February 2006 - Posts
Even if you are not a VFP developer but use some other COM based language like VB 6 the Sedna project might of interest as it contains NET4COM, a library of COM wrappers around a selected subset of the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.
Below are some of the awards I have received in recent years from Microsoft.
Maybe it isn’t a big issue but it is one of those things that waste my time and for that reason piss me of :-(
The Environment class has a GetFolderPath() function that lets you retrieve a whole list of folders as defined by the SpecialFolder enumeration. Nice but the Temp folder isn't part of the enumeration. If you want to find the temp folder you need to use the Path.GetTempPath() function. So how hard would it be to add the TempPath to the SpecialFolder enumeration and have the developer remember only a single function to check directories>
I don’t know how much spam you receive but I receive a lot. If I had to guess you receive just as much if not more and if not consider yourself really lucky :-)
Even though I receive a lot of spam I consider myself lucky enough to use SpamBayes. Just in case you have never heard about SpamBayes, it is a statistical anti spam filter written in Python. Basically it just splits each message into its distinct words, assigns a spam probability to each word and calculates the total spam probability for the whole message. Messages are divided into three categories, Ham (=good mail), Spam and Unsure. All this calculation is done based on the training you did so in that respect it is an artificial intelligence solution, you train it and it gets smarter at working for you :-) Training doesn’t take much effort, specially if you have a folder with a few hundred known spam messages and it makes very few mistakes once trained. Any time it misplaces a message all you need to do is to click the “Delete as Spam” or “Recover from Spam” buttons and it immediately moves the message and updates its keyword database to avoid the mistake in the future.
But the best thing about SpamBayes is that it’s completely free and integrates well with Microsoft Outlook 2003. You can find the project at SourceForge at
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net.
Recommended!
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
Don’t you just hate errors like that :-(
Well I am glad Amanda does too and she announced that they released a hot fix for the problem. Unfortunately you can't download the hot fix, you have to go through PSS and request it. If you do refer to knowledge base article 915038. Don't worry if you can’t find the KB article yet, it will appear later but PSS should be able to get the hot fix for you.
Now the only thing I don’t like is that we have to go through PSS to get the hot fix. Why not make it available through the MSDN web site so anyone can download it without the extra hassle. Just attach an extra warning that it is a hot fix and therefore not tested quite as well as normal releases. I don’t know why they don’t but I suspect that it is the lawyer kind of reason :-(
If you are going to the DevDays in Amsterdam this year come by and say hi. I will be at the Microsoft Paviljoen along with a number of other MVP’s where we are supposed to have our own corner. If you haven’t decided yet and are in the Amsterdam neighborhood take a look at
http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/msdn/devdays/default.aspx for more info about the DevDays. There are quite a number of good speakers and sessions so it is definitely worth the time.
Steve Lasker, the one from the Microsoft Visual Basic team, has posted the presentations from VSLive online at
http://blogs.msdn.com/smartclientdata/archive/2006/02/01/522549.aspxIn the samples he shows some interesting ways to solve typed data table and data adaper problems. Samples include:
- ITableAdapter
- Keeping the typed TableAdapter private while exposing the typed DataTables
- The future direction Microsoft is going with their data development.
Recommended reading!
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
This weekend was the first in quite a while that I could go paragliding again. I was in the market for a new glider and I had a number of test flights on the Airwave Sport 3 and I really like it :-) Guess I am no longer in the market as I have one on order now. Now all I have to do is wait for good weather and the next trip to France
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
If you regularly switch between VB and C# you might miss the cw code snippet while working in VB. I certainly did so I decided to create it. You can
download it from here.
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
Some people have a gift for writing. Scott Swigart, one of the people on the VB insiders mailing list sure has the gift. In a recent post he shared his frustration while consulting for companies that where migrating from VB 6/Access to VB.NET. Roy Osherove posted it to his blog and it makes for a nice read. The only sad thing is that it is painfully true. The good thing is that Microsoft is aware of the issues and is working on them.
See
http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2006/02/10/437845.aspx for a good if painful laugh.
Maurice de Beijer
wwwTheProblemSolver.nl
I like and have been using VMware workstation fors ome time now and think it is a great tool. While Microsoft Virtual Machine works well VMware feels quite a bit faster and as I normally run on a laptop speed is an important thing.
But things are getting even better as VMware have decided to release VMware server for free. Yes that is free as in $ 0,-! Now I don’t have much experience with their server line personally but we are using it at a client to simulate a network of 4 machines, all running on a single box, and it works just great. I haven’t use Microsoft Virtual Server so I can’t compare the two but at that price VMware sure have an excellent price to quality ratio that is hard to beat.
If you have never used any of the products line Microsoft Virtual Machine or WMware Workstation I recommend you give them a try. I have found it very beneficial to keep some of the work I do away from my main machine in a virtual machine. Sometimes just for an initial trial and some I permanently keep in a VM. And of course installing beta software on your main machine is always a bad idea so you should always use a VM in that case (although I must admit to breaking the rule once in a while).
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
I still think Visual Studio 2005 contains more shortcuts than a dog has fleas and that knowing a bunch of them can be a big boost in productivity [:D]
Another useful one is to select open files using the keyboard. There are actually at least two ways to do so.
The first is to use Ctrl+Tab. Hit it and you get a popup window with all open windows. Use the arrow keys to select the window you want and let go of the keyboard. VS2005 now activates the window that was selected when you let go of the keyboard.
Another nice way is to hit Ctrl+Alt+DownArrow. Now the Active Files dialog pops up and lets you select the file you want to edit.
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
Sometimes I think Visual Studio 2005 contains more shortcuts than a dog has fleas. Knowing a bunch of them can be a big boost in productivity. One I just recently discovered was that the solution window supports incremental search. Great if you have a big solution and need to search for those source files.
So how to use it:
- Hit Ctl+Alt+L to activate the Solution Exporer
- Just start typing and the focus will jump to the first file matching your typed text.
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
If you have a library of well debugged code you might want to avoid stepping through it every time you debug using Visual Studio 2005. One easy way to do this is using the DebuggerNonUserCode attribute. You can apply it either to a specific function or if you prefer to a complete class. The effect of the attribute is that wVS2005 will treat the code as external to your program and not step into it. However if this code contains a call into any code that doesn’t have the DebuggerNonUserCode attribute it will step right into it.
Pretty neat and makes debugging a lot nicer experience.
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl
If you have installed new templates in Visual Studio 2005 you might have experienced the fact that they don’t show up in the Add New Item list. This can happen because VS2005 uses a template cache that isn’t always updated correctly. However there is a quick and simple fix for this that was unfortunately not documented very well. This quick fix is to run DevEnv.exe with the /InstallVSTemplates option from the command line. Doing this will force VS2005 to rebuild its template cache and you should be good to go.
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl