Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

I'm on a quest to answer the question: "Can Visual Studio .NET 2003 work with Visual SourceSafe 2005?" I'm learning some cool things about SourceSafe along the way, so the next few posts will probably be SourceSafe related.

The cardinals in the Vatican have picked a pope in 2 days and 3 votes. They'll announce who it is in about 45 minutes.

I fail to understand why Microsoft STILL insists on installing the J# runtime with Visual Studio. Why can't it be an option? Would it really be that hard to add a check box to the setup routine? I'm never going to use it. I'm never going to develop in it. Why do I have to go through the extra work of uninstalling it later?

I'll be in Redmond May 20-21 to judge the Imagine Cup 2005 Finals. I judged the regional and state competitions for Arizona last year, and I had a blast, so this should be fun. Of course, I'll be blogging from the event, complete with pictures and an interview with the winners.

I'm a big fan of ZipEnable, the utility that helps get more bang for your buck out of IIS6 compression. One of their sales guys told be that v3 should be finished by the end of the month. Hopefully this version will do a better job of compressing CommunityServer syndication feeds than v2.

Mark Bower tells us that MS signed off on the VS2005 Beta 2 bits last night. The official word is they'll be on MSDN "soon"... the build fairy tells me you'll see it anytime before next Wednesday.

Microsoft has finally updated the images and animations that are packaged with Visual Studio. In this MSDN TV Episode, Aaron Brethorst tells us about the Visual Studio 2005 Image Library. Thanks Microsoft!

While I was working on my Remote Desktop Assistant tool, I was getting really frustrated with the Registry. I couldn't bind registry values to a WinForm control, and it was a pain to manipulate when I needed to change a dozen or more entries. I also needed to access values by collection index, and a syntax like RegistryKey.Items("UserName").Value = "SomeUsername" would have been nice too. So I created a really small and simple API to solve those problems, and it's called RegistryPlus.