Mix 08 Recap

Friday, April 18, 2008 10:57:53 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Last week Jeff Brand (Microsoft DPE), Rocky Lhotka and I sat down to discuss the good and bad of the Mix 08 conference.  You can get the podcast from Jeff Brand's blog.

Silverlight Controls Demo - Silverlight Beta 1

Friday, April 18, 2008 10:57:27 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

You can find the Silverlight Beta 1 control demos here.  Including some controls we don't see in WPF like the DataGrid, Calendar and Hyperlink button.

Expression Learning Resources

Friday, April 18, 2008 10:53:57 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Expression Blend is great for doing some things that are more complex in Visual Studio when authoring xaml... some of those things include Transformations and  Animations.  The Expression site has a entire area dedicated to helping people get up to speed on the Expression suite tools.

Mix08 Keynote & Announcements

Wednesday, March 05, 2008 8:22:16 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

This isn't a summary of all the announcements, just a couple of one that I thought were notable.  If you want to see the actual keynote or any of the sessions they have all been recorded and are up on the Mix08 site. Some of the things that I found interesting included:

 

IE 8 Beta 1 is Available 

They have added some interesting features and extensibility mechanism to work with content on the web and are working to abide by the W3C standards for browsers.  Here is a recap of what will be in IE8

  • CSS Compliance
  • Start of implementing HTML 5
  • Web Slices
  • Activities

You can find more about the last two features here.

 

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 Released 

They also announced that Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 was released.  Which has added the awaited support for a number of basic controls.  In the previous release the target was around rich media and a basic subset of xaml.

 

Blend 2.0 Beta 1 is available

Expression Blend Beta 2 was released.

 

Coolest Application Built on Silverlight 2.0

One of the most impressive demos of the keynote was the launch of Hard Rock Cafe's memorabilia collection based on Silverlight and SeaDragon.

Organizing Outlook Email... Unbearable

Friday, January 11, 2008 12:41:22 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I have finally given in... I can't find anything... I know I have it... but where is it.  I was looking for some tools to help me with my problems.  An acquaintance of mine (David Ing) runs Taglocity, which I have yet to install.  I am not sure tagging is what I want to do.  Google Desktop and Live aren't cutting the different ways I want to be able to look at my email.  I have read posts by Paul Graham for a number of years... and have enjoyed what he has said.  The reason I mention this... is that Paul is involved in Y-Combinator... a company that funds startups and this is how I happened upon xobni.  Which really caught my eye because they are looking at some different ways to deal with emails... and the UI actually looks clean and interesting. Check it out.  I am still on the waiting list to get the beta... but I will blog my experience once I have a chance to take a look at it.

Xobni outlook add-in for your inbox

Software Development Automation

Wednesday, December 19, 2007 11:54:12 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

There is a new site that focus on software factories, domain specific languages and Visual Studio Extensibility.

http://sf.devrevolution.com/

Source Available for .NET Framework

Wednesday, October 03, 2007 3:09:53 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Wow... this is great, less time in reflector... and the ability to see comments:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx

Windows Live Writer Beta 2

Tuesday, June 05, 2007 10:30:58 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

has been released... http://writer.live.com/

Copy and Paste References within Visual Studio

Friday, March 23, 2007 11:11:04 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Stumbled across this one the other day... it's a add-in for copying and pasting references between VS projects.

http://weblogs.asp.net/okloeten/archive/2006/04/09/442307.aspx

Lutz Roeder Reflector 5.0 Released

Monday, March 12, 2007 6:30:48 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I got a notice to upgrade my Reflector yesterday... some really cool features have been added.

Check out the Power Point of features.

Window Live Search for Mobile

Friday, February 16, 2007 12:05:31 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Just released a couple of days ago... its pretty cool.  I hate typing on my phone and the navigation model is all done using the directional disc.  I was impressed... the ease of use and information available was impressive.

Power Toys for Resharper 2.5.1

Tuesday, February 06, 2007 3:06:39 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I have to remember to go check these out when I have more time...

http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/ReSharper/ReSharper+Plugin+Development

Using Word Automation to Update Word's Table of Contents

Tuesday, January 23, 2007 11:11:23 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

This one took a while to figure out... so I thought I would post it for others.  So the problem was I am building a document using the Word Automation model within C#.  When I inserted text that had styles defined for the TOC (Header 1 for example) I couldn't get the new header text to appear in the TOC contents in my final document output.

My usual approach of recording a macro in Word and then reviewing the VBA code resulted in the followin:

Sub Macro2()
'
' Macro2 Macro
'
'

WordBasic.UpdateTableOfContents
End Sub

But there was no indication of how to "Update entire table", like the option shown in the UI.  No matter what I indicated it was always the same code as shown above.

I saw other approaches online that cycled through the Fields collection and called update, but again there was not option for "Update Entire Table".  When I tried it, it didn't update the TOC with the header 1 text I had just added to the document.

After digging a around a bit more I finally figured it out:

Word.Application _wordApp;

internal void UpdateTOC()
{
//cycle through all of the TOC's and Update them
foreach (Word.TableOfContents contents in _wordApp.Application.ActiveDocument.TablesOfContents)
{
contents.Update();
}
}

KB Article for Allowing SQL 2005 Remote Connections

Monday, January 22, 2007 1:27:14 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Couldn't connect to SQL 2005 the other day... this article helped through the process.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;914277

Wikipedia Explorer and WPF

Sunday, December 31, 2006 9:25:38 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I stumbled across this one the other day... it is similar to the New York Time reader written in WPF but instead uses Wikipedia for its content.

