that on Tuesday more than 1,500 government workers in Guangdong inspected 67 shopping malls, 797 sleepovers and 137 high schools. They reportedly seized 171 fans.

"Man," one Guangdong official said, scraping the gum off his boots, "what was Britney thinking?"

Al Michaels will never have too many fans.

Thank you,

Jif Johnson, Esq.
# January 7, 2004 4:04 PM

Jon Galloway said:

Jeff-
On this subject, seen this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3324883.stm ?
Mail sender pays, but pays computationally so the worry of stealing to pay for spam (something I'd never considered) goes away... or does it? I guess this might just unleash zombie farms of spam computers (even more so than they are now). Interesting, anyhow.
- Jon
# January 8, 2004 3:16 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 9, 2004 10:14 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 9, 2004 10:15 AM

TrackBack said:

# January 12, 2004 4:11 AM

bob said:

unable to initialize program (0xc0000135)WHAT THAT MEANS !!

---had to terminate once I extracted all files, still would not load.
# January 13, 2004 2:51 AM

bobbyb said:

priceline--why should I give the choices to someone else to make for me? I still want to choose from a list that I generate, there are other factors in addition to just price--that's why priceline is NOT the way to go. I tried it and it stinks. Sorry
# January 13, 2004 2:58 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Burns: [chuckles] And to think, Smithers: you laughed when I bought TicketMaster. "Nobody's going to pay a 100% service charge."

Smithers: Well, it's a policy that ensures a healthy mix of the rich and the ignorant, sir.
# January 17, 2004 5:28 PM

SBC said:

yup... finally.. the conversion to $un has happened..
# January 18, 2004 8:43 PM

SBC said:

yup.. there's a reasoning behind it - see my posting at Userland: http://radio.weblogs.com/0112769/2004/01/14.html#a316
# January 18, 2004 8:44 PM

Jeff Key said:

That was a tongue-in-cheek title. :) The cost of licenses are almost always a fraction of the cost of a solution. As you mention in your post, those implementing the solution are certainly not free. While some folks are doing Big Corporations a favor by writing free software, I haven't heard of anyone doing implementations or customization at no cost.
# January 18, 2004 9:31 PM

Jeff Key said:

Ah yes, another reminder that I need to watch the Simpsons. Maybe if I ever get a Media Center machine I'll have it get me up-to-speed on all things Simpsons.
# January 18, 2004 9:32 PM

SBC said:

the sad truth is that contractors/developers in the "Open Source"/Java world charge more per hour than their MS counterparts! Yet the continue to moan & groan about M$..
# January 18, 2004 10:10 PM

Robert McLaws said:

LOL. They shoudl super-glue one of those ball-gags to his head.
# January 18, 2004 10:12 PM

Jeff Key said:

True. I think as .NET and competent MSFT solution providers gain ground in the enterprise we'll see things even out. MSFT has always had the "anyone can develop MSFT technology" stigma attached to them, but just look at the countless failed Java projects, which are generally in the millions of dollars. You can fail on any platform. It's not about the platform as much as it is time to market and overall cost, both of which are generally in MSFT's favor. The anti-MSFT press certainly doesn't help in this matter, but it does appear that some are lightening up a bit.
# January 18, 2004 10:58 PM

Graeme said:

A Fix for Logitech keyboards is around too:

http://www.ben.pope.name/logitech.html
# January 19, 2004 2:40 AM

SBC said:

very true.. there's a lot of 'sweeping under the carpet' in the J2EE world. Most of those enterprise projects are in 'mega-bucks' range so any failure is usually huge (in terms of costs). They have to fess up sooner than later..
# January 19, 2004 6:01 PM

Justin Rogers said:

Linux in itself is free. This is HP's Linux offerings. That doesn't mean software, but machines instead. HP also provides a good deal of customer support for linux installations, the same way Dell/Gateway do for MS/Windows based desktops.

In the first paragraph of the article it even defines Linux based products and services, not the Linux operating system.
# January 19, 2004 9:11 PM

Jeff Key said:

Exactly, Justin; I didn't mean the "cost" of the OS itself. :)

For some reason MSFT hasn't been tossing around "TCO" like it used to. I haven't seen their new anti-Linux adverts, but let's hope they drill that home: It's not just the licenses, it's the TCO, and Java/Linux solutions generally have a very high TCO.
# January 19, 2004 9:26 PM

Scott said:

Do you work for Microsoft?

If you do then, and only then, do you see a penny of any profit Microsoft makes by selling it's OS and dev tools.

The rest of us make money the same way that Linux developers do, by selling our services. By your reasoning anyone who releases code for free instead of selling it is a "sucker"
# January 19, 2004 10:33 PM

Darrell said:

If creating code is your livelihood, then releasing it free is charity work. But if you think you are sticking it to company X by doing so, when all you are really doing is increasing revenue for company Y, then I would say you are being a sucker, where X and Y are 2 large companies that you don't work for and probably are both your competitors.
# January 19, 2004 10:58 PM

Alex said:

Of course, you could be a student and then I don't think you fit any of these categories. Most of the statistics I've seen say that the OSS developer pool is made up of 25-35% students. =)
# January 19, 2004 11:09 PM

Jon Galloway said:

Once again you fly off the handle and propose something half baked. This encourages hackers born on Leap Day (Feb 29), and unfairly penalizes canine hackers.
# January 19, 2004 11:25 PM

Jeff Key said:

Scott: I was thinking of Darrell's scenario; perhaps "sucker" is too harsh. Don't get me wrong, I think Linux is great and I admire the folks that contribute. Competition makes our industry tick and the rise of Linux has been beneficial to everyone. I certainly see the benefit of IBM and other Big Corporations contributing to Linux, but it's Joe Coder the sysadmin at a small company that's not getting a piece of the (very big) pie. Pride does a lot for a person, but it's unfortunate that others are essentially getting paid for their work. This may not even be the case anymore -- I don't know. (BTW, I believe that solution providers can get a cut of Microsoft licenses, so they would in fact see some of that profit.)

Alex: Interesting..and a bit scary. ;)

# January 19, 2004 11:35 PM

Jeff Key said:

I saw a quick blurb about that a while ago, Jon, but didn't know the details. Good stuff! It would be a monumental task to get every email-sending application to use these new standards, which is the #1 problem in general: With such an established application base and protocols, where can you "inject" new goop that will have the least amount of impact? I say leave SMTP as it is and create a new protocol altogether, designed with what we've learned over the years. Yes, it's drastic, but anything that will have a significant impact will require massive changes on every client and server anyway, so why not start from scratch with an improved foundation?
# January 19, 2004 11:45 PM

Jeff Key said:

Ah yes, I should've known Jon would be on me for this one. It seems I can't post something without Jon getting on me about unfair treatment of canines. I do love canines, Jon! You do make a valid point about Leap Day Hackers. They will be beaten about the head, neck and chest with hot mops.
# January 19, 2004 11:56 PM

senkwe said:

They're only getting shafted if the purpose of writing some code was not to just "scratch an itch". Otherwise, I really don't think they give a damn.
# January 20, 2004 1:57 AM

R said:


Linux IS free .. free as in freedom, not as in beer. This is the BIGGEST misconception about Free Software.

I don't understand the assertion that people write OSS because they want to wallop Microsoft. People want to write OSS because as senkwe said, they want to scratch and itch and not have to pay for it. Or they want to contribute something to a community that doesn't cost money to be involved in.

While I readily admit there is an endless stream of zealots ready to moan and bash Microsoft, I'm now seeing more and more Microsoft Zealots bashing Linux because you still have to pay for the hardware to run it on, or worse yet .. for support (shock,horror).

Here's why I prefer Linux (although I do like Windows):

None of the Linux developers or sellers are pushing me to upgrade technology that works very well thank you very much and costing me money in upgraded Operating Systems and new hardware to support it. They're not pushing the certification gravy train in order to extract more money out of people/companies ...
# January 20, 2004 7:49 AM

Calis LNb said:

3 days of my life, I have given to EnableVisualStyles and it's cursed progeny, the SEHException. Thank you, Thank you for putting this up on the web where I could see it.
My app ran perfectly for weeks on end after I first put it in place. Only after I reorganized my datasets and made some mods to some mousemove events did the error started coming up 95/100 times . . .
# January 20, 2004 5:11 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

I'm confused, Jeff. You say "Linux is not free" not once, but twice in your post and then you claim that you weren't talking about the cost of Linux. Why the misleading title then? Why the lack of explanation? What WERE you talking about. If you didn't mean Linux or you didn't mean free, why did you say Linux is not free?

Linux IS free. Some things that run on Linux are not. Some support is not. Saying "Linux is not free" because you have to buy hardware is misleading to the point of being easily mistaken for a lie. Saying "Linx is not free" because you may have to pay for support is just as bad.

Maybe you think that people who own companies don't know the difference between the cost of hardware and the cost of software and the cost of support. If so, I guess your post may be a failed attempt to educate them, but you forgot to get around to the education part of the post. Where do you explain WHY you say (incorrectly) that Linux is not free?

Windows XP Pro costs $299 retail. To argue otherwise because of costs of hardware (which is required to run most software) and/or support ($250 per incident) is misleading.
# January 20, 2004 7:35 PM

Jeff Key said:

I apologize for the confusion. I read a lot (too many) industry rags/news and one of the things I see over and over again is that "Linux is free" is a reason for choosing or considering that platform. My short post was a response to the generalizations I read all the time.

I would argue that the associated costs are certainly valid when comparing them as platforms. With Windows you have the platform and application services, as well as a runtime environment (.NET) as part of the package. No need for an application server, MQ server, etc. The only assumed additional requirement is a database server. (Yes, sometimes additional applications/services are required.)

I do hope decision makers consider _everything_ when choosing a platform. TCO is a huge factor and it appears, at least in the press, that it's not always taken into consideration as much as it should be. Sometimes a Linux/Java solution is cheaper over time, sometimes a MSFT solution is.I've been doing .NET full time since the beta days and early on we lost some projects to Linux/Java that went grossly over budget. In my experience, the MSFT solution is generally the most affordable, both in cost and time.

Although my post wasn't about the price of Linux itself (although it wasn't glaringly obvious), it's worth looking at Red Hat, the market leader (especially here in the US). You cannot get a free version of Red Hat. You can get something called the Fedora Project. Let's look at that:

Cost: Free
Support options: None.
ISV certifications: None.
Hardware certs: None.

Now for Red Hat Linux:

ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION RATES:
Desktop starts at $179 (with support: $299)
Enterprise ES starts at $349 (with support: $799)
Enterprise AS starts at $1,499 (includes support)
Support options: 24x7
ISV certs: over 300
Hardware certs: Lots

There is no free Red Hat Linux. Yes, there are others that are free. The Red Hat stats are valid because they are a major player and if they make money charging you can bet others will follow.

Again, I apologize for the confusion and appreciate the feedback. Lesson learned, and I'll be more responsible in the future. (I really do like Linux and Java; it's the press that pisses me off.)
# January 20, 2004 9:10 PM

Marc said:

Why do I see this love-fest turning into a domestic disturbance? ;-)
# January 20, 2004 11:53 PM

Marc LaFleur said:

Talk about splitting hairs. I bet he was one of those guys who stood around Time Square on Dec 31st 1999 telling everyone that the millennium doesn't start until 2001. Some people are just to "geek" for their own good.
# January 20, 2004 11:55 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 21, 2004 10:49 PM

Jim Argeropoulos said:

Care to share any tricks? I also got no result using it.
# January 22, 2004 9:37 AM

Dave Wanta said:

Thanks for the kind words.

Cheers!
Dave
# January 22, 2004 9:47 AM

Jeff Key said:

Jim, I think the key is the case of the assembly to watch. This works:

"d:\Program Files\NCover\ncover.exe" /c NetPing.exe /a sliver.NetPing.Core

Whereas this doesn't:

"d:\Program Files\NCover\ncover.exe" /c NetPing.exe /a sliver.netping.core

(Note the "NetPing.Core" bit.)
# January 22, 2004 10:27 AM

SBC said:

Good posting. I would read those analyst reports only with a little thought - they don't code. I am not sure about their technical competence that's needed to truly gauge the potential of the technology. Most say only what would sell their reports to corporate clients.
To answer the question - "
Show me a company that isn't driven by revenue and I'll show you a company that's soon to be out-of-business". Answer: $un. Look at their stock market performance. :-)
# January 22, 2004 9:33 PM

mjm said:

Not to interrupt the masses of geekdom here who insist on bringing everything down to the endlessly exhausting Mac vs PC debate...that debate is as '97 as people using 128 encoded MP3s. Shit, head's-up here comes the flamebags...

