Archives
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FinalBuilder 4
As you may have heard, FinalBuilder 4 has just been released. If you’re not yet sold on a build tool then you should seriously consider this. This is by far the best build tool I’ve used. We use version 3 for a number of production builds and my latest project is already being built with version 4. We’re so happy with it that we’re picking up a site license as part of our 2006 budget.
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Buying a Camera in Canada
I’m in the market for a specific digital camera. Unlike in the US, here in Canada the main retailers don’t carry a large selection. I recently came across www.cameracanada.com which seems to have a wide selection and a polished website. My only problem is that I’ve never heard of them before and I can’t find any links to them on the web. My concern is with credibility.
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Twenty Seven?
Having just completed my 27th lap around the sun I feel rather tired.
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Max CPU: Another one for your developer toolbox...
For various reasons, mostly related to my day job, I often find it useful to simulate excessive CPU usage. I’m sure every developer that has been coding for a while has at one point written the following program.
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The Lesser Spotted Security MVP
For all those MVPs who didn’t managed to find me in the crowd at the Summit, Raffaele Rialdi managed to get a photo of a few of the security MVPs hanging out with Michael Howard.
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Martyn Lovell blogs again…
I just noticed that Martyn Lovell has started blogging again at a new home on blogs.msdn.com
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Media Center Update
The “Update Rollup 2” for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 was just posted on the MSDN Subscriber downloads website. Go grab it while it’s hot!
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MVP Summit Concludes
I arrived home a few days ago and realized that I didn’t get to meet half the people I had hoped. With so many MVPs and such a busy program, it was really hard getting a moment to track everyone down.
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Window Clippings 1.0
Update: Version 2.0 is now available! Download it now from http://www.windowclippings.com/.
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The MVP Summit is Love
So this is my first MVP Summit and it sure is interesting. The theme seems to be that the VB folks are disgruntled. They seem to be feeling left behind. Everything from “VB6 or die” to case-insensitive programming. I hadn’t actually realized the latter was a “thing”. I just figured … well never mind.
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Not about PureText
So PureText has been making the rounds on the blogs. It’s certainly a great little tool, but I thought I would point out something that all the bloggers seems to have overlooked. If you’re not a programmer you probably don’t care, but PureText comes to us from the creator of the Dependency Walker. If you’ve been programming Windows for five minutes (to paraphrase John Robbins) you have surely heard of “Depends”.
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MVP Global Summit 2005
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To the island we go...
We’re off to Vancouver Island for five days of relaxation, well as much relaxation as you can get with three kids under five years of age. It’s our first visit to the island since moving to British Columbia, so we’re really looking forward to the experience.
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Demystifying Managed Code and Compiler Output
Since publishing my Introduction to MSIL series, I have received a number of questions related to compilers and IL. In this post I hope to address a number of those questions.
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Brief Update
Sorry for the lack of posts in the last few weeks. I’ve been quite busy with various projects (and family) which have taken up all of my time. Some quick thoughts:
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No PDC This Year!
Don’t worry. Before you cancel your hotel reservations, the PDC is by no means cancelled!
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Mixed Types and Finalization
After I wrote about Mixing Native and Managed Types in C++ I received some feedback that my AutoPtr ref class really needs a finalizer. I had hoped to leave a discussion of finalizers to another day but since you insist…
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Adam on Compiling MSIL
Adam White, a friend of mine from Toronto, read my Introduction to MSIL series and noticed that I neglected to provide any information on how to actually compile all the IL that I wrote about. I figured it just wasn’t all that interesting, but if you have read my series and need a bit of help getting some of the examples to run, you may want to check out Adam’s post where he provides some helpful information.
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Moving to Visual C++ 2005 July CTP
I just installed the July CTP of Visual Studio and immediately noticed a bug in the way the Visual C++ compiler implements the Dispose pattern for ref class destructors.
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Mixing Native and Managed Types in C++
Wow, its turning into a busy month. I just haven’t had any time to blog despite having a number of interesting topics to cover. I’ll try to get a few of them written soon. Here’s a topic from one of my regular readers.
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I'm an MVP!
Please welcome the newest member of the Microsoft House of Representatives. -
Tabbed Browsing in Visual Studio
Don Box points out the neat tabbed browsing support in Visual Studio 2005. It’s certainly way better than the tabbed browsing provided by the MSN Toolbar which flickers terribly as it switches IE windows.
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OneNote PowerToy Contest
Does anyone know whether Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 can be used to develop power toys for the contest? The official rules simply state:
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WTL 7.5 on SourceForge
A new version of the Windows Template Library (WTL) was released earlier this month and includes support for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. This is a great library for building native Windows applications.
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Broken Links
My web hosting provider seems to be out of service at the moment so downloads and images on my blog aren’t available as they’re hosted on my site (http://www.kennyandkarin.com/). It will hopefully be restored in the next few hours.
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Is P/Invoke Dead?
A reader recently asked whether P/Invoke is dead since you can use C++ Interop and avoid re-declaring all the functions and structures that you might already have in system header files.
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Special Folders Browser
When using the Environment.SpecialFolder enumeration I often spend a few extra moments checking what path a particular SpecialFolder constant refers to on my computer. Since it can be different from machine to machine and user to user it can help to quickly identify where the special folders point to. I got tired of writing the same boilerplate code over and over again so I quickly wrote the Special Folders Browser.
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Independent Microsoft Technical Evangelist?
Hi, my name is Kenny Kerr and I am an Independent Microsoft Technical Evangelist.
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Lesson of the Day
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Humans and Mac Minis
This is hilarious and yet so sad.
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Initializing Arrays and Aggregates
Jordy posted a question to MSDN’s new forums website that I thought would be interesting to readers of my blog. Basically he wants to convert the following native C++ code to managed code:
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Using Statements
From a completely unrelated Google search I came across this post by Fritz Onion over on pluralsight mentioning that he was happy to see Visual Basic 2005 adopting the C# using statement to make resource management a little easier in VB. He went on to concede that it wasn’t quite as elegant as the corresponding C#. Here is the VB example he provided:
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Applied Visual C++ 2005
I haven’t been blogging much over the last few months mostly because I’ve been real busy on various projects, the most significant being my new book entitled Applied Visual C++ 2005. Hopefully I will be able to write more about it in the coming weeks. In a nutshell, it introduces Visual C++ 2005 as a language and compiler for developing applications targeting the .NET Framework.
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The Case of the Missing Generic (Parse Method)
I’ve noticed that quite a few people in the community have been wondering why on earth the System.Enum type in version 2 of the .NET Framework lacks a generic Parse method. If you haven’t used the Parse method lately, an example will help to clarify the frustration many developers have experienced.
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More on Building Secure Applications in C++
Earlier this year I wrote an introduction to some of the safety features available to hobbyist developers using Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition. You can read it here:
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Icon Browser on MSDN
I just noticed that my Icon Browser utility is featured on MSDN. This was one of the first .NET applications I wrote back in 2001 and is still one of the most useful little tools I’ve written on a sleepless night, mostly due to the “Export Icon” feature. You can read the full article here:
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Using Visual C++ Express to Build Secure Applications
My latest Visual C++ 2005 (security) article is now live on MSDN. It should be headlined on the appropriate dev centers in the next day or two, but here's a sneak preview: