Absence makes the heart grow fonder?

calinoiu — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 13:29:00 GMT

So... Umm... It's been a while. A little over six months, to be specific. That would be three months of unrelenting nausea and surprisingly heavy fatigue, followed by three months of desperately trying to catch up on all the "real world" stuff that didn't get done during those first three months. But now it's winter, and I'm looking forward to three months of not skiing, so there should be plenty of time for 'putering (at least once the pesky December holiday season is over), and care and feeding of this blog thing will slowly resume...

For today, I figured I'd address some of the correspondence I've shamefully ignored since June. Comments have been moderated and, where appropriate, answered. For those of you who sent me e-mails, here are some replies:

You're quite correct: a single-line textbox is actually attribute-encoded. Why I didn't pick up that error in the table while I was working on the double-encoding example is a bit of a mystery...
I do indeed have a solution for automatic HTML-encoding that avoids the double-encoding problem. I actually started working on a framework and series of blogs posts about a week after writing the HTML-encoding post, but I got busy with other stuff and never ended up publishing anything on the topic. Now that I know that at least some folks are interested, I'll try to find some time to update the framework and explain how it works and how to use it.
A version of Bordecal.ImportsSorter that works with Visual Studio 2008 will be coming soon-ish. It ranks right below work, holiday preparations, and future offspring concerns on my to-do list. (Hmm... That probably doesn't sound like I'm likely to find much time to work on it any time soon. However, please rest assured that I want this new version at least as much as you do, and I'm highly motivated to work on it whenever I have the time and energy.)

My apologies to those of you who have been waiting far too long for those answers. I'll try to do better over the next little while (or at least until I drop out of sight again in about three months)...

P.S.: In case you haven't figured it out yet and are worried about my health, please don't be. I do have an abdominal parasite, but it's mammalian and quite benign. ;) For those of you who are curious, it's a girl, and she's due on February 29th.

The magically disappearing start page

calinoiu — Thu, 17 May 2007 12:20:00 GMT

Off on a bit of a tangent this morning...

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the Visual Studio start page. I do find it useful enough when I first open VStudio. However, once I start working on anything, the mere presence of the start page tab in the IDE main window is really, really irritating to me for some reason. Of course, given that even one little using directive out of place also drives me to distraction, this probably isn't too surprising.

At any rate, the other day, I decided that it was high time to do a little something about that start page annoyance. At some point in the medium-ish future, I might turn Bordecal.ImportSorter into Bordecal.ToolsForObsessiveCompulsiveNitPickers and throw in a start page closer. In the meantime, here's a VStudio 2005 macro to close the start page as soon as any document is loaded in the IDE.

For those of you who are interested in using the macro, here are a couple of picky details:

The start page will be closed when any document is opened, regardless of how it was opened. If you open a solution that has open documents, that's good enough to trigger closing of the start page.
The start page will only be closed once. If you reload the start page manually, the macro won't close it on you.

The above are completely intentional features--that's exactly how I personally prefer the start page to be closed. If you would prefer some alternate behaviour, please feel free to ask. I'm quite willing to consider adding customization of the behaviour when I eventually get around to adding this stuff to an add-in...

I may have joined the wrong side : Miscellaneous

Absence makes the heart grow fonder?

The magically disappearing start page