No really, how about some of you lazy format espousing bastards actually do some serious tests in various formats with various musical genres and various encodings to actually let us know what SOUNDS GOOD. These are after all audio formats and frankly most of what I've heard about AAC/mp4 is that it doesn't cut the mustard. Here's one of the only real-world comparison tests I can find: http://www.xciv.org/~meta/audio-shootout/

If all you blowhards think the latest and greatest is also the best, then why don't you put up or shut the hell up - prove it. As far as I can tell, the main emphasis of Jeff's original discussion is the loss of audio quality. The primary function of this new format hasn't been to increase audio quality, it has been to find a secure format so "the Man" can control music distribution once more, therefore despite a +1 over mp3, i doubt there is much of a audio quality increase especially one that can't already be achieved. But btw, the new one also isn't supported on older Mac OS's either, hmm i'm sure Apple's not just using it to force more suckers ahem, users to upgrade hardware and software. The sizes certainly haven't improved much so you're dealing with the same amount of bits, just rearranged. There's not suddenly that much more magic in your pants geekwads.

Clearly, quality has been all downhill since vinyl succumbed to Sony's boss' love of opera music, so where is the line currently?! Let's see some more real world tests comparing just how low we can go and whether or not we're there yet.

My piss in the pot:

Having used MP3's for years, a LAME encoded MP3 at 192 or 224 (depending on the type of music) will be indistinguishable to your ears on a high-end home stereo system from the original CD - try it yourself - set them both up playing at the same time through the CD & AUX channels of your stereo and have a friend switch the output channel between the 2 and see if you can tell correctly which is which.
If you would like to DJ or use the MP3s on a club or professional system you would need at least 256 or 320. These rates however begin to defeat the purpose since the file sizes are getting large (when considering a large collection) and you are probably better off keeping the original CD format.


now back to the next 5 morons repeating the same damn posts that have been repeated by their brethren above ad nauseum - "itunes DOES encode MP3s", "AAC is so great my dick is 3 inches longer" waa, waa, waa...asshats...
# January 22, 2004 10:25 PM

SBC said:

Since the Linux industry is maturing (and about time), you'll see quite a few companies shutting their shutters.
# January 24, 2004 9:13 AM

rido said:

I've tried Ncover (from SF) this weekend, here is my impression:

It works modifying the .cs files (original files are backed up in *.cs.uninstrumeted files), looking for code branches and adding instrumenting code inside the NCover namespace, so you will need to add a reference to NCover.dll before you compile it again.

As you suppose you need to "re-reun", and you will get a xml files with the code execution data.

The first thing I've missed is the ability to recover your original files, so you must be working on a separate tree.

Note that I ¡m not capable yet to produce any results..

My 2cents (rido)
# January 25, 2004 6:02 PM

Jeff Key said:

Great info, rido, thanks! I still haven't played around with that one yet; now I know not to until I have some free time.
# January 26, 2004 4:07 PM

Anon said:

I continue to hear people complain about the advertising. Screeming "FALSE ADVERTISING"!!! and saying stuff like "Im not really geting a sale price".

Haynes does not carry the same merchandise every week. Our buyers are very agressive and go after furniture that we can sell and move out quickly. They buy in bulk and get very good prices as a result. We do have a sale every week because we are always bringing in new merchandise that we buy at discounted prices from the vendors. Sometimes I think customers come in just to complain. They never inteded to buy anything in the first place. Just because they merchandise they are looking at is not 65% off they go off the deep end. What is on sale may not always be what you like. You could tell them its free and it still would not be good enough. Unless its free cofee and cookies. Oh, they will come running for that lol. My advice to you is if you dont belive its a good price, shop around before you start complaining. No one is forcing you to purchase anything. To save you some time and agrivation, walk away if you feel its not a steal.

And another thing, if you see the advertising. LISTEN and READ it completly. It says UP TO 65% off. Not everything is 65% off lol. I love my customers to death, without them I would not make a living. I just ask for some people to use common sense and act in a professional mannor when your dealing with a salesperson. You will always get better service that way.
# January 28, 2004 10:58 PM

TrackBack said:

# January 29, 2004 12:34 AM

Joseph E Shook said:

Recently I proved this scenario out myself using NUnit. I had previously used Nunit but many times it was bolted on after the GUI was well on its way. I was the only developer on a web based user admin so I basically said my GUI will be NUnit and I wrote my tests firsts. With tests running green against my facade layer, I moved on to the creations of my aspx pages. To my surprise this process went amazingly fast because a lot of the thought process and the code need for hooking GUI to Facade, was in my unit tests. I new the pay back near the end of the project would be there, but I didn't realize the transition form unit tests to GUI were going to be so fast and smooth.
# January 29, 2004 5:15 PM

Marc said:

You could also use conditional compilation, like:

#If DEBUG Then
Console.WriteLine("Debug mode is enabled")
#End If

The call to console.writeline will not be compiled into the release build.
# February 3, 2004 2:02 PM

Peter Waldschmidt said:

Very cool! Thanks for putting this together. I really need to upgrade the NCover user experience when I get some time.
# February 4, 2004 8:00 AM

Pete McKinney said:

If you are interested in NCover, please also take a look at NCoverViewer. It takes the output and integrates it with Visual Studio as a plug in.
# February 4, 2004 9:28 AM

Jeff Key said:

Peter: No problem. Thanks for the app!

Pete: I'd love to, but Google doesn't provide any results for "NCoverViewer". Can you provide a link?
# February 4, 2004 11:16 AM

Jeff Key said:

Found it:
http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/ncoverviewer
# February 4, 2004 1:17 PM

Grant said:


I would have preferred that C# use a hybrid approach to properties, indexers, operators, etc. You'd define members with a specific syntax (e.g. setName, getName, opAdd, opIndex, etc.). These members would be mapped to the appropriate syntax in the language.

For example:

A.Name=B.Name;

would be mapped to:

A.setName(B.getName());

so you get the benefit of the terse syntax.

But you also get the advantage of a consistent image of the reflected class because all these special operations are exposed via ordinary methods.

You get the benefit of being able to call these functions naturally from languages that do not support the terse version of the syntax. And you get the terse syntax for classes written in languages that don't natively support the terse syntax.

Note that this would have alleviated the need to add the "new feature" of differing access levels for getters and setters in C# 2.0. It would potentially allow for virtual operators. It would remove the need for special operator or property declaration syntax.

Anyway, just thinking out loud...
# February 5, 2004 9:25 AM

Eric Brunsen said:

I just tried Ctl-M, Ctl-O to collapse all the folder tree in Explorer, and it took me a few seconds to determine why it didn't collapse the folders.

Eric
# February 5, 2004 1:50 PM

Eric Brunsen said:

Personally, I would like for MS to offer long documents (>5 pages) in MS Word format as a download.

Eric
# February 5, 2004 1:54 PM

Jeff Key said:

Agree. They already do this for a good number of things already. My guess is that those docs are stored as XML already; transforming them into WordML shouldn't be hard at all.
# February 5, 2004 9:30 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 5, 2004 9:40 PM

Frans Bouma said:

I haven't heard anything about a newer build in the Alpha test group. It would be a real weird thing to do, to release a newer build to visitors of a show and not to alpha test group members. But you'll never know, it's Microsoft :)
# February 6, 2004 11:56 AM

Scott Watermasysk said:

BTW, if you went to the PDC, you can go to DevDays for free...so you can save your $100 :)
# February 6, 2004 12:14 PM

Alex Lowe said:

I'm pretty sure it will be the PDC build. You should, however, go to DevDays for the great speakers, food, and networking. =)
# February 6, 2004 12:18 PM

Matt Hawley said:

I've read (somewhere on weblogs.asp.net) that it will be the PDC build.
# February 6, 2004 12:27 PM

Michael Teper said:

DonXML checked into this a few weeks ago and he concluded it was going to be the PDC build.
# February 6, 2004 12:29 PM

Jeff Key said:

Great feedback, thanks guys. Good point Alex; I actually hope to go since it's just a few miles from home/work, but don't know what my schedule looks like. The "free" bit does make it more attractive. ;)
# February 6, 2004 12:38 PM

Jeff Key said:

The post title reminds me of the Underwear Gnomes episode of South Park: Underwear + ?? = Profit! Hilarious episode that hit the idiocy of the internet bubble on the head.
# February 8, 2004 2:45 PM

Matt Hawley said:

Jeff, I'd be interested... I'll be at the Chicago one too, maybe we can meet up either way?
# February 8, 2004 3:25 PM

TrackBack said:

Doing things the hard way with RSS Bandit leads to some interesting statistics; Stuff for my Boss and co-workers; SOA and Joe Developer -- Phillip gets it right (again); Bits on Reporting Services; Wake up and smell RSS.NET; htmlArea (drool); InfoPath duh; McD's
# February 9, 2004 2:45 AM

Ryan Rinaldi said:

You can count me in. I don't know if I will be at DevDays, but I would be more than happy to grab some drinks.
# February 9, 2004 12:41 PM

Jeff Key said:

Excellent! Feel free to email me your contact info (Contact link in top left corner of page) and we can figure something out.
# February 9, 2004 2:53 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 9, 2004 10:38 PM

Frans Bouma said:

Heh :) ALways nice to see 'real world' and 'longhorn' in one sentence ;)
# February 10, 2004 3:51 AM

TrackBack said:

# February 11, 2004 1:20 AM

TrackBack said:

# February 11, 2004 9:19 AM

Darrell said:

Certifications, exams, etc. are no excuse for not doing due diligence.
# February 11, 2004 11:18 AM

Fabrice said:

There is a small problem with NCoverGui: you always add the /a option, while you should not add it when the user doesn't provide any assembly.
From NCover's FAQ :"If you do not specify the /a argument, NCover will attempt to analyze every loaded assembly that has debug information available."
# February 12, 2004 9:39 AM

TrackBack said:

# February 12, 2004 9:46 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 12, 2004 9:47 PM

PETA said:

ive heard you're mean to dogz too. whats with that?
# February 13, 2004 2:40 AM

TrackBack said:

# February 13, 2004 3:47 PM

Julie Lerman said:

hmmm - I got one too! That two timin' .....
http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/#a6660602f-47c9-4f34-8eaa-1561e2baf4f6
# February 13, 2004 11:28 PM

Young said:

Can't seem to find the info on the free single user. Where can this be found?
# February 14, 2004 1:30 AM

Jeff Key said:

It's actually the default -- when you download Vault, you automatically have a single license. Details are here in Eric's weblog:

http://software.ericsink.com/20040213.html#10151
# February 14, 2004 1:37 AM

TrackBack said:

1 .Net, 1 Perl, 2 Rant, 2 WILY, 1 WTF?, 1 XML
Line du jour:
# February 14, 2004 12:26 PM

Mauricio Feijo said:

I thought about metioning that on the blogger. it is really very nice.

I keptthinking how they did it.

Does anone know?

It is jkust so nice to have the toolbar alive. I LOVE GOOGLE.. xoxoxoxoxoxo

8^)...
# February 14, 2004 12:30 PM

Mauricio Feijo said:

Sorry! I forgot to iSpeel my msg ... :(
# February 14, 2004 12:31 PM

John said:

I love the subtle humor in their branding. Last winter they had a whole sequence of events playing out a goofy snowman drama.
# February 14, 2004 3:48 PM

Louis Parks said:

Looks like the love is over. Sadly, my toolbar is back to normal.
# February 15, 2004 6:00 AM

af said:

The real question is thr long time budgeting needed, not only the installation part.
# February 15, 2004 1:08 PM

Jeff Key said:

Yup, the love is indeed gone. Looking forward to future holidays to see if they do it again. I figure they must if they went through the hassle of coding in the ability in the first place. Bring on St. Pat's day! (Will the Os become pints of Guinness?)
# February 15, 2004 4:30 PM

Jason Nadal said:

Nice title. The problem is, what advice do you give the noob?
1) "Don't download anything" -- bad since then people don't download critical updates and security problems
2) "Download anything" --I hope this doesn't need an explanation why it's bad
3) "Download selectively" aka "Don't download something that seems suspicious" -- right, but the average person isn't probably going to realize that the link to microsoft, saying it's from microsoft on a site that looks like microsoft isn't really microsoft.

This is a tough problem with no easy solutions.
# February 16, 2004 11:01 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

There is an easy solution - double click the lock and make sure the subject is who they claim to be. But then - it's easy to spoof that window too...

Of course if you're not using the default UI style you're ok.
# February 16, 2004 11:25 PM

Jeff Key said:

The easy solution is to tell people to just stop using the web; with new forms of trickery appearing weekly, it seems pointless to try to keep casual users up to speed.

Since that isn't the most practical solution, I stand by what I said in the original post: If new browser windows are created in script that hide toolbars and/or the status bar, don't allow any content from the Internet zone. Pretty simple.

Also, it would be great if MSFT built in a Verisign or BBB toolbar that showed either the registered owner (Verisign), or even better, the name in the BBB registry. The latter would be much harder to fake, AFAIK.
# February 17, 2004 9:09 AM

Jonathan Cogley said:

We starting using the SF NCover a few days ago. Very impressive product! We easily integrated it into our continuous integration process and impressed technical management with the coverage report. It doesn't appear to catch all the coverage "points" in our code (doesn't get all branches in logic) but peeking through their source (which compiled and passed all its tests out of the box!) - it looks like it should be easy to adjust the regexs to catch all coverage points. I highly recommend SF NCover.
# February 18, 2004 5:03 PM

Jeff Key said:

Great to hear! Thanks Jonathan.
# February 18, 2004 6:03 PM

Richard Hsu said:

Hi,

"...If it a class in an <b>application, then the latter is fine</b>. The behavior is known and expected. However, if it's in a library such as the <b>FCL, I prefer the latter</b>..."

Both case, you are suggesting latter ??
here latter refers to using of ReadOnly flag in the class.

What I understand is that Application - ReadOnly flag is fine, Library - separate ReadOnly class ('former'). I think this is what you meant ?
# February 20, 2004 1:59 AM

Louis Parks said:

The homepage of my blog is 35% evil. Should I take the glass if half full approach and say, "I'm glad I"m 65% good" or half empty and say, "I have some repenting to do"?
# February 22, 2004 5:44 AM

David Cumps said:

http://www.microsoft.com is
50% evil, 50% good

http://www.linux.org is
58% evil, 42% good

:p
# February 22, 2004 5:48 AM

anonymous said:

Try out the four letter F word - it's 1% evil :p
# February 22, 2004 6:37 AM

Darrell said:

I'm cruising in at 32% evil. Just one calorie, not quite evil enough!
# February 22, 2004 11:45 AM

Jeff Key said:

I'd say 35% evil is pretty darn good. Nice job!
# February 22, 2004 1:09 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 23, 2004 4:17 PM

TrackBack said:

# February 23, 2004 4:26 PM

ShadowChaser said:

Your version checking code is flawed. If Microsoft releases Windows 6.0, the code will not execute.

It will only execute if all versions end in .1! ie/ versions 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 will fail, but 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, etc will work.

You might want to update your code...

Also, you should probably mention that not only does it require XP to work, but that XP Themes also need to be enabled. Doh! :(
# February 23, 2004 9:08 PM

Stuart Laughlin said:

I really dug those articles, too. The timing is coincidental because I'm on the 12 year plan (and that's generous) to get my BS, and this semester I'm taking CS121 -- Data Structures. My class happens to be C++ instead of .NET, but as you said, the subject matter of these articles is really language agnostic so they apply as much to my class as to what I do at work with .NET. Good stuff!
# February 23, 2004 9:34 PM

Gamut said:

I don't see the point of this. There are tons of data structures books around.
# February 24, 2004 1:36 AM

Jon Galloway said:

No way can I trust this - the title of the download link (http://www.sliver.com/dotnet/ClipboardViewer/) is "Create Shortcut Util". Will it view my clipboard or create a shortcut?! I'm paralyzed with fear and will probably turn to the open source community.

I guess you did give enough waringins in your post, and even in the about box...

Seriously, though, I figured some bozo would point that out so it might as well be me. Feel free to delete this comment when your QFE team fixes this "show stopper" defect.
# February 24, 2004 2:29 AM

Jon Galloway said:

P.S. I know how to spell warnings, but the above issue really threw me off.
# February 24, 2004 2:31 AM

Jeff Key said:

Uh oh, I've been found out. I guess it was bound to happen. I've shown the entire sliver.com web development team[1] the door and I can assure you this will never happen again!

BTW, I cannot be responsible for any interaction between CreateShortcut and ClipboardViewer. If you require more information, please contact the sliver.com legal department.

[1] Except for the design guy. I don't think I could ever find someone to replace the exceptional design skill displayed on the site.
# February 24, 2004 2:42 AM

Jeff Key said:

Correct. There are tons of books on everything. That doesn't mean Joe .NET Developer is going to search them out and read them. The fact that it's published on MSDN is what's significant. There seems to be a push @ MSDN to get more articles published that aren't solution-based. This is a good thing -- it brings topics to people that otherwise wouldn't think to research them.
# February 24, 2004 2:53 AM

kevin white said:

Those articles were a perfect introduction for the newer members of my development group. They are also an excellent short refresher for experienced programmers, like me. I can't wait for the next article in the series.
# February 24, 2004 10:47 AM

Metawizard2 said:

I have found a solution; ironically, it requires using the Opera browser with the following stats:
Version 7.23
Build 3227
Platform Win32
System Windows XP

I open the MSDN page:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/sql/reskit/sql2000/part5/c2161.asp

Then press the Print Preview button on the small toolbar twice. The view of the page changes from one that looks "weird", and then looks like a Word document. Printing at this point prints just the article, without trying to print the treeview menu, and the whole doc prints without getting cut off edges.
# February 25, 2004 3:40 PM

Metawizard said:

Forgot one thing:
When the MSDN article opens, right click on the frame that has the article, and choose Frame, and then Open in New Page.

Then you can use the trick with the Print Preview button.
# February 25, 2004 3:54 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

Thanks for your kind words and review, Jeff. Reminds me that I've got to get my butt in gear on Part 6! :-)
# February 25, 2004 4:58 PM

Russ911 said:

My computer was running extremely slow in accessing files, such as 20 seconds to change a directory when I opened Word's or Wordperfect's "save as" window. When I tried to use Windows' defragmentation, it hung up -- absolutely useless! The Windows defragmentation had worked in the past, so there may be a point of percent defragmentation, where Windows' defrag cannot function. You need a third party solution.

I have Windows XP Professional on my computer, so checked out various disk cleanup programs. Decided to spend the $49.95 (which also included a copy of Undelete 4.0 on this date, 26Feb04).

In running Diskeeper Pro 8.0 (note the one "k") on my "C" drive, the analyze command showed that of 147,205 files, 11,630 were fragmented into 123,660 fragments.

Diskeeper took just 25 minutes to defragment my 35MB drive. My programs are back to their original speed.

For me, Diskeeper was worth the money.
# February 26, 2004 3:12 PM

Christophe Lauer said:

Rumors about a Windows XP "Second Edition" are floating around for some time now. I found an article talking about this (sorry, in French), and quoting someone from Acer who explains that this XP SE will also provide support for 2 simultaneous users, a mandatory feature for Smart Displays. But hey, since this article was published, MS announced that plans around Smart displays were stopped. This person from Acer should check her sources ;-)

http://www.weblmi.com/news_store/2003_10_01_Microsoft_devrait_la_33/News_view (Article in French)

/CL
# February 26, 2004 6:12 PM

Jeff Key said:

Haha. Yup, recall hearing that, too. It's too bad they discontinued the SDs. I was really looking forward to getting one when the price went down. Oh well...
# February 26, 2004 7:39 PM

bigmutt said:

I used diskeeper for the 30 days and found it worked wonderfully, in every respect. $50 however is lots to spend on a utility that should come with the operating system (a proper one, that is).
Maybe a key is available somewhere for diskeeper, does anyone know?
# March 1, 2004 3:14 PM

sara said:

please give me a free virus scan
# March 2, 2004 1:14 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 6, 2004 12:52 AM

TrackBack said:

Where my dogs at?
# March 7, 2004 10:35 PM

Phil McCracken said:

Just because you're a mindless tool who made a wrong choice when initally encoding tunes does not spare you from the grief you have brought upon yourself.

I have 18000 songs that I spent the time ripping before portable players were in vogue, and you know what? I went ahead with MP3 encoding.
Know why?

Portability

Big fucking deal if iTMS uses AAC. The DRM is the reason. I'll admit, I have a pod, and I have to decide what goes on it. I also buy the occasional track trom iTMS, and if I need to, I'll burn it to CDRW, and re-rip it to MP3.

Instead of lambasting everybody for pointing out your own incompetencies, why not eat crow, and admit that what you have done is wrong and fundamentally stupid.

And if that doesn't work, try sticking your head up you ass, and then jump really hard, and maybe you'll disappear.

Dick...
# March 8, 2004 10:59 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Phil. Next time you're in Chicago, drop me an email and we'll go for a beer. You sound like a fun guy.
# March 8, 2004 11:02 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 9, 2004 8:45 AM

bob said:

ich war glueklich darueber

danke
# March 10, 2004 1:55 AM

miha at rthand com (Miha Markic [MVP C#]) said:

Even better is to use Virtual PC (or VMWare) as a test platform. It won't cure the old sins, though :)
# March 10, 2004 8:29 AM

Christiane said:

I need help trying to find out if there is a virus in my comutere on not. thank you for your help.
# March 10, 2004 1:20 PM

Ben Spigle said:

Also might want to check out CoverageEye.Net on GotDotNet -- this one is IL based... Also Clover http://www.thecortex.net/clover/index.html is releasing a .Net version. I haven't personally worked with any of them (yet), but work with some guys who are involved in the Clover port from Java. Sounds good.
# March 12, 2004 3:01 PM

Art said:

Impressive indeed! Thanks for the tip.
# March 13, 2004 9:24 PM

Matt Hawley said:

I actually ran across this (pointed to it actually Dmitry at BlogJet) last week. Very impressive, however I haven't tried it out yet.
# March 13, 2004 10:30 PM

MArtin said:

The fix mentioned above doesn't seem to work when the keyboard is connected using USB instead of PS/2. Too bad :-((.
# March 14, 2004 5:00 AM

Brian Desmond said:

I'm interested - northsider here.

--Brian
desmondb@payton.cps.k12.il.us
# March 14, 2004 2:57 PM

TrackBack said:

Jeff Key is starting a Chicago branch of the Pragmatic Practitioners after reading the posts about our Denver group. Congrats!...
# March 14, 2004 5:04 PM

Darrell said:

Awesome.
# March 14, 2004 5:43 PM

Andrew Carlson said:

I am interested. I work in the Loop and live in Wicker Park.

ajc@andrewcarlson.org
# March 15, 2004 12:31 PM

Adam Kinney said:

Oh dang, no CHAO :p

Well it looks like you found more people in downtown Chicago, then you thought.

/runs off to go read about "Pragmatic Practitioners"...
# March 15, 2004 11:42 PM

christian ehrhardt said:

one of my favorite (and still referenced!) books is "data structures and algorithms in pascal" from 1982 because the manner which the author explains everything ... there are nice illustrations and examples i can visualize.. helped a lot when first trying to "see" a sorting algorithm or trying to "picture" a queue ... loved theses links
# March 16, 2004 2:43 AM

Harper Reed said:

I am also interested. I work in the Loop and live in Logan Square.

-harper
harper@nata2.org
# March 17, 2004 10:48 AM

John Miller said:

You have to understand that when you rent the theatres you have to use there ticketing system. It is not the choice of the company or sketch group. Go to the box...cheapo.
# March 17, 2004 5:11 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, John, but that's not entirely convenient for everyone, especially when we don't have cars.
# March 17, 2004 9:09 PM

Paul Wilson said:

That's just sick. :)
# March 17, 2004 10:14 PM

Darrell said:

I'm up for some unnecessary pain and suffering!
# March 17, 2004 10:48 PM

Scott Sargent said:

I'm up for some suffering as well, bring it on. March 22, no intellisense. I will probably wear out my F7 key (compile) on that day.

# March 17, 2004 10:53 PM

Ryan Farley said:

OK, I am up for it. I'm such a man that you can call me a Man.NET
# March 17, 2004 10:53 PM

timh said:

are you insane?!?! choosing to remove developer productivity!?!?!

intellisense is the #1 most underrated and underawarded tool in the world. period.

well, okay that and solitaire (hey it's bug free)
# March 17, 2004 11:36 PM

Robert McLaws said:

I know a blogger that doesn't read blogs. I sat down with Chris Brumme at PDC, and he says he never reads a single blog. I don't blame the dude. Betweeen writing novels and building the framework that practically every team at Microsoft depends on, I wouldn't have the time either.
# March 17, 2004 11:40 PM

Paul said:

I don't have a blog! :)
# March 17, 2004 11:41 PM

Jeff Key said:

Haha, sorry, Tim.

I agree that it's convenient, but I do see people hunting through the IntelliSense looking for stuff they know is there just so they don't have to type it, and that usually takes them longer than actually typing it! :)
# March 17, 2004 11:42 PM

Matt Hawley said:

Sometimes I hate intellisense, like when your editing HTML and you want to type just an "a", but "AccessKey" gets placed in instead. Err. I may try it, but then give up on it after 10 min :)
# March 17, 2004 11:49 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 17, 2004 11:54 PM

Jerry Dennany said:

Hmmm.. Maybe I should attend Intellisense Anonymous. I'm hooked, and I don't think I can give it up.
# March 18, 2004 12:53 AM

Dave Rothgery said:

I think I'd rather try programming one-handed. It sounds less painful.
# March 18, 2004 12:58 AM

Scott said:

Does it count if you stopped using VS a while back and started coding your ASPX, ASCX and code behind pages in a text editor because the flipping environment kept switching off intellisense and you'd have to restart it to bring it back?

Heck I don't even have VS installed at home on any of my machines, I just use Editplus and NAnt. I don't suffer foolish environments long.

Been that way for a while. Me.Manly++; :)
# March 18, 2004 1:03 AM

Ryan Rinaldi said:

This is by far the most twisted and sickest thing I've ever heard.

I'm in. :)
# March 18, 2004 1:03 AM

Jon Galloway said:

Must... resist... urge... to try... to... hack... poll!
# March 18, 2004 1:25 AM

Jon Galloway said:

Make it "No Google Day" and you'll have me scared. Probably fired, too.
# March 18, 2004 1:27 AM

O said:

I don't have a blog, and I vote.
# March 18, 2004 1:51 AM

Richard Tallent said:

Good idea...

http://www.tallent.us/CommentView.aspx?guid=4f06e7c4-5aed-4f6b-aa25-293f0a556216
# March 18, 2004 2:31 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 18, 2004 3:05 AM

Thomas Freudenberg said:

Do I have to disable Visual Assist (http://www.wholetomato.com/) and ReSharper (http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/Home) as well?

;-)
# March 18, 2004 4:07 AM

SBC said:

this is non-intellisense..
:-)
# March 18, 2004 6:31 AM

David said:

No blog here.
# March 18, 2004 7:19 AM

Matt Hawley said:

LOL nice SBC
# March 18, 2004 8:04 AM

The Penton-izer said:

Why not just use your favorite text editor instead? That and occasional Anakrino or Class Browser trips and I am good to go!
# March 18, 2004 8:46 AM

P said:

Does one have to have a blog to come? :)

In da loop.

# March 18, 2004 8:56 AM

Darrell said:

You know I have a blog...
# March 18, 2004 9:00 AM

Jon S. said:

No blog for me (yet, anyway!).

I suspect the poll might be skewed in favor of the "no" response, since your text preceeding the poll makes people who read blogs but don't have their own feel "special" somehow, and therefore more likely to respond to the poll!
# March 18, 2004 9:04 AM

AndrewSeven said:

I have a whole buch of projects in each solution, so IntelliSense stops working regularly. No need for a special day.
# March 18, 2004 9:08 AM

Scott Galloway said:

Sorry...but you are a bad, bad man for even suggesting this - shame on you!
# March 18, 2004 9:21 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 18, 2004 9:38 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 18, 2004 9:39 AM

Juan Felipe MAchado said:

jeje, I really like this one!!.
PD. Just one problem. I'm from Colombia and the next monday (march 22) is a holliday... So I'll do it on march 23.
# March 18, 2004 9:53 AM

Jeff Key said:

Funny, Jon, I almost didn't put any "commentary" before the request for voters for that very reason. One of my electives in b-school was marketing research and there was a pretty heavy segment on surveys, best practices, etc. Amazing how 95% of the surveys I see these days break many of these rules..

As an aside, the survey news organizations are doing now floor me. Typical one: "Will George Bush be reelected?". What? Not only is it pure speculation, but what good are the results of the survey? "X% of people _think_ George bush will be reelected." What good is that? 80% of those that think Bush will be elected may vote for Kerry. Those numbers tell you absolutely zip. (Note to self: Get some sleep.)
# March 18, 2004 10:05 AM

Jeff Key said:

Jon: No Google? Now _that_ is pure insanity!

Scott: Bravo! Would you consider being the mascott for INISD? :)

Penton: Anakrino? Isn't Reflector's decompiled output a superset of that? Regardless, it's still a good tool.
# March 18, 2004 10:14 AM

Munish Gupta said:

I am a non-blogger and read more than 200 blogs regularly (no where even close to Scoble!). May be in the next poll you should ask WHY :-)
# March 18, 2004 10:47 AM

joseph said:

How about some kind of lunch every two weeks ?
Jeff I guess you are the appointed organizer :)
# March 18, 2004 11:16 AM

Frans Bouma said:

That's a bummer, I think I've to design some serious forms on monday ;)
# March 18, 2004 12:02 PM

Scott Mitchell said:

From my blog entry http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/posts/159.aspx back in July 2003:

"CyberAtlas has a short piece on blog statistics [http://www.clickz.com/stats/big_picture/applications/article.php/1301_2238831] worth checking out. One statistic worth noting is that only 4% of the online community even reads blogs, while only 2% of the online community has created a blog."
# March 18, 2004 12:04 PM

TrackBack said:

Support No IntelliSense Day...
# March 18, 2004 12:31 PM

Geoffrey Plitt said:

Hey Jeff - Definitely keep me in the loop about this.
# March 18, 2004 1:46 PM

David Cumps said:

No, no, no :p

Long Live IntelliSense!
# March 18, 2004 2:37 PM

Jeff Key said:

David: I agree! As they say, "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone". INISD isn't about trashing IntelliSense, but rather celebrating it. :)
# March 18, 2004 5:19 PM

Jeff Key said:

P: lol nope. Feel free to email me your info if you're interested.

joseph: We're leaning more for an after-work gig so we have the option of enjoying a few adult beverages. I'm always looking for interesting lunches, so feel free to send me an email and maybe we can work something out.
# March 18, 2004 9:06 PM

TrackBack said:

You have been Taken Out! Comments about your posting in this link. Thanks!
# March 19, 2004 12:05 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 19, 2004 2:37 AM

marko rangel said:

i have nothing interesting to say, but i have interest in what other people write, but Munish, 200+ blogs a day? that's a lot of reading!

marko rangel
# March 19, 2004 10:02 AM

Sean Schade said:

This could be a very unproductive day! That being said, is Intellisense a crutch? :-)

http://blog.magenic.com/seans/archive/2004/03/19/166.aspx
# March 19, 2004 12:48 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 19, 2004 1:47 PM

Jason Haley said:

Jeff, I have my own blog as well as a blogsite set up within my company (intranet). Out of the 8 or so people who have blogs on my intranet site - I am the only one who has a blog on the outside. I have been a blog pusher in the past within my company, but some people would rather just observe, read and comment. Most people use the "I don't have time" response.
# March 19, 2004 4:51 PM

Josh said:

Shift + Del does this, too
# March 19, 2004 6:27 PM

Jeff Key said:

In C# Shift+DEL is Cut. If you have text selected, it cuts the selected text. If nothing is selected, it cuts the whole line. (This is important if you have other stuff you want to paste already on the clipboard.)

FWIW, I thought Shift+DEL did this too for a while until I realized I kept losing my clipboard info. :)
# March 19, 2004 6:34 PM

Jeff Key said:

Sean: I think it can be a crutch or a godsend, but usually the latter....
# March 19, 2004 6:51 PM

No, the best one is said:

CTRL+]

Moves to the corresponding brace\bracket\#ifdef

Now THAT is a keystroke
# March 21, 2004 2:08 PM

Kevin A. Boucher said:

Those are good, but my favorite is CTRL + -.

It moves you to the last place you were editing.
# March 22, 2004 2:36 PM

df said:

<hr>
# March 23, 2004 5:37 PM

Adam Kinney said:

Congrats man.

I am from the opposing camp, I would miss the spam.

How else would I obtain the great images I use for my MSN Messenger profile?

How else would I half know Japanese by now?

And how else would I know about the 5 cent tax per email that the government has declared? Can you believe that?!?!
# March 24, 2004 10:13 AM

Omar Shahine said:

Is SpamArrest like Mailblocks? I just started using MailBlocks cause I can't be bothered with traditional filters any more.
# March 24, 2004 12:41 PM

bertcord said:

"Once per day I check all of the email that wasn't allowed through"

I used to do this also...but to me tht is the same as getting the spam. IT woudl be impossible for me to do that now as I get over 600 spams a day...waht did I do?

mailblocks...it is the best service. No more spam for me!
# March 24, 2004 1:24 PM

Matt said:

I can't quite boast of those numbers but I subscribed to www.SpamStopsHere.com and have been quite pleased with their service. And it works for all the members of my family using the same domain name. A little pricey, but well worth the money.
# March 24, 2004 4:03 PM

Hugh Jass said:

To make matters even worse, the president / owner of exsuckutive software is a L. Ron Hubbard (Ol' Mutha hubbard) flunky. In other words, he belongs to the "church" of scientology, which is neither a church, nor does it have anything to do with science. Plain and simple, you are funding a CULT if you buy this software.
Cults are only one step away from communism and terrorist networks like hamas (I call it HUMMUS!) and al qaeda (I call it ALL GAYDA!).
So, if you buy this lame SPYWARE, not only does it screw up your computer, but you are supporting terrorism and demon-worshipping atheistic cults worldwide.
No WONDER Germany has banned his spyware software!!!
# March 24, 2004 4:10 PM

Jeff Key said:

adam: Yup, sucks about the email tax..and I had to hear it from my mom! Also, I've actually become half-Japanese, but I'm not sure it had anything to do w/spam.

omar: I just checked out the MailBlocks web site and it looks pretty much identical to SpamArrest, except of the inclusion of "Trackers", which is a great idea. I do the same thing manually (since I own my domain), but this is a great feature. The price is also much better.

bertcord: I've had the same email address(es) since 1996 or so, so it's necessary to check for email sent to those addresses from unknown senders, particularly automated ones. Last year I implemented a system similar to MailBlocks' Trackers, so hopefully I can stop looking checking in the next couple of years. ;)

Anyway, thanks guys for the heads-up on MailBlocks. It's cheaper than SpamArrest and has more features. I'll probably sign up soon.
# March 24, 2004 5:18 PM

S said:

GOT LONGHORN ALPHA ITS OK THATS ALL I CAN SAY
# March 25, 2004 4:26 AM

Omer van Kloeten said:

It also copies the line to the clipboard, unfortunately, as does Shift+Del.
That sucks. I sure could use one that just deleted a line without copying it to the clipboard.
# March 25, 2004 2:19 PM

Jeff Key said:

Doh! You're right, Omer. That's quite a bummer and I'm surprised I haven't been bitten by it. Thanks for the info.
# March 25, 2004 2:30 PM

Darrell said:

Not tennis elbow, SourceSafe-elbow! It's a debilitating disease which I am sure you can sue Microsoft for.
# March 25, 2004 2:56 PM

Minh T. Nguyen said:

I usually just press tab and then space. Quicker than the mouse at least.
# March 25, 2004 3:18 PM

Doug said:

Why don't you just turn off the dialog?

Tools->Options->Source Control->General
Change "Prompt for check out" to "Check out automatically"
# March 25, 2004 3:22 PM

Drew Marsh said:

I put in a request for this feature back in the days before VS.NET was released. Unfortunately they flagged it "for future consideration" and it has yet to be fixed. :\

I forget if I checked to see if they addressed it in Whidbey.
# March 25, 2004 3:26 PM

Jeff Key said:

Doug: Sometimes VS.NET wants to check out and change things it shouldn't, particularly Windows Forms. I'd tried this before, but it was checking things out, changing them and I'd accidentally check them back in. Not good.
# March 25, 2004 4:09 PM

Michael Flanakin said:

I would be interested. How much will it convert? Just class diagrams? Or, will it go further? I have been working on a very simple XMI -> C# XSL page. Your tool would be nice to provide a round-trip engineering experience. I've been thinking about tying this into a Win Form app that automates the file creation, but haven't bothered with that, yet.
# March 25, 2004 11:47 PM

Jeff Key said:

John: IIRC, it does typical class diagrams with generalizations and realizations. I'll try to dig it out this weekend and see where it's at.
# March 26, 2004 1:05 AM

Jeff Key said:

Michael: I have no idea why I thought your name was John. Strange.
# March 26, 2004 1:05 AM

Adam Kinney said:

Jeff: That is the funniest comment I have read all day.
# March 26, 2004 1:11 AM

Ryan Farley said:

Jeff, I think you have the first tip wrong. I belive the recommeneded option is for everyone to stop downloading until *I* am done first. ;-)

(Currently 21%...)
# March 26, 2004 1:13 AM

Thomas Tomiczek said:

Some more tips:

::If you're going to install to a VPC and already
::have a VPC w/the PDC VS.NET Whidbey,

then, heck, be spmart enough to make abackup of the installed OS image BEFORE INSTALLING VS.NET. It is less than 3gb, and it is much faster to go back to an onld state.

::And finally, don't expect to get the bits quickly.

Downloading near optimal speeds.
# March 26, 2004 1:46 AM

Yves Reynhout said:

Looks like someone beat you to it:
http://www.anticipatingminds.com/products/assemblymetadata2xmi/assemblymetadata2xmi.aspx

There's also someone that did this for Enterprise Architect( http://www.sparxsystems.com.au ). Navigating to the forums should give you a clue.

Please note that XMI is not as interoperable as we may want it to be.
# March 26, 2004 5:17 AM

Phil Scott said:

I just threw it on its own image myself. Isn't that the major benefit of VPC?

Anyways, what was odd was that when I tried to drag the .img file that I downloaded onto VPC, it wouldn't take an image file that big. So I extracted it and did a "network" install.