Consolas Editor Font for Visual Studio 2005

Monday, November 20, 2006 10:34:49 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I stumbled across the fact that they released a new editor font for Visual Studio .NET which is supposed to be more compressed and easier to read.  I had been using Lucida Console forever and really liked that, but I like Consolas even better.

You can download it at the Microsoft Download Center.  Beware it will install as the default font for your Visual Studio environment.

Displaying Hierarchical Data with SQL

Wednesday, November 15, 2006 4:49:59 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I have solved this problem a number of times using recursion on the client and have always wanted to better solution for handling on the server side.  Handling it on the client requires that you bring back all of the data and recurse through it. Again I was faced with the problem this week... and I thought I would poke around to see if there was a better way to solve the problem.  It looks SQL Server 2005 now supports Common Table Expressions, which allows for recursion.  Here are a couple of articles I found explaining how to do it:

SQL Server 2005 Recursion Functions

Hierarchical Queries in SQL Server 2005

Patterns and Practices Requirements Gathering Tool on GotDotNet

Sunday, November 12, 2006 8:53:31 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Looks like some of the folks on the Microsoft Patterns & Practices team is looking at what it will take to build a requirements tool.  As far as I can tell they are just playing with a concept application and are looking for feedback.  The tool doesn't look like it is geared to any specific process and is very basic at this point.  I downloaded it and after removing some references that I didn't have on my box ( you will need CAB, Enterprise Library and SQL Compact edition - formally SQL Everywhere) was able to get it to compile and running.  It nothing special at this point.  It handles creating hierarchical requirements and linking.  With the most recent release it also look like they have built a module to sync with Team System.  It also is using has some example code in how they plan on handling the occasionally connected scenario. It's just a POC right now, but if you are interested you can take a look at it here.

Problems Installing .NET Framework 3.0

Thursday, November 09, 2006 3:48:48 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

.NET 3.0 framework was released a couple of days ago.  I downloaded it today and try to install it and ran into the following. 

problem copying $shtdwn$.reg

I tried it on another computer... basically the same messaging only differening by the drive letter.  That drive happens to be my NAS... which I didn't choose but rather the install package choose when unpacking the files to a temporary location.  Thinking this was not good... I detached my NAS and ran the install with no problem.

The other Required installs (.Net 3.0 SDK for example) allowed me to install with the NAS attached.

Web 2.0 UI using the Yahoo! UI Library

Monday, November 06, 2006 12:49:45 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I thought this site was kind of cool.  It demos the the Yahoo UI Library to build a blog.

CTA Subway map on Google

Monday, November 06, 2006 12:47:39 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

This is one of the better implementations I have found (although very slow) using google maps to layout the "L" routes in Chicago. 

http://www.tastypopsicle.com/maps/cta.asp

DotNet XML XInlude Library

Wednesday, November 01, 2006 3:00:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I had always written my own include for Xml with out knowing there is an actual standard.  You can find information on the standard and a library built by the Xml MVP's.

Bitwise operations on Enum Flags

Thursday, October 26, 2006 9:13:37 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

A number of times I find my self looking up how to assign multiple enum values to a property to support options semantics on a control.  So to make it easier to find I am TidByteing it here. An example of this is the classic Border property that allows you to identify where you want lines drawn.  For example, lets say we have an enum that looks like this (note that I am using powers of two so they can easily be combined):

public enum Border

       {

           Top = 1,

           Bottom = 2,

           Left = 4,

           Right = 8

       }

And you want to indicate to draw only on the left and right borders would look something like this:

ctl.Border = Border.Left | Border.Right

To make this work you need to add the FlagsAttribute to the enum:

[Flags()]
public enum Border

 

Then to check to see if a flag is set you would do the following:

if ((propertyName & Border.Left) == Border.Left)

        //border left border needs to be drawn;

 

 

Google CodeSearch

Wednesday, October 11, 2006 3:03:12 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Google introduced Code Search about a week ago.  It doesn't look like it actually will pull code snippets from blogs or html, but it pulls from sources that are not typically cataloged by crawlers... such as archive files.  I have already found it useful a number of times.

Lets say you want a function to convert a string to pascal case... you know this function has been written a thousands times before so you hit Google.

Google Search on 'c# pascalcase'

There is a bunch of hits on coding standards but no function that actually converts a string to pascal case on the first page.

Now try it on code search...

Google Code Search on 'lang:c# pascalcase'

Right away you find the code you are looking for.

Xml Notepad is back...

Wednesday, October 11, 2006 3:02:28 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

For those that loved (may be a bit strong... maybe liked... it wasn't that great) Xml Notepad in the late 90's they have released an updated version.

DasBlog 1.9 now supports posting images through Live Writer

Friday, October 06, 2006 1:26:55 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Anyone that uses Live Writer will be happy to know that you can post images on your blog without using FTP.

Can you ever have enough screen realestate?

Monday, September 25, 2006 9:01:16 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

I don't think so. Count them... yes 5 monitors.

Building Live Writer Plug-Ins

Monday, September 18, 2006 10:05:06 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

This look like a pretty good summary on how to build a plug-in for Live Writer.  Posting this one so I don't forget.

http://nayyeri.net/archive/2006/08/15/Write-a-Windows-Live-Writer-plugin-using-C_2300_.aspx

GotCodeSnippets.NET: THE online source for Visual Studio code snippets

Wednesday, September 06, 2006 10:37:04 AM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)

Stumbled across this... GotCodeSnippets.NET

Live Writer Now Available

Tuesday, August 15, 2006 11:00:00 PM (Central Standard Time, UTC-06:00)
I think most people have seen that Windows Live Writer was released.  It's a pretty solid editor for your blog.  It was extremely easy to setup.  It supports an SDK and an Add-In model.
 
You have the ability to save drafts of posts and recall previous posts that have been published (shown below).