The World According to Marc

  • Even slower coming out?

    2 Comments

    Somewhere along the lines I damaged my Visual Studio install and tonight I decided to just uninstall and reinstall. I planned on a few hours as we all know what a bear it can to be installing this bugger.

    Well I didn’t think it was possible, but Visual Studio takes even longer to uninstall than install. Plan on seeing a log of postings tonight, I’m going to have some free time…. Ug.

     

  • Playoffs

    2 Comments

    So we are looking at something around -5 with wind-chill for Sunday’s Patriots vs. Titans game. The real question isn’t who will win (Patriots naturally) but rather how many fans will stick around to see it happen. :) 

  • One More Wish-List Item

    3 Comments

    As of today I need to add another item to my 2004 Technology Wish-List:

    To get the old RichTextBox back

    Anyone who has to work with the RichTextBox for more than hour will start to wonder how this control ever made it though a review. Aside from the rather laughable fact that it doesn’t inform the designer that the RTF property is bindable (only plain text is listed) there are a number of changes from the old ActiveX version that make it nearly impossible to use.

    For example, the following code will set the selected text to bold in the ActiveX version:

    RICHTEXTBOX.SELBOLD = TRUE

    Nice and simple isn’t it? Well, there is the C# equivalent:

    RichTextBox.SelectionFont = new Font(RichTextBox.SelectionFont, FontStyle.Bold);

    Did they really need to make it so much more difficult?

    And too add even more pain, the old method would simply bold the text and leave any other formatting alone (i.e. underline, italic, font face, etc). Not so any more. That C# code above will blow away anything previously set.

    So if someone could please find the big red undo button over there, I would appreciate it.

  • New Years Wish-List

    2 Comments

    Happy New Year Everyone!  Ok, so I’m a bit late… shoot me<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

    While everyone is still trying to keep up with their New Year resolutions I decided to forgo the entire process this year and instead focus on my technology wish list for 2004. I’ll accept that I’m as likely to see my wish-list come true as you are to stop eating the chocolate you resolved to give up. But as that didn’t stop you from making your resolutions, I’m not about to allow it to stop me from wishing away. :)

    ·         To have the C# team come to the realization that Edit & Continue is in fact not the devils playground. Maybe they don’t make typos but I sure do (some 10 in the post alone I bet). Having to restart the entire application to fix a single letter is a massive productivity killer. Edit & Continue, it is your friend.

    ·         For someone to finally unseal the ImageList component. Or at least implement the ImageList as an interface so we can develop our own. For those of us who build commercial apps with hundreds of windows this is a huge issue. Someone decides that the “New” icon should be changed and we spend the next week changing it in 99 places (yes, 99. Because we always forget to change one someplace).  Hell, think of the memory savings that could be had by only having a single global ImageList rather than 100 separate ones with 99% of the same images in them.

    ·         A real source code control system API. See that one that you have now? Give it too Frodo and send him to Mt. Doom right away. It is evil and needs to be destroyed. Source Code Control is the most overlooked aspect of software development and the poor API support provided by Visual Studio is doing nothing to help correct it.

    ·         Yukon by Q2

    ·         Someone to confirm that there will in fact be an MSDE version of Yukon. I always assumed so but someone pointed out that this has never been explicitly stated.

    ·         A [Replaced] attribute that goes one step beyond [Obsolete] in that it causes Visual Studio to automatically replace the old reference with the new reference. The best example is with property values persisted in the InitializeComponent method. When you
    ”Obsolete” a property Visual Studio doesn’t remove the old reference so you get a slew of compiler warnings that you must then delve into generated code to fix. This is even worse if you actually remove the property all together. It would be nice if the system could handle this automatically and use [Replaced(NewFunctionName)] to point to the new property.

    Any others I should add to my list?

  • Categories

    No Comments

    Sorry for the massive re-posting but I wanted to start using categories and it looks like the only way to do so it to repost everything.

  • Comments

    4 Comments

    Someone just told me that comments are not working (I tried it, sure seemed that way to me). So I guess no one can call me an idiot today then. :) 

  • Weird Visual Studio Problems

    2 Comments

    I am having some weird problems with Visual Studio lately.

    Here you are working on a window all happy and smiling. You go away from the designer for a second (to build, work on code, whatever) and when you come back things are missing. Big things like that grid you spent and hour on.

    And when I say missing, I only mean from the designer. The code for the objects still seems to be there and it is still listed in the properties box object list. And about 50% of the time you can close Visual Studio and reopen with everything back in place (that is assuming you didn’t compile or otherwise save mucked up version).

    Right now it happens about 15-20 times per day but sometimes it is much worse. And it doesn’t just happen to me, it happens everywhere. So I must be wasting at least two hours a day just waiting for Visual Studio to open and close. Yuk.

    Anyway, it just happened and I felt the need to vent. Thanks for listening.

    And if you have the fix for this, please send it!

  • Some Things Never Change

    5 Comments

    It has taken hundreds of millions of dollars and several billions man-hours to get to Longhorn. And what do I use it for?

     

    Like I said, some things never change.

  • Peter Coffee

    5 Comments

    Mr. Peter Coffee over at eWeek opined that developers should start writing software that knows what updates to some other company’s software might possible break our application at some point in the future. \

    I think Mr. Coffee has seen too many IBM commercials. He does know that there is no magic pixie dust right?

    Anyway, maybe I need to go see a woman about obtaining a crystal ball…..

  • Longhorn Presentation

    1 Comment

    I had the pleasure of attending a presentation on Longhorn at the Boston .NET User Group last night. I’m sure most of us left with more new questions than answers, but that is to be expected; it is a ways off after all. All-in-all it was worth sitting though, if just to get a glimpse of XAML, Avalon, and WinFS in action (WinFS flat out blew me away).

    There was one theme that dominated the questions however, “What parts of ‘Longhorn’ will be available to the old O/S group (XP and 2003)”. We already know that some things like Indigo will be made available (or at least some part of it), but what of the other technologies? No one seemed to have an answer for this one. With this question in mind I started searching for some sort of XP/2003/Longhorn Roadmap, but there doesn’t seem to be such a beast available. Maybe someone like Chris Sells or Robert Scoble would know about such things?