There is probably some really cool way to get around this in VPC, but I don't know what it is. So I had to extract the whole damn thing via isobuster before starting the install
# March 26, 2004 7:57 AM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Yves, you may have just saved my weekend. :)

Can you expand on your XMI comment? I've only used it with Poseidon.
# March 26, 2004 9:26 AM

Jeff Key said:

Thomas: Yes, that's the idea solution, but not everyone has done it. Congrats on the speed.

Phil: FWIW, VirtualCD, which is on MSDN, will let you extract the files as well.
# March 26, 2004 9:31 AM

Darrell said:

Cool. I can't wait to get a hold of a copy for myself. Our MSDN sub is managed via another developer, so I can't download :(
# March 26, 2004 11:24 AM

Wow` said:

You are pretty dumb Hugh Jass, I mean I will buy anything that will fix my computer if it is at a good price or download anything that will make my system faster. I don't care who it supports and there is no spyware in it because I own it and I checked it out.
# March 26, 2004 1:33 PM

JD said:

That's slick... I could use that several times a day. Wonder if there's a macro that would run under VS.NET 2003...[off to google...]
# March 26, 2004 7:57 PM

Michael Teper said:

As a better yet, why not turn on the quiet checkout in the menus. This way, you'll still get prompted when you start editing, but at least you'll have the option to checkout with just a right-click-click via the solution explorer.

I do feel your pain though -- the fact that there is no easy way to get out of that dialog is annoying while the dialog itself is not.
# March 27, 2004 2:52 AM

Jeff Key said:

Good thinking, JD. Any luck?
# March 27, 2004 1:14 PM

John said:

ie is alright but i like brown's browser, it has tabbed browsing and ad blocking. very fast, great cache cleaner, TOTALLY STELLAR!!!!!!
# March 30, 2004 8:07 PM

Art said:

Or create a new template. Jonathon Goodyear (angryCoder.com) wrote an article in Visual Studio Magazine maybe??? I don't quite remember. If not Visual Studio it's one of those magazines we all get.
# March 30, 2004 9:22 PM

Darrell said:

Nice.
# March 30, 2004 9:41 PM

John Sands said:

Hooray! Opening brace on the same line, the way it is MEANT to be! Thank you.
# March 30, 2004 10:04 PM

Jhai said:

coooool, thanks!
# March 30, 2004 10:54 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 30, 2004 11:04 PM

TrackBack said:

# March 30, 2004 11:08 PM

RichB said:

> Hooray! Opening brace on the same line, the way it
> is MEANT to be! Thank you.

ctrl-A-K-F

will sort this out for you.
# March 31, 2004 4:09 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 31, 2004 10:15 AM

TrackBack said:

# March 31, 2004 10:16 AM

JD said:

No luck via Google and Google Groups, though I suppose it's possible I didn't use the right combination of search terms.

Now if only I knew the automation model better and could tackle the macro on my own. Maybe it's time to see how good the "Record Macro" works as a starting point.
# March 31, 2004 12:24 PM

Jeff Key said:

Bummer..thanks for the update. :)
# April 1, 2004 12:25 AM

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson said:

What about the propably faster method (no casting going on):

(stringVar == null || stringVar.Length == 0)
# April 1, 2004 7:03 PM

Jeff Key said:

I wasn't suggesting the be-all-end-all check, but rather just another little trick. :) Yours should indeed be faster.

While Gooling something unrelated this morning I saw a question asking if there was anything like 2.0's IsNullOrEmpty, which prompted me to post this.
# April 1, 2004 8:12 PM

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson said:

Yeah. I offered my method as an alternative. This is the beauty of programming, there is usually never just one correct way to do things. I guess it all comes down to habit and circumstances :)

Having looked at the CTP of Whidbey i can't wait to start using it in "day to day" programming. A quote i saw somewhere fits the occasion very well: "It sucks
to know the future when you're stuck in the present!"
# April 1, 2004 9:17 PM

Jeff Key said:

Too true! I find myself constantly running into situations where I could use the new language enhancements and the "refactoring" tools in the IDE will be a definite productivity enhancer. I've been using both C# Refactory (which seems to be out of business now) and the "C# Refactoring Tool" together for a while and it'll be great to have the stuff built into the IDE and solid, which neither tend to be at the moment.
# April 1, 2004 9:24 PM

JD said:

Jeff -

Do you have an URL for the "C# Refactoring Tool" you mention in the above post?

Also... I read somewhere (a MSFT blog entry, I think) that checking a string against "" was slow because the runtime needs to create a string object to hold the empty string.

if (myString == "")

The author suggested doing this instead:

if (myString == string.Empty)

No good for the null case, though, so I suppose that Stefan's initial post above is the way to go (for 1.1 anyway).

Cheers,

JD

# April 2, 2004 11:30 AM

Jeff Key said:

JD:

"C# Refactoring Tool": http://dotnetrefactoring.com/

Again, I was only showing a little-known trick..not the perfect or most performant solution, but simply the one that requires a single method call. (I've seen far too many people either do the null or empty string check, but forget to do both.) To be honest, I never use it because the stuff I write generally needs to be very fast. For things like transactional apps that don't require very high perf, it's more than adequate. (I just did a simple test on my laptop and it executed the line ~12,000,000 times in one second. There are certainly lower hanging perf fruit to worry about before this. :) )

..and I knew someone would would mention String.Empty! :) I've seen the argument a thousand times and it seems like definitive answer is always one or the other. Strings literals are interned, so the "" should only be created once. Check out the code below:

string a = "";
string b = a + a;
Console.WriteLine((object.ReferenceEquals("", String.Empty)).ToString());
Console.WriteLine((object.ReferenceEquals(b, String.Empty)).ToString());
Console.WriteLine((object.Equals(b, String.Empty)).ToString());

The result is True, False, True. The empty string literal and String.Empty point to the same object. The variable "b" is not interned and thus doesn't point to the same object.
# April 2, 2004 12:39 PM

Brendan Tompkins said:

Hi Jeff. I posted an article that steps you through how to edit these templates...

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/bsblog/archive/2004/01/12/5519.aspx
# April 2, 2004 2:12 PM

TrackBack said:

Changing Visual Studio's default project settings
# April 2, 2004 2:59 PM

TrackBack said:

# April 2, 2004 5:44 PM

TrackBack said:

# April 2, 2004 5:45 PM

TrackBack said:

# April 3, 2004 12:06 AM

Easy CD-DA said:

I've been reading forever trying to find a way to convert the stuff I imported with iTunes. I went to the trouble to import stuff with iTunes thinking it would be a great way to archive stuff. I never imagined I would want an USB flash mp3/wma player. I didn't want an iPod either because I'm cheap.

Cut to the chase, I found a program that makes it easy for us cheap asses to convert stuff in the iTunes library to low bitrate wma for mobile consumption. (seriously, my headphones aren't good enough to tell the differnece)

Here's the link to it on Cnet.com
http://download.com.com/3000-2140-10277737.html?tag=lst-0-2

It's called Easy CD-DA. I can't say it's the greatest thing ever, but it's an easy way for me to move stuff to the mini player. One thing it can't do however is convert the stuff you bought from iTunes...you have to burn/import that stuff...a pain.

Well, I just posted this here, because I saw this was the longest ever running discussion about stuff iTunes, so I thought I'd help a brotha out.

I appologize if someone else already posted this, but after an hour of reading all these posts on my crappy home PC monitor I just quit.

Jeff, sorry people don't read anything you've written before bitch'n...that's just the way it is.

peace,
Shawn
# April 3, 2004 1:15 AM

Jeff Key said:

Good stuff, Brendan, thanks.
# April 3, 2004 3:23 AM

Johnny Hall said:

Shouldn't it "select" the whole of the #endregion text, rather than just the # ?

Or am I missing something?

(BTW You're comment form doesn't show up in Firefox 0.8 - if you care about such things :)
# April 3, 2004 6:50 AM

Darrell said:

Johnny - the comment form does show up, you just have to scroll down past the menu items on the left to find it.

# April 3, 2004 2:47 PM

Jeff Key said:

Johnny: You can select the entire block by holding down SHIFT while pressing CTRL+}.
# April 3, 2004 2:59 PM

Johnny Hall said:

Thanks.

And thanks. I realise now what it does. I was thinking Ctrl+} means that you should be pressing shift. Ctrl+] would be without it.

I still find that pressing Ctrl+} (+shift) selects the whole block, but not the word "endregion", just the #. Which is odd.
# April 4, 2004 11:54 AM

Jeff Julian said:

Tonight I think we are hitting the bars after the reception. (913) 209-2756
# April 4, 2004 12:34 PM

TrackBack said:

SUN - Microsoft peace: possible implications
# April 4, 2004 5:54 PM

TrackBack said:

# April 5, 2004 5:48 AM

TrackBack said:

# April 5, 2004 6:19 AM

JD said:

Cheers.. thanks!
# April 5, 2004 5:57 PM

TrackBack said:

Jeff Key describes, how to disable this annoying
# April 6, 2004 1:17 PM

Andrew Connell said:

Is there a place other than digging through all the VS.NET shortcuts that lists all the VS.NET shortcuts?
# April 6, 2004 1:18 PM

TrackBack said:

# April 6, 2004 2:25 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks for the heads-up, Jeff. Unfortunately I was totally tapped out that night since I only slept maybe one hour the night before. :| Sounds like you folks had fun!
# April 6, 2004 4:24 PM

B Scott said:

Just saw the link on brad site. I'd be intrested. Work in downtown. A co-worker may be too, I'll forward him the link.
# April 6, 2004 5:39 PM

John Schroedl said:

Sweet! I love the command completion and I will definitely use this tip in my large directories.

Thanks for sharing!
# April 7, 2004 3:10 PM

John Schroedl said:

This seems slightly appropriate to share here...

While I love the command prompt, sometimes you need to go to details view in Explorer. My rarely-documented tip to share for that view is Ctrl-'+' (NumPad plus) -- autosizes all the columns. Very nice!
# April 8, 2004 10:01 AM

Jeff Key said:

Too cool! Thanks, John. I'm always in details mode and always double-clicking the column handles to resize one at a time. How have I missed this all these years? An instant classic.
# April 8, 2004 10:09 AM

Eddie Ann said:

I am going to miss Bob Edwards, I let NPR know my feelings about it.
I suggest checking out Amy Goodman / "Democracy Now"
A very hard hiting daily news program. Can be found on Pacifica stations ...check out on the web.
# April 11, 2004 6:31 PM

gert said:

I am trying to get a free online scan to see if I have a virus but don't want to install something that I will have to pay for afterwards as I do not want to purchase anything right now.
# April 11, 2004 6:44 PM

Mike Schinkel said:

The PDF you linked is gone.
Here's an alternate:
http://www.rockymountain.com/ref_microspeak.htm
# April 11, 2004 11:11 PM

alan said:

microsoft - windows 95 startup sound...now where can i download the .wav?
# April 13, 2004 11:58 AM

Ken said:

You know, it would be awesome to integrate SmartTags into System.Attribute. Imagine, you decorate your class with an attribute that generates the appropriate SmartTags, which can be used as a XAML file, thus dynamically generating a class.
# April 16, 2004 11:57 AM

Kiliman said:

Do you know if there's a shortcut for Duplicate Line?

Another thing... do you know how do disable the "feature" where Ctrl+C will copy the line if nothing is selected?

<rant>I don't know how many times I've accidentally hit Ctrl+C when I meant to press Ctrl+V (paste). Luckily you can press Ctrl+Shift+V to cycle through the clipboard to paste the thing you wanted to paste before it got overwritten by the stupid Ctrl+C behavior.</rant>

Kiliman
# April 16, 2004 3:19 PM

Jeremy Brayton said:

I use both Windows and Linux pretty extensively in our work environment. I also use both open source and commercial programs as well.

Linux does have a greater cost with it. Because it's free to use doesn't mean it's free to maintain. The same can also be said for certain areas of Windows (which I believe should be free but apparently no one else thinks so).

With Linux I have to rely on the open source community to make an app I can use. I spend way too much time actually doing things I need to do to try to program or tweak something to my liking. A lot of Linux is scripting or tweaking where Windows has usually less of it. There is a lot of tweaking but you usually only need to do it once or twice.

A very good product I use for Linux is webmin. It allows me to control both my work and home machines over the web. I can control them using ssh and command-line but there are cases where I don't need to really type in all of the commands. Without webmin I would probably be spending a lot more time out of EVERY day just to upkeep my systems.


So there are costs with Windows but there are often 'hidden' costs with Linux. There's usaully a lot more upkeep and tend to be a huge learning curve. I hate man pages because they're written by technical retards who can't make anything simple apparently. If there's no HOWTO doc or some tutorial, I generally don't mess with it. The reason is I don't have hours of my day to read through the tech specs to understand every last little mudane detail. I know Linux is made by programmers for programmers but there are cases when some of us don't want to spend every waking hour trying to learn that little peice of code you just made.


Also about the whole Linux distro thing, the only real differences are in the applications. SuSE, RedHat, Slackware (which I use), and all the rest all have the SAME EXACT kernel. The kernel or the operating system itself basically doesn't change. The only thing RedHat has that Slackware doesn't is more user friendly programs and different 'bundles' of software. The funny thing is Redhat would charge for software that I could get right now for free. So why in the hell would I pay for that? I'm not that stupid.
# April 16, 2004 5:21 PM

Jeff Key said:

Unfortunately I dont...BUT:

I didn't know about the Ctrl+Shift+V! Bravo!
# April 16, 2004 7:46 PM

Adam Kinney said:

Yeah I enjoyed the show. It was just neat because it wasn't just about people sitting around and talking or starving the wilderness. It actually had business concepts and it was placed in the mysterious world of Trump and New York. Good stuff.

Hope you run into Bill (the winner, not Gates) somewhere... ;)
# April 17, 2004 9:24 PM

overkill said:

I am with you Jeff, like Shawn I couldn't keep up with all the gab, but for what its worth here is my opinion. I am mostly a linux guy, but I use Microsoft for music and my mp3 player(Wintendo's). I won a bunch of music from Pepsi. They won't play on my mp3 player or they won't burn in a format that plays with my cd player. My Mp3's work great. I would not purchase I-tunes mostly cause they aren't compatible with my players. Also what would happen if I decided to re-install my OS? Would I lose them, can I save them somewere. I haven't tried yet. I haven't found a fool proof way to convert yet. I have tried 3 different suggestions on this forum alone, and none of them worked for me yet. I can play all my mp3's on anything including my truck player. That is my 2 cents worth.

I got your message Jeff.
Mike
# April 19, 2004 2:38 AM

ha ha said:

Ha ha, whoever wants to kill me can go to hell, but I don't know how the conversation turned from defragging to al qaeda.
# April 21, 2004 11:51 AM

Hugo Vale said:

Wow, nice article! It is so dificult to find information of this sort. If you have any more links to designer information, i would be greatly appreciated.
# April 21, 2004 2:29 PM

Jeff Key said:

Kiliman: Today's release of Resharper (http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/Changes) includes a duplicate line feature. :)
# April 21, 2004 2:39 PM

Eric G. Harrison said:

Jeff, I agree that it was a success. Last night was great. I had a good time meeting everyone, and look forward to the next one. Perhaps we need a cool name for the group. Maybe something like the "No Homers Club"? :)
# April 22, 2004 9:36 AM

Cunning Mind said:

duh, if you have a grievance with disk keeper - just get a crack. bonzana. To hell with you mister culty culty. I agree with that Huge Ass dude about the Scientology. I'd like to think that post's intentionally ironic [it's sehr funny], which is unusual because I'm an amazingly cynical person...

Do not trust the Mother Hubbard - she dwells in yonder caves beneath the sea...
# April 22, 2004 6:23 PM

Jeff Key said:

Sorry, Hugo, I don't. I did write a forms designer using .NET, so feel free to hit me up for any related questions.
# April 22, 2004 11:03 PM

Gar said:

a couple o' GEMS in there! You da man!!!!
# April 24, 2004 1:53 AM

Jon Galloway said:

Cool! Kind of like http://www.csszengarden.com except it's not so "look don't touch".

Nothing can beat Strange Banana (http://www.strangebanana.com/generator.aspx), though. These people have analyzed the HTML spec and have created the most beautiful designs allowed by law.
# April 25, 2004 4:58 AM

Jon Galloway said:

P.S. The Strange Banana recommendation was a joke. It is quite amazing to watch, though. Lime green and hot pink, together again!
# April 25, 2004 5:00 AM

Frans Bouma said:

"Background images were the hot new thing and tables had just been introduced into HTML, IIRC. Those were the days!"
Yeah! The days where mosaic users looked at your screen (I was still on a sun box back then) and said: what's that? Why can you have images on the background? "Oh, this is Netscape, you should try it" :)

But don't fear, most designers know nothing about code, it's like Constant = AmountOfDesignTalent * AmountOfSoftwareEngineeringTalent :)

(uhoh, looking at that, one of my first websites where I used photoshop proofs I have less talent for writing code than I thought ;) http://www.xs4all.nl/~perseus )
# April 25, 2004 6:22 AM

HGH said:

FP2003 is really great. Sharepoint does look interesting. Great upgrade.
# April 25, 2004 11:54 PM

dru said:

Any comments on how us punks can capitalize on the XP balloons?
# April 26, 2004 12:37 PM

ajc said:

I had mentioned my growing dislike of <a href="http://blog.andrewcarlson.org/archive/2004/04/16/188.aspx">pop up notifications</a> a week or so ago, but this puts me in a tough spot. I suppose I would prefer to see a pop up notification instead of hearing a ding, but I would ideally just prefer to have the taskbar flash for any app with really important news. For less important news, I prefer a pop up notification which I can easily turn off. Dings are right out, as are sounds in general-- was that a new AIM message, a new e-mail message notification from Windows Messenger, a new Windows Messenger IM, a new Dell Support Alert, iTunes telling me it's done ripping a CD, or some new trojan that likes to make noise? I can never keep them straight.
# April 26, 2004 1:01 PM

ajc said:

I guess HTML is not allowed in the comments. Oops!
# April 26, 2004 1:02 PM

Thomas Williams said:

G'day Jeff - I too hear the random "ding!", but I reckon I would definitely, absolutely turn off a balloon notification (I could handle a taskbar button flashing). Please don't let an app steal focus for a ding!

I don't know about you, but most of the time for me it's SQL Enterprise Manager dinging letting me know my results have been discarded to save memory.
# April 26, 2004 7:29 PM

Jeff Key said:

Andy, Thomas: I agree that pointless or overused balloons, toast, etc. are annoying. It's the responsibility of the developers to realize that their app isn't the most important thing in the world and that people may want to turn these things off. BUT I'll take these over a modal dialog any day.

As for the taskbar blinking: I think of that as the program telling me "Hey, I need your attention", whereas the balloons, toast, etc. are the apps saying "Hey, I thought you'd like to know this".

Dru: I can write up a .NET example if you'd like one.
# April 26, 2004 8:42 PM

Jeff Key said:

Jon: Crazy! A designer friend pointed me to the Garden before. That's some cool stuff.

Frans: I think you're right! :)
# April 26, 2004 8:44 PM

dru said:

Try placing this in the <HEAD>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
(Assumes UTF-8)

And this at the top:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
(Assumes XHTML 1.0 Strict)
# April 26, 2004 10:16 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Dru!
# April 26, 2004 10:37 PM

clarson said:

Not only this, error messages should hava a link to a website that could have much more detail about the problem and solution than the typical terse message. For example, Microsoft could put a link in all their error mesages that pointed to a support article or list of articles. Also, add some detail about the error link in a querystring to further fine tune the solution provided. They could log all the hits they get from these error message links and build up a database of error inquiries to highlight where they need to make improvements.
# April 26, 2004 10:42 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

Jeff, even when you add those tags you still need to setup your web server so it serves HTML as HTML, not as plain text. You complaining about that is like me having an executable named program.txt and complaining that Windows won't execute it (it actually will but not from the shell).

As for what the W3C's HTML/XHTML validator handles - HTML (text/html) and XHTML (application/xhtml+xml). They don't try to validate plain text (there are no rules as to how should a plain text document be structured). Unfortunatelly the best browser on the Earth does not handle XHTML very well...
# April 26, 2004 11:37 PM

secretGeek said:

i was just bloggin 'bout this last week -- as clarson says, links to relevant articles would be excellent.

if big software companies did this, it would also lift a few technical writers out of the ranks of the unemployed :+)

cheers
lb
# April 26, 2004 11:37 PM

Jeff Key said:

Jerry: The site has an textbox to upload a web page. I save the HTML from a page and uploaded it. What did I do wrong?

clarson: Definitely agree. Nice to see that MSFT is starting to do this in some areas. I hope the trend continues.
# April 26, 2004 11:42 PM

eddie said:

need help...just learning how to use a computer, might have a virus problem
# April 27, 2004 12:38 AM

Adam Kinney said:

I'll second the .NET example request :)

I like toast/popups. I think they fit the purpose perfectly as long they do not display too long and have a close button.

+1 to hearing Enterprise Manager dinging - "The results set has changed. Do you want to kee…"
# April 27, 2004 12:41 AM

trace;y said:

still needing help,
# April 27, 2004 12:42 AM

Jerry Pisk said:

Jeff - if you use the file upload then you did nothing wrong, but since you're not uploading the response headers (because you simple can't, no fault at anyone's end) you need to explicitly set your content type and encoding. The validator is really built to validate live pages by pulling them off of the web server, since HTTP pushes a lot of metadata with each response that is not preserved when you save the HTML content to a text file.

Or you may just need to save the file as .html, not .txt (since your browser will set the content-type on the file you upload, text/plain in case of .txt files).
# April 27, 2004 4:15 AM

dru said:

If you are using the w3c validator they should have a suggestion box. Ahh, but they don't how very bad of them. I have written an email to the w3 validator team asking for a suggestion box and that they rework that error message. We will see what happens.
# April 27, 2004 8:41 AM

michael said:

How about balloons that get increasingly bigger, the longer you ignore them?

Annoying? Yes. Better than the *dings*? Hell yeah!
# April 28, 2004 7:42 PM

TrackBack said:

# April 29, 2004 4:07 AM

Cornilius van Berkel said:

I find using paired Boolean conditions to test one state distracting, especially when they are used in a complex relational equation.
e.g.
if ((a != null && a != “”) && (b != null && b != “”) && etc)

I therefore make use of the function <b>String.Compare<b>.
e.g.
if ((String.Compare (a, “”) > 0) && (String.Compare (b, “”) > 0) && etc)
# May 2, 2004 7:42 AM

RM said:

The "stealing focus" issue was a major issue of debate between IBM and Microsoft when OS/2 was in development. Since Windows had from the start allowed focus stealing, they wanted to keep it that way. IBM vehemently said this was bad UI design and fought it. IBM would remove the capability, MS would put it back.

This was also the case with client versus System redraw of windows. IBM said System, meaning if a window was obscured the OS would save the bits on the screen and redisplay them when it was visible without calling the client app to do so. MS said "no", call the client app to redraw wasting memory and countless CPU cycles.

Someday MS will pull they heads out. It is just bad UI design and a major privacy and security hole.

# May 3, 2004 2:09 PM

Chris Nahr said:

I agree, disallowing duplicate case values looks like a C holdover that never had a good reason in the first place.

Duplicate values on different case statements are clearly an error but what possible reason is there to disallow duplicate values on the same statement, enum or not?

I can't think of any. The compiler could simply fold them; maybe optionally emit a warning at the highest level.
# May 9, 2004 4:31 AM

Andrew said:

Odd,

I have cancer in my leg AND a pair of size 9 Bauer inlines....

Andrew
adouble_uu@hotmail.com
# May 11, 2004 3:13 AM

Blackfox said:

Im trying to get the Product Key to install Longhorn Beta 4074 does anyone have it. If so could you plz e-mail it to blackfox3818@hotmail.com thanx. :)
# May 13, 2004 2:58 AM

Eric G. Harrison said:

Okay Jeff, okay! I promise, I'll get on DotNetBugs.com soon! :)
# May 14, 2004 9:15 AM

GuyIncognito said:

http://www.error-bank.com/
# May 14, 2004 9:57 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

If someone offerred to pay me $3,000 an hour, I'd work one 40 hour week, and then take a 51-week vacation.
# May 14, 2004 3:03 PM

Stuart said:

I'm sure you've already done the math, but just to state the obvious...

Figuring 40 hrs/wk and 52 wks/yr (or 2080 hrs/yr) that makes 6200/2080 or appx. 3 yrs of work.

I guess that's somewhat feasible, i.e. the lawyer spent 3 years working on essentially nothing but the MSFT case. Since his asking rate is $3000/hr that of course means he's asking $18,600,000.00 for his 3 years -- that's $6.2 million per year. What an ass. And all because he got Microsoft this *sweet* deal whereby all they have to pay is a measly (?) $1.1 billion?? Uh huh.

All this to say: +1 on the lawyer outsourcing. ;)
# May 15, 2004 1:21 PM

JBT said:

I'm also after a product key for longhorn 4074. Please e-mail to jamesturner80@aol.com. Cheers!
# May 16, 2004 5:13 PM

Jeff Key said:

Yup, we're definitely in the wrong business. :)
# May 17, 2004 1:52 AM

HumanCompiler said:

It just so happens there is a place, but it's currently in beta right now. I think it's supposed to be officially out this summer some time.

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback

Basically, it will be a place to post bugs, get feedback from Microsoft, vote on which bugs are the most important and post known workarounds.

