Archives

Archives / 2004 / May
  • VS2005 MAY 2004 CTP: What Happened To My DefaultInstance?

    One of the coolest new features iI saw in the March 2004 CTP bits was the new "DefaultInstance" property in WinForms design. Well, I just installed the May 2004 CTP bits, and when I went to recompile my app, it threw an error. I go ti investigate, and the DefaultInstance property, and it's associated attribute, have been removed. What gives?!?!?? That was a great idea, and should have stayed in. Where did it go?

  • VS2005 Favorites: XML/XSD Heaven

    Visual Studio 2005 has some really awesome new features. My favorite so far is the new XML/XSD designer. Working with XML is a lot more intuitive now, and they've made it dirt simple to create a schema from a given XML file.

  • Whidbey Hates Me

    I've been trying to convert a Windows application from VS.NET 2003 to VS.NET 2005 - March CTP, and I haven't had the best of luck. First, the installation I did was running RIDICULOUSLY slow. Every time I made a code change, it took in upwards of 4 minutes to recompile a 4 project solution (on a dual proc, hyperthreaded 2.4GHz Xeon box). Then, I kept getting COM errors in the designer. I saw some cool new properties in the "Project Properties" dialog, like "Make Single Instance Application" and "Show Splashscreen At Startup", but none of them were enabled in the upgraded project, which made ma kinda mad. So I finally said "screw it", reformatted the box, reinstalled Windows XP and VS.NET 2005, and tried to start designing a Windows application from scratch.

  • Cyberakt Becomes ComponentArt.com

    I am very excited today to announce that my very good friends over at Cyberakt, the makers of ASPnetMenu and RichContentRotator, have changed their name to ComponentArt, and launched a brand new website and new products. Man, this new site is sexy as hell. The quality of the site design is far better than any other component vendor out there, myself included. It's not too cluttered, it's easy on the eyes, and it makes excellent use of blacks, whites, and reds. As any decent graphic design book or magazine will tell you, these are the three best colors for designing things for readability, especially in print.

  • TabletPC Videos up on Channel 9

    The just posted a new video from Peter Loforte on some of the new things you'll see in Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 or whatever the hell they're calling it now. It's good stuff, you should check it out. The TabletPC he's using? It's a slate-vertible from HP. It works like a regular convertible, moving from Notebook node to the "flip-around-and lock" convertible mode, but with one KILLER exception. You can also completely remove the keyboard and it tirns into a slate. How cool is that. Now if it were as powerful as the Portege 4000, I'd get one.

  • TechEd 2004 BOFs: Things To Remember

    I was looking over the list of BOFs for this year's TechEd (I won't be going after all, unfortunately), and it looks like there's going to be a great set of sessions. Having ran 2 sessions and PDC and attended several others, I wanted to give a few tips for everyone running one at the end of the month.

  • AtomAPI Problems and the Road to Beta 2

    Sorry about the radio silence the past week or so. It's been really hectic around here. Several of my friends graduated from college the past 2 weeks, so my weekends have been full of partying ;). But I've been working on VisualBlogger 2004 very heavily, walking down the long road to Beta 2. I've made a ton of progress, and the client is much more stable now. We have a complete implementation of the Provider Model, a la .NET 2.0, which I am extremely excited about.