Archives

Archives / 2004 / June
  • Visual C++ 2005 Beta

    The Visual C++ 2005 (and of course Visual Studio) beta will be available to MSDN subscribers in a few days. Subscribe to the downloads feed to be notified of its availability.

  • New Arrival

    Our baby boy finally arrived this morning just before 10 am. Daniel James Kerr weighed in at nine pounds and nine ounces. Danny and his mom are healthy and doing well.

  • On Productivity and API Wars

    Joel Spolsky recently posted another essay, this time ranting about Microsoft, platform shifts, runtimes, etc. I'm a big fan of Spolsky's and I strongly encourage anyone who is at all interested in software to read all his essays on software. He seems to be showing a bit more bitterness than usual these days though. One of the points he tries to make is that the reason developers are more productive with programming platforms like Visual Basic or the .NET Framework compared with traditional programming languages like C and C++ is because the former have automatic memory management.

  • Exploring Installations and Security Identifiers

    With a shared computer you can get into a situation where one user installed a program and a different user wants to uninstall it. The trouble is that the program may not be listed in Add or Remove Programs when the second user logs in. You need to log in as the original user to view the program as an installed program in the list. So how do you discover who originally installed the program so that you can chase them down?

  • Displaying .NET Framework Versions

    In supporting or diagnosing .NET based products, I often find it useful to check what versions of the .NET Framework are installed on a given machine. Most programmers know by now how to do this by checking the registry or some file on disk. But when you’re on the phone to a customer you want a simple solution that does not involve them cranking open the registry. What you need is a simple, low-tech solution.