I don't believe it's a public beta yet though, but know it's coming! :)
# May 17, 2004 1:54 PM

Jeff Key said:

Cool! Thanks, Erik.
# May 18, 2004 1:43 AM

Ryan Farley said:

I totally agree. Just another reason why I love blogs. You get to hear of news from people on the inside as well as the community take on it. If it weren't for some of the big name bloggers out there we'd have a tough time getting real and accurate info (even though it's usually not an "official" word, it is nice to hear it from big named in the industry - just as if you were talking about it around the water cooler at work.)

-Ryan
# May 19, 2004 11:56 AM

Jeff Key said:

I agree. Now if I can only find one or two good enterprise Java/Linux blogs...
# May 19, 2004 12:14 PM

15Seconds said:

I'll shamelessly promote our sister site www.internetnews.com and let you decide for yourselves.

BTW, here is a passage from a CNET.com article (http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-5212077.html?tag=cd.lede), "Advanced search features that Gates has termed the "Holy Grail" of Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, won't be fully in place until 2009, Bob Muglia, the senior vice president in charge of Windows server development, told CNET News.com."

The article continues ... "The technology, called WinFS, is an add-on the Windows file system ..."

Still continues ... "WinFS will be included in the server version of Longhorn, slated to debut in 2007. However, "some of the functionality of WinFS and some of the scenarios may be limited in terms of what it can do."

So, this is where they get 2009 from. The reasons for the misinformation or bad analysis, however, I cannot say because I do not know.
# May 19, 2004 12:38 PM

Eric G. Harrison said:

Does Slashdot count? After all, they proclaim themselves as "News For Nerds". :)

I kid, I kid...
# May 19, 2004 12:44 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, 15Secs, I'll check it out.

Regarding the article, I read that too. Still don't know where they got "Microsoft postponing the release WinFS until 2009". Missing a feature is one thing, but "postpoing the release" of the entire product is malarkey. :)
# May 19, 2004 1:37 PM

15Seconds said:

You may also want to check out crn.com and newsfactor.com. These aren't part of our network, but they are similar to internetnews.com in that they are trade publications, rather consumer publications such as news.com and zdnet.com.
# May 19, 2004 1:44 PM

TrackBack said:

# May 19, 2004 3:15 PM

Rich C said:

I suffered from the same moment of shock when I read the article regarding BlackBall. I had to stop and think, "Have I been out of tune that much in the last week?" (answer: NO!)

I consider the possibility that Bob Brown mentions to David Berlind, "You know, WinFS is postponed until 2009. Yeah, you guys even ran an article about it." At this point, Berlind does a quick check, sees 2009 and WinFS in the same sentence and runs with it. Brown gets a much bigger plug for his product and no one is the wiser... 'cept us in the blog community that talk too much!
# May 19, 2004 10:24 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

Wouldn't your method fail when I call with an in array parameter? Because it would return the type of the array element, which is not what I want for in parameters?
# May 23, 2004 4:07 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

And to suggeste a solution: how about using Type.IsByRef instead of Type.HasElementType?
# May 23, 2004 4:09 PM

Jeff Key said:

Good call, Jerry. I posted late at night and before I wrote the unit tests; I should've known better. I'll update the post w/better info.
# May 24, 2004 1:48 PM

Zing said:

So does String.Compare work for nulls then? It says _nothing_ about that in the manual.
# May 24, 2004 9:48 PM

Jeff Key said:

A quick check shows that it does indeed work, but compares can be expensive if you're doing a lot of them.
# May 24, 2004 9:54 PM

Eric W. Bachtal said:

Did you see Eric Sink's post?

http://software.ericsink.com/20040524.html#10169

# May 25, 2004 12:06 AM

Jeff Key said:

Yup. Also just got my answer at the very end of a great FAQ[1]:

Q: Is this the tool that Microsoft uses internally?

A: Not yet. However, once Visual Studio 2005 Team System ships, the Developer Tools Division at Microsoft will be using the source code control system full-time. This is one of our core tenets for change management: we will build the product we use internally.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/burtonfaq.aspx
# May 25, 2004 12:11 AM

Jon Galloway said:

Sounds like you have your answer, but you may want to ping Korby (http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/ / http://blogs.msdn.com/korbyp/contact.aspx).

I hope Perforce is better than StarTeam. Maybe it's just poorly implemented at my company, but it's so bad I wish we were back in VSS.
# May 25, 2004 12:41 AM

Stuart said:

Jeff,

Before you buy Perforce you owe it to yourself to check out Subversion. Have you tried it yet? Sweet and free, my friend!
# May 25, 2004 12:48 PM

Eric said:

I'm not a big user of Source Control software (only experience was with VSS), but I have been using SourceGear Vault and like it very much.

Eric
# May 25, 2004 3:47 PM

Bogdan said:

Is it possible to get a Longhorn 4074 product key for free?? I'm a student and don't have the financial possibility to subscribe to MSDN.
Could you send a product key to bogdan_007@hotmail.com ?

Thx,
Bogdam
# May 25, 2004 6:23 PM

Brian Harry said:

Yes, the plan is that we will use Visual Studio Team System internally. Of course we are a big company and we don't roll out anything at the drop of a hat. Further this is pre-release. Today the source code control team is using it. We have near term plans to roll it out more broadly within the Team Foundation teams, then into the rest of team system, then Visual Studio, ...

You get the idea :)

Brian
# May 26, 2004 12:43 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks Brian, I appreciate the feedback!
# May 26, 2004 2:52 PM

Hernan said:

I tried to use NCoverGui with csUnit but it fails to execute.
Follows the command line I use:
d:\apps\ncover\ncover.console /c "D:\APPS\csunit.org\csUnit 1.9.4\csunitcmd.exe" " /recipe:..\..\..\Scheduler.recipe" /a "SchedulerMain" /w "D:\Proyectos de Visual Studio\_Scheduler\SchedulerMain\bin\Debug"

Note the directories with whitespaces and also note the whitespace before /recipe argument.
I downloaded the source files of NCoverGui so had I fix it, I could send you the patch. Regretably, the source doesn't correspond to the last binary version.
# May 27, 2004 7:12 AM

stefan demetz said:

sql server scalability
http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/stefandemetz/archive/2004/05/16/13724.aspx
# May 28, 2004 6:46 AM

Jeff Key said:

Stuart: Yup, gave it a shot. The final decision isn't up to me. One of our guys is in charge of the build process and related items and there was something about Sub that he didn't like -- don't remember what it is. I might give it another shot at home, though!
# May 31, 2004 4:54 PM

Woody Pewitt said:

WOW I love this tool!

I will be using this thing all the time but I would like to give some feedback to try to help improve it.

I don't know if you are still working on this but if so I will start firing off my list from the first day of use. I am sure there will be more as I use it more.

I am more then willing to help implement my suggestions if that would help.

By the way I teach at UCSD and will be using this now to show .NET code up to now I have been using Notepad and the command line in class.

Thanks for a great tool!
# June 2, 2004 7:00 PM

Paul Brantley said:

If you find out where to download it, please email paulbrantley@mail.com
# June 5, 2004 7:47 PM

R. M. said:

If I read the article correctly, they're including hardware sales, including everything from Linux based Thin Clients to Linux based Itanium servers to Linux based supercomputers as "Linux-related products".

If you're suggesting that hardware costs are part of the of the cost of computers that can run Linux - of course they are. And while Microsoft publically announced that they believe hardware is free (covered in the mark-up of Windows?), this typically isn't the case for Linux systems.
# June 7, 2004 5:32 AM

gas scooter said:

good
# June 10, 2004 3:06 AM

Donny said:

I got the same SEHException Problem when using ShowDialog() of a form. You have mentioned about "Interestingly, using a manifest file to get the same results does NOT cause the app to crash." Does it mean I can bypass the problem by using a manifest file? Do you have the latest info about the crash problem raised by EnabledVisualStyles?

# June 15, 2004 10:49 PM

Doug McClean said:

It is possible to create a delegate to a property accessor. Simply use Delegate.CreateDelegate() and pass a MethodInfo object obtained from either PropertyInfo.GetGetMethod() or PropertyInfo.GetSetMethod(). This doesn't work for other accessors, like Let accessors, that you may have, but should solve any common problem.
# June 17, 2004 5:05 PM

Jon Galloway said:

I've got this... um... friend... who uses Virtual PC often but hasn't used Virtual Server. Not me, you understand. Anyhow, I'm having difficulty explaining how the two differ. He guesses it's just that Virtual Server is a server edition of Virtual PC, but as much as I try to explain the finer points to him he says he'll only listen to a Chicagoan. And he owes me $5.

So, my question: can I take him to small claims court?
# June 19, 2004 1:12 AM

Jeff Key said:

Forget small claims court and go right for the big time: The People's Court. Justice is served.

I was going to explain here, but it might make sense to make a post of it. Here we go..
# June 19, 2004 1:39 AM

Jon Galloway said:

Rokken like Dokken. Good explanation - better than http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/evaluation/virtualizationfaq.mspx. Thanks.

P.S. I'm also a math enthusiast.
# June 19, 2004 2:21 AM

TrackBack said:

# June 19, 2004 3:11 AM

Mr Lizard said:

We all pray for the end of the format war: let every player and every software jukebox play every format.

Hurrahh!
# June 20, 2004 1:03 PM

Jeff Key said:

Thanks, Woody, fire away!
# June 20, 2004 8:14 PM

mearls@hotmail.com (Michael Earls) said:

Thanks for the post. I've been hesitant to jump in. I'm having "issues" with my VPS. Most notably, I am unable to access it on the network. But, that's a user error, I'm sure.
# June 22, 2004 4:40 PM

Jeff Key said:

Let me know if you don't get it resolved. I've set up a few of these now and might be able to help.
# June 22, 2004 5:08 PM

Eric W. Bachtal said:

Not to be contrary, but there a lot of ways to develop using XML technologies that one might consider distinct from traditional languages and environments (and one might certainly consider distinct from "comma-delimited" and "binary" data manipulation, which largely rely on the use of traditional languages and environments). For instance, one might code XSL transformations, or model data using XSD. These activities have tools, environments, best practice standards and the like that could easily warrant it's own category. In other words, someone could do this full-time.

Nonetheless, I agree it's hard to capture this distinction in a cheesy salary survey. You have to wonder, if an XML developer makes $X and a C/C++ developers makes $Y, does a C/C++ developer who knows and regularly utilizes XML technologies make $X + Y$? ;)
# June 23, 2004 12:52 AM

codemann8 said:

please send me the product key for longhorn 4074 to codemann8@elite-techs.net
# June 23, 2004 2:35 AM

SBC said:

I was under the impression that XML is used in conjunction with other technologies (be it Java, .NET, SQL2K Server, etc). Can't say if it stands on its own.
# June 23, 2004 8:47 AM

John Askew said:

I fixed this problem in my application and learned something more specific about this bug.
You must call EnableVisualStyles & DoEvents BEFORE you instantiate your main form.

[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
// Enable XP Theme support(?)
Application.EnableVisualStyles();
Application.DoEvents();
ClientMainForm clientMainView =
new ClientMainForm();

// .... more code here ...

Application.Run(clientMainView);
}
# June 23, 2004 12:36 PM

Ayman said:

-------
# June 23, 2004 3:21 PM

^DevelopAll said:

Speaking of outsourcing the layers - your wishes just might come true!
In the resent month the practice is becoming more common and the interest from Law firms is growing rapidly for all the reasons mentioned in your article. There are still very few companies that are capable enough to offer outsourced legal services - my company, is also positioning itself to capitalize on the trend. There are a limited number of services that can be offshored in the legal industry; mostly research of various forms, but I think it will evolve with time. If interested to learn regarding the offshore legal trend and offerings you can visit my site at www.DevelopAll.com
# June 26, 2004 2:08 AM

Kiliman said:

I noticed that too :(

I have XP SP2 RC2 installed and our corporate LAN is behind ISA 2000. Oddly, I was able to download the files just fine.

I haven't tried installing the bits yet, so it's possible the problem occurs when the installer tries to download the files, instead of manually downloading them.

But I agree, it would be a shame if that was the standard policy... disable the firewall! UGH.

Kiliman
# June 29, 2004 1:49 PM

TrackBack said:

# July 1, 2004 2:25 PM

KnightsTemplar189 said:

Wow, it's amazing how heated people get over MP3 vs AAC vs OggVorbis vs Mp4. I've just used iTunes, downloaded 1 track and I'll never use it again unless and until it supports DOWNLOADS (not importing etc) but DOWNLOADS in other formats. The important thing is portability of format and how easy it is for me to do it.
I don't have an iPod and possibly never will. I have a small (512MB) MP3/WMA player and that's enough for me as I'm not a music geek, I rip in 192VBR MP3 and that suits me fine.
At the moment the apps/methods to convert M4P to MP3/WMA are too much of a pain in the arse. I'm not going to burn an iTunes playlist to CD then rip it MP3/WMA - I'll do what I did last week; go on eBay or 101CD and purchase that shiny circle of plastic and rip straight from that.
And don't bother flaming the 'board audiogeeks, iPod Geeks or xxx is the best format-geeks as I won't be coming back to read your pissy posts weasels
;)
# July 1, 2004 5:47 PM

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT) said:

It is good to eat less :-)
# July 4, 2004 12:49 AM

sean said:

That was a very kind help
# July 4, 2004 6:37 AM

Darrell said:

Manufacturers play that game all the time. The funniest one was where they decreased the number of feminine hygiene products in a box from 40 to 36 and charged the same price. Women revolted, and the company had to go back to the higher number. Draw your own conclusions for the moral of the story! :)
# July 6, 2004 11:00 AM

JPS said:

lol - good observation. Coming soon
"D2: Frito-Lay Bag-o-air"
# July 6, 2004 4:17 PM

alex said:

Well if you were smart, you would know that if you copy a cd in itunes you can use it anywhere else, even in DVD players.
# July 7, 2004 7:42 PM

Tony John said:

I have always preferred to kill 2 birds with 1 stone and so to make sure I catch both, null as well as not null empty strings, I do it like this:

// Append empty string to str, so if it was
// either null or empty string, the result
// would still be an empty string.
if ( (str + "").Length > 0 )
{
// Perform operations on not null or not
// empty string
}

The only caveat is that str+"" always creates a new string and so it needs to be used diligently. If the above expression is part of a loop, then the mutable StringBuilder class should be used to avoid unnecessary copies of str.
# July 8, 2004 7:58 PM

Ali Moeen said:

How about .NET programmers?
# July 11, 2004 10:27 AM

Gary van der Merwe said:

I hope you know the Bauer was bought by Nike.
# July 12, 2004 11:09 AM

Greg Osborne said:

Does anyone know how to enable visual styles on VS.NET 2003 addins?
# July 15, 2004 12:36 PM

Defragmented said:

You people sure know how to go from semi-intelligent to full blown azzholes in a matter of a few posts
# July 15, 2004 1:07 PM

Jerry Dennany said:

I had the same problem. I signed up for earthlink last week, and had to end up cancelling because I could not work with their tech support.
# July 15, 2004 9:41 PM

Jerry Pisk said:

I use Earthlink's online chat, with roughly 50/50 split between talking to complete idiots (suggesting I empty IE's cache when I can't even ping a host I know is up, let alone connect to any services running on it) and talking to guys who absolutely know what they're doing, to a point that I wonder somebody this knowledgable works customer service.

As for using cable companies to access the net - I'm staying w/ Earthlink because my upload is 384 kbit and I get three public IP addresses (so I don't have to NAT my home network). I love calling cable companies' sales and asking about upload speeds. They always say that a normal person only uses download, and all the stuff you can do with broadband, like sharing pictures, video conferencing or telecommuting and so on don't really use upload at all ;)
# July 16, 2004 1:54 AM

Darrell said:

Comcast has upload at 384k as well, and up to 4MB download. I've been very impressed with their service, and the price (the plan I am on gives me cable and Internet for LESS than the price of cable alone) is great!
# July 16, 2004 9:51 AM

Geoff Plitt said:

Hey Jeff! Same problem, but with AT&T. Also, I wanted to make a complaint after 7 calls with no results and talking to a rude guy, but he wouldn't give me a last name or employee #. plus AT&T doesn't actually escalate calls to management when you demand it (i finally got a letter saying to go back through their customer service line), so i said F U and switched to speakeasy DSL. With Speakeasy, I won't even need local telephone service. Yay!
# July 16, 2004 11:25 AM

Erik Porter said:

That sux...sounds like a good idea to switch. I've been on Mediacom (sister company of Comcast) Cable for a few years and have been very happy.
# July 17, 2004 1:32 PM

Jeff Key said:

Jerry: Haha, I tried chat. Told the guy the same thing (no ping, nothing) and he wanted to know what error I was getting in my browser. Click. Sounds like you have a good deal. The new cable upload speed is as good or better than my old DSL, which was pretty pitiful. The only stuff that's going through that side of the pipe are Remote Desktop and music, so I don't need much.

Darrell: Bravo! I'm getting ~3Mb. 33% faster than my old DSL.

Geoff: Ouch, what a mess! I'm glad you mentioned the local telco -- now that I'm on cable I won't need it either!

Erik: Glad to hear it. I've been leery about the whole cable thing for a while, but from what I've heard it's much better than it was a few years ago. I'm a very happy camper so far.
# July 17, 2004 11:15 PM

Noel said:

My recent descent into dsl hell... I've been an earthlink/mindspring customer since '98 (dsl since early 2000). In March, I decided to move all the way across the hall to a bigger place. Earthlink told us they first had to cut the service before moving it, and it would take a week to get it on in the new place. Since I'd be moving stuff in the evenings after work, a week without dsl didn't seem so bad. On March 9th the dsl went away in the old place. After a few weeks earthlink said they couldn't deliver service to the new location! Great, whatever, so fine, I'll use someone else. Two weeks later (late-April) I had sbcyahoo working for two days, then it suddenly dies. After a few days and some phone calls, come to find out that earthlink has, without any warning, asking, getting permission, whatever, just up and decided they can provide service at my new location after all and takes over the line for themselves. Called them and they said they'd release the line immediately, but after a few weeks they hadn't (also there was also no dsl signal on the line to try to use). Cut to the end (over 50 phone calls)... had to get a second phone line and finally got sbcyahoo up and running on that line June 11th.
# July 18, 2004 9:53 PM

Adam Kinney said:

+1 for Comcast Cable

I've have had their service here for about 4 years. Good support response and good speed.


# July 19, 2004 12:21 AM

what is all the big deal with NullOrEmpty said:

Every application needs to have a util class

Just set up

public static bool IsNullOrEmpty(string stringVar)
bool b;
if(stringVar == null || stringVar.Length == 0)
{return b;}

and be done with it and stop whining about whidbey?

call it from anywhere:

if (!Util.IsNullOrEmpty(myString))
{myString="a good one"}

Isn't programming about creating stuff. Then why are all these "experienced" programmers begging to be spoon fed?

Rob
# July 19, 2004 10:56 AM

if ( (str + "").Length > 0 ) is the said:

this is the worst performance. It invovescreation of a string object and concatenation too.

Rob
# July 19, 2004 11:01 AM

Rob said:

Sorry got to typing too fast:

public static bool IsNullOrEmpty(String s)
{
bool b;
if (s == null || s == 0)
{
b=true;
}
return b;
}

rob
# July 19, 2004 11:11 AM

TrackBack said:

# July 19, 2004 1:55 PM

Helen said:

I have really enjoyed the sites, especially the Zen Garden! I find it a kind of professional fun :)

"But don't fear, most designers know nothing about code, it's like Constant = AmountOfDesignTalent * AmountOfSoftwareEngineeringTalent :) "

I do not claim to know much about code! Still I do insist that basic knowledge of HTML and CSS is absoltely necessary to a graphics designer!
# July 19, 2004 4:35 PM

Klong said:

Well alex, if you were smart, you would know that he's talking about playing m4a/AAC files (around 9 albums in 1 CD) in his Home DVD player.
# July 21, 2004 7:46 AM

Creepy said:

Yes, I would also like a product key, please. ironbeanerman@yahoo.com thanks.
# July 21, 2004 11:17 PM

Jeff Key said:

Since everyone's asking for a product key, here it is: 7

Enjoy!
# July 21, 2004 11:31 PM

Jeff Key said:

Bravo, Noel! You definitely win first prize. Ugh.

Adam: That makes me feel better..
# July 21, 2004 11:33 PM

Firey said:

7??
# July 25, 2004 11:07 AM

Eliott said:

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If you are interested contact me +511 97486790 , my name is Eliott C A
celias1@hotmail.com
# July 25, 2004 9:38 PM

Brian Scott said:

I noticed this once with the low fat Milky Way. It had some% less fat than a regular Milky Way on the wrapper, but the bar was about 30% smaller. Someone thinks everyone is stupid I suppose.
# July 28, 2004 11:14 AM

Christo said:

Jeff Key:

Hey, thanks a lot! You don't know how much time I spent googling for a working one ;-)

I did however find an article saying that as a debug feature, if you use the Product Key "7.1" then LH starts a LOT quicker!

-Christo
# July 30, 2004 5:53 PM

asss said:

aaaaa
# July 31, 2004 10:42 AM

B said:

Comparing a horrible audio codec to the most advanced music jukebox program is bad. Your portable audio device is not worth much now since Apple made it obsolete with pushing Dolby's Mp4 AAC. Down the road your HD-DVD players will play the M4a files.
# August 2, 2004 12:44 AM

Eric-Paul said:

Now this is a thread long dead, don't even know if it's still possible to post a comment, and whether anyone will read about it, but I'm in need of HELP! Last week my PS/2 port died, so I'm desperately looking for a *wired* alternative for my beloved MS Natural Keyboard Pro, that has proved to just work and work for several years in a row now.

I figured there must be some USB natural/ergonomic keyboard out there that doesn't require you to pay $200 for a wireless, mouse-included bundle, right? As you all know, the wireless products actually require *more* wires than the wired ones, from PC to the radio-module, from anywhere to the battery-loading-dock, sometimes even a regular power-supply is needed. What's up with that?!~I would just "for old time's sake" like to have these two simple features combined in one keyboard:

* Wired USB connection
* Natural/ergonomic design

Does anyone know what company one should turn to, to obtain such a keyboard?
# August 2, 2004 6:30 AM

Eric-Paul said:

Still going strong on the issue: One USB wired natural/ergonomic keyboard. I phoned MS and the friendly person that answered gave me this link:

http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp

For all you people that always wanted your wishes to come true. And don't forget to mention a wired USB Natural keyboard!
# August 2, 2004 7:18 AM

Dessi Bravo said:

I am trying to retrieve the system icons to add into my completed application such as a calculator. But it seems that I can't find it when depressing the icon elipses i n the property window of vs.net. The system 32 folder pops-up, but no icons retrievable. When I deploy the completed application I would like to add an icon when pointing the application to the usesr's desktop. When the user installs the program into his computer, a shortcut will appear in his desktop with the embedded icon. How can I retrieve a icon into the completed application?
# August 4, 2004 2:17 PM

kevin said:

what do u mean by thad debug thing :S
what do i have to do to start faster ?
# August 5, 2004 9:12 PM

thu trang said:

removal mydoom
# August 5, 2004 11:48 PM

Spamboy said:


Sure, dings suck, but the worst are web pages with music or sound when inappropriate. Very embarassing at work when some sort of music pops up or someone says anything. Only once did I open a page, and a banner talked to me. How evil that was. I hope we're not going to have that everywhere for the rest of the existence of the internet. I'd just stop surfing.
# August 10, 2004 2:14 AM

TrackBack said:

# August 14, 2004 12:50 PM

TrackBack said:

# August 14, 2004 1:05 PM

Jeff Atwood said:

Why not just use POPFile?

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

It's free, and it works extremely well (bayesian).
# August 15, 2004 3:38 AM

Jeff Key said:

1) It's Bayesian, whereas SpamArrest is challenge/response -- I've used both and I prefer c/r. The best thing is that it puts the onus on the sender, not the receiver, so there's no need to waste your time looking for false positives.

2) Web mail client. When it comes to friends/family, most of them use web mail clients, AFAIK.

3) It looks like POPFile is a client-side, Perl-based proxy. That alone would prevent me from recommending it to friends/family because I would be the guy they called if they had any problems. SpamArrest is simple: You enter your POP3 info from your email client on their website and change your email client's POP3 info to point to them. Done. If anything breaks, it's on SpamArrest's side and they deal with it before you even know about it. Gotta love the ASP model.

The best choice, of course, is to use whatever works for you.
# August 15, 2004 10:57 AM

Jeff Atwood said:

If they're using webmail (hotmail, gmail, etc) wouldn't the built-in anti-spam tools be sufficient? I thought we were talking about POP3 all along.

As for putting the burden on the receiver, what about mailing lists, order confirmations, and the like? You still have to "allow" machine generated emails that you want to receive, otherwise the c/r process will automagically reject them.
# August 15, 2004 1:58 PM

Jeff Key said:

If their existing anti-spam tools are sufficient, that's great. I'm not proposing that everyone start using it.

SpamArrest has a white list for mailing lists.

As for order confirmations, you probably need to authorize an email address the first time (auto-confirm@amazon.com, for example), but this isn't unique to SpamArrest's implementation.

I'm not saying SA is the be-all-end-all cure for spam. However, there are few programs/services that actually improve my life and this is one of them. I've tried just about every other spam technology and this, for me, is the sweet spot.

As I said in my last comment: The best choice is whatever works for you.
# August 15, 2004 3:44 PM

Jeff Atwood said:

Hmm, well, I think whitelists have just as many drawbacks as bayesian, they're just different ones. Eg you still have to parse through your "rejected" emails to figure out which ones are valid, until the system is trained.

I guess what I'm objecting to is the illusion that the whitelist approach is ultimately less work for the user-- it's not. Just a different set of pros and cons.
# August 15, 2004 7:02 PM