Kevin Dente's Blog
The Blip in the Noise
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PDC - not me
Well, now that the PDC has sold out, I guess I can say definitively that I won't be attending. Back when I first heard about this year's PDC, I assumed that I would be attending. And the truth is, I probably would be attending if I wasn't in the midst of a big release cycle and buried in hard-core DHTML coding. Nonetheless, as summer progressed and I learned more about the PDC contents, I curiously found myself less interested that I was initially. Yes, I, like many of my fellow bloggers, had fallen victim to Longhorn Lethargy. As fully geek-enabled as I am, I just can't get excited about an operating system that's at least 2 years away from being released, and probably 3-4 years from being widely deployed. As a software developer, I get paid to develop software that people can actually use, and anything Longhorn related is ways from fitting that criteria.
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EIF
Microsoft has posted EIF, the Enterprise Instrumention Framework, on the Microsoft download site. Interesting. EIF is the .NET API for centralized logging and event monitoring that was only available on the MSDN subscriber downloads site. I never did understand why it was only posted there, but I guess they're making it more readily available.
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Ask and ye shall receive...a Sysinternals RSS feed
Roy Osherove's Feedable site continues to create RSS feeds upon request for sites that don't have them. A few days ago, I submitted a request for a feed for the Sysinternals web site. Lo and behold, when I checked Feedable today the feed was up. Roy - you rock! That's one less web site that I need to poll periodically in my browser.
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Element behaviors
For a while now I've been coding away on a fairly hairy DHTML/JavaScript project. The project is basically a browser-based image viewing and annotation UI. So far I've mostly been working in straight-up JavaScript, with the server component wrapped into an ASP.NET Server Control.
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The Magic is gone
Well, it happened. The DotNetMagic UI library went commercial. Very sad, as the "free tool" community really needs something like this. Fortunately, the free last version will continue to be available, it just won't be enhanced.
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Fanless PC
I just ran across this article about a new fanless PC. After several years running a mega-tower with 2 10K SCSI drives that sound roughly akin to an F-14 taking off from an aircraft carrier, this speaks to me. I'm seriously interested in my next home PC being quiet.
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Transparent image generation
Sometimes you run into a task that should be easy but ends up being hard. Today I hit a big one. I was trying to dynamically generate an image with a transparent background that could be displayed in a web browser using GDI+ in the .NET framework. I was working with GIFs, since I had read previously that IE doesn't support transparent PNGs (unless you use the filter hack).
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New version of Process Explorer
The Sysinternals folks have released version 7 of Process Explorer. It's wicked cool. The new thread view (with call stacks and debug symbols) is unbelievably awesome. I can't imagine my life as a developer without the tools those folks provide, and they've done it again.
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String concatenation - + vs StringBuilder
Countless times I've read that the when doing string concatenation, the StringBuilder class is more efficient than the String "+" operator. I pretty much just accepted that advice until a couple of days ago. But after poking around a bit, it now looks like there's some simple and common cases where in fact the opposite is true.
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New Microsoft Web Service
MS has released an SDK for accessing Microsoft.com downloads. Nice idea. But what I'd really like to see is a SOAP API for accessing the knowledge base. I use that sucker enough that a rich client UI would be very handy. Plus, it would let me fix the annoying limitation that the kbase UI refuses to remember the fact that I always, always, always search for "All of the words entered" with a limit of 150 articles.