Archives
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CodeMash!
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View History doesn't work in VSS 2005
I was doing some work with VSS 2005 this weekend and had a very wierd problem. When I tried to view history for a file, nothing happened. No errors, no prompts -- it just did nothing. I tried this both from VS.NET 2005 as well as the VSS 2005 client. Same thing.
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It arrived!
After 5 1/2 years, I have retired my Kyocera Palm SmartPhone. Sitting on my desk in it's docking cradle is my new Samsung i730. If you look closely at the screenshot, you'll see its running Windows Mobile 5.0. The upgrade went flawlessly -- although I'm working with a brand new phone with no data on it and no additional 3rd party apps installed. -
The wait begins...
Finally! After 5 1/2 years with the same phone (yes 5 1/2 YEARS), I've finally found a phone with the features and price I want to replace my trusty Kyocera Palm SmartPhone.
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Followup on String.IsNullOrEmpty
My post about the utility method IsNullOrEmpty elicited an important comment. It seems there is a JIT optimization bug with this method that will bite you if you compile in release mode and run outside of the IDE. Seems like it might be best to avoid this one and wait for the fix. Thanks to Arjan Zuidhof for the comment!
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String.IsNullOrEmpty (.NET 2.0)
How many times have you written the following string validation code:
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DevCares Training Event
Yesterday, Bill Wagner and I spoke at the local Microsoft DevCares event in Southfield, Michigan. We spoke on "Incorporating Agile Development into Your Organization". It included a slide deck where we talked about what agile development is, how it can help you and how to go about getting an agile project started in your organization. In the second part of the event, we got into code! We talked about TDD and the testing and code coverage features available in Visual Studio 2005.
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Doubles, strings and parsing.
A guy at a client site quizzed me the other day on an interesting topic. Given the following snippet of code:
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Data Binding fails me again...
Please excuse this minor tirade I'm about to belch out...
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My last day as an MVP.
Today is my last day as a .NET MVP. I first received the MVP award back in October 2001 when there was only a single classification of ".NET" and awards were give out mainly on your contributions to the USENET newsgroups. Today, the .NET MVP awards are divided into subcategories such as C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET and awards are given for all sorts of community activities. It's been a great ride and I was lucky to have a great lead in Rafael Munoz at Microsoft.
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Plugin Screenshot
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Glutton for punishment!
Although I liked the ease at which I could get my source code highlighted with the squishyWARE Syntax Highlighter component, I didn't like that is was VS.NET 2003 coloring. So I got the crazy idea of just pulling the RTF off the clipboard and converting that to HTML.
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Syntax Highlighting with a plugin
I've been playing around with writing a syntax highlighting plugin for Windows Live Writer Beta. It allows me to paste some C#, VB.NET or XML code into a textbox and then uses the squishyWARE syntax highlighter to set HTML coloring. Fun (and easy!). Great for code samples. Here's some output:
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More VS.NET 2005 Goodness!
I was reviewing some code I had ported from VS2003 today. The project was using visual inheritence in a windows forms enviroment. At one point (back when it was in 2003) I had marked the class abstract since, well, it was abstract. Unfortunately, I could no longer use the VS2003 forms designer to edit the form -- since the class was abstract, the IDE couldn't create an instance of it. At that time, I just added some comments to the code that the class should not be instantiated directly and that it wasn't marked abstract simply because of the VS.NET 2003 IDE.
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Documenting .NET 2.0 Assemblies
I've been spending some time today documenting my code. I'm using .NET's built-in XML comments and an alpha build of nDoc 2.0 that supports .NET 2.0 assemlies. So far, it's been going pretty smoothly (for an alpha). It seems quite stable and I haven't run into any show stoppers.
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CodeMash is coming!
Just found out about this at our user group meeting the other night:
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Tip: Temporarily Disable Snaplines
The .NET 2.0 Forms Designer has an awesome new feature called Snaplines. Snaplines show visual cues to help you line up controls on a form. They make it very easy to conform to the Windows User Interface Guidelines.
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Real World ClickOnce with Brian Noyes
I'm geeked about tonight's user group meeting. We've got IDesign's Brian Noyes in town to talk about ClickOnce development and deployment. Should be an awesome talk! If you're in the southeast Michigan area tonight (Southfield, to be exact) stop on by. More information on the GANG website.
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Followup on Enums
In a follow-up to my last post, Eric Bachtal pointed out that I could use a class with only public constants to accomplish just about the same thing:
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To Enum or not to Enum...
I'm using a library that accepts an integer as a parameter. The value for the integer is really arbitrary -- it's a utility library and the consumers of the library decide what they want this integer value to represent.
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The world is not all managed (yet!)
When we work in a managed environment (.NET) for so long, we sometimes forget there is still unmanaged code out there.
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Trying out Windows Live Writer Beta
I only got a dozen or so uses out of BlogJet before the 30-day trial expired. Since I'm not blogging very much (as is obvious by looking at my archives), I didn't feel like forking out $40 even though I liked BlogJet.
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Ian Griffiths: "You can't just leave everything to the GC"
In another follow-up to the thread I mentioned in my previous post, Ian Griffiths talks about some common misunderstandings about how .NET’s Garbage Collector works and how you interact with it via IDisposable. In this reply he also mentions:
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Handing out Disposable objects
Vince asks a question about handing out Disposable objects:
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OpenFileDialog and the current directory
Just found out something odd that I never noticed before. If you use the OpenFileDialog class to allow a user to select a file, then once they’ve selected a file, the directory that file is in is now your application’s current directory! Huh? Seems odd to me.
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OT: MP3 Player with CD Drive?
I picked up an MP3 player for my niece and noticed that it appears to come with it’s own CD drive!
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FTP classes in .NET 2.0
I had a chance to play around with the FTP classes in .NET 2.0 (FtpWebRequest and FtpWebResponse). My initial impression (after about 15 or 20 minutes of coding) is, yuck — not very good.
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FrazzledDad: We Have a Cover!
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Blogging with BlogJet
Ok, the usual, boring “just testing this” post. I’ve used w.Bloggar in the past but I’ve seen a number of positive comments from people using BlogJet so I thought I’d give it a try (I never used .Text’s HTML interface for posting and the Community Server one doesn’t wow me either). Seems a lot like w.Bloggar so far — although no “preview” window (which I kind of liked). I know this is a WYSIWYG editor, but the styles come from the particular skin I use in CS so it’s not quite as WYSIWYG as I’d like.
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Retrieving DeviceID from the Compact Framework
I needed to get the device ID from a Windows CE device for a recent project I worked on. Some googling found many discussions as to whether it was possible on all devices and whether is was even possible via managed code. Then I found a blog entry by Microsoft's Jeremy Hance that put it to rest:
A Simple Device ID Class -
Community Server Update!
Congratulations to the gang at http://weblogs.asp.net for a very smooth transition to Community Server! I had a few bumps myself, but only because I didn't read through the entire email that detailed everything I needed to know about the transition! :)
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Josh Holmes Speaking in Cleveland Tonight
Our local user group VP and fellow MVP Josh Holmes will be speaking in Cleveland tonight. He'll be talking about "Personalized Web Sites with the ASP.NET 2.0 Portal Framework". Sounds cool! If you haven't see this new stuff in 2.0 you should try and catch this talk.
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Sample code from COM Interop Exposed - Part 2
Someone emailed me with a request for sample code from my second COM Interop Exposed article on 15seconds.com. Since they didn't leave an email address where I could send them the ZIP file, I just decided to post it here:
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MasterPages and Nils Gruson
Thanks Nils! I was having problems with a MasterPage layout and could not figure out what was going on. VS.NET kept telling me "Could not match '...' with any ContentPlaceHolder". Despite the fact that there was indeed a ContentPlaceHolder with the proper ID. I gave up and Googled. Although blogger Nils Gruson has but one blog post, it was exactly what I was looking for!
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Hiding VS.NET 2005 Options?
About two years ago, I blogged about that stupid (IMHO) setting for VS.NET 2003 that would hide "advanced" members from intellisense in VB.NET. In VS.NET 2005, this option is not only off by default, but the checkbox is disabled. Nice.
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New article on COM Interop
My latest article on COM Interop is up at 15seconds.com. COM Interop Exposed - Part 2 shows what you need to do in your .NET objects so that your events are exposed to your COM clients. I start with a history of how events work in COM, and then show how to use interfaces and attributes for easier integration with your existing COM clients.
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Great talk by Miguel Castro
Last night's talk on Webserver controls by Miguel Castro at GANG was awesome. I've read and enjoyed his articles in CODE magazine, but if you have the chance to see him give a talk you really should take it. He's a great presenter and kept the audience involved during the whole presentation. Thanks Miguel!
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Upcoming Events
My talk at the Ann Arbor Dot Net Developers group went well last week. And there's more stuff happening this week.
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NUnit Presentation Tonight
I'll be doing an introductory presentation on NUnit at tonight's Ann Arbor Dot Net Developers group. After my presentation, Dave Donaldson will be discussing ways to write quality software with free tools (NUnit, NCover, FxCop) and how to write quality software with VSTS Developer Edition. If you're in Ann Arbor tonight, come check it out.
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Finding work
So yesterday was my first day as a contractor. Well, actually, it was my first day as an unemployed individual. The contract I was supposed to start on has gotten stalled in some "red-tape" and its uncertain whether this will be solved to everyone's satisfaction. Scary, to be sure. But this is one of the possibilities I planned for when deciding to go independent. Many W2 employees have a false sense of "security" when it comes to their jobs. You should always plan for the possibility of being out of work tomorrow!
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The EventLogTraceListener and EventLogEntryType
If you've ever used the EventLog class, you know it's a convenient way to write entries into any of the event logs on a machine. The WriteEntry method has a number of overloads and one of them allows you to specify an EventLogEntryType member to indicate the type of event log entry to create -- Information, Warning, Error, SuccessAudit or FailureAudit.
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Instance variable initializers - C# vs. VB.NET
I ran into an interesting issue today when changing some VB.NET code. I was surprised at the outcome so I did a quick repro case in C# and didn't have a problem.
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Taking the plunge!
Tomorrow begins my final week as a W2 employee. As of Monday, February 27th I become an independent contractor!
