Roland Weigelt

Born to Code

  • Notepad3 vs. Notepad2, or The Spirit of Open Source

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    I already mentioned Notepad2 in a past blog post: It's a nice little free Notepad replacement that meets my requirements for a program that is similar to, but slightly better than the original, with a fast startup.

    That's why it makes me sad to read about what has happened to the author, Florian Balmer: Somebody took the (GPLed) source code of Notepad2, changed a few lines and released it as an "improved version" called Notepad3 to various download sites. In theory there's nothing wrong about this as the licensing conditions are met, but some kind of unpleasant aftertaste remains to put it mildly.

    Read the full story in a commentary by Florian titled The Spirit of Open Source.

  • PDC2008 - I'll be there!

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    The PDC has always been something special to me.

    In 2003 I was following the bloggers late at night in front of my computer here in Germany. Live blogging was fairly new back then and I can remember hitting F5 a thousand times as the news bits from the keynote came in.

    In 2005 I had an absolutely fantastic time in Los Angeles. Hey, I even had the opportunity to tell Anders Hejlsberg that raising events is too complicated in C# in my opinion (his reaction was "Yes, we thought about it, didn't find a solution that's best in all situations and in the end other things were more important"). And I got Brad Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina to sign my copy of the Framework Design Guidelines book during the power outage on the day of the precon.

    In 2007 I was all fired up to go and was incredibly disappointed when PDC2007 was cancelled.

    Yesterday my company (Comma Soft AG, we're hiring BTW) completed the process of registering me and two colleagues for PDC2008 and now it's "Los Angeles, I'm coming!". Wow, this has been a great week at work for me, after getting my new development machine (Q9450 Quad Core with 8GB of RAM, running Windows Server 2008) on Tuesday.

  • Usage of GhostDoc in Large Corporations

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    A message to all developers in large corporations out there: If you try/have to approve the usage of GhostDoc because of company policy, you may get the response that legal problems prohibit the usage as no agreement could be reached with the author (i.e. me). To avoid the impression that I'm trying to rip off your company in any way, I'd like to explain this:

    If a company approaches me asking whether the usage of GhostDoc is allowed for commercial purposes, I point them to the license which clearly states that this is the case. If company policy still requires an explicit statement regarding commercial use, I don't have any problem with that, either.

    But: I will not sign any multi-page legalese for a piece of software that I didn't actively offer, let alone try to sell to a company in the first place. If my freeware license is not compatible with company policy, then that's unfortunate, but it's nothing I will do anything about - sorry.

  • Vortrag "GUI-Design für Nicht-Designer" in Koblenz

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    Am Mittwoch, 28. Mai 2008 bin ich bei der .NET Developer Group Koblenz zu Gast, wo ich ab 19:00 einen Vortrag mit dem Titel "GUI-Design für Nicht-Designer" halten werde.

    Der Vortrag richtet sich u.a. an jene Entwickler, die von sich behaupten überhaupt keine Ahnung von GUI-Design zu haben. Die werden durch den Vortrag natürlich nicht automatisch zu perfekten GUI-Gestaltern, aber wenn man ein paar Grundregeln kennt, ist es gar nicht so schwer, zu einer durchaus brauchbaren grafischen Oberfläche zu gelangen.

    In den Beispielen zeige ich GUIs mit Windows Forms, insgesamt geht es aber relativ wenig um konkrete Technologien, sondern eher darum zu lernen, Anwendungen aus der Sicht der Benutzer zu betrachten. Dabei kläre ich u.a. was zugekniffene Augen und Fluchtreflexe mit Usability zu tun haben.

  • Blog Posts are now tagged by Language

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    As the number of my blog posts in German language has increased in recent time, I have decided to tag all posts with either "English" or "Deutsch", depending on the language.

    My blogging language for technical posts will remain English, I just want to give those living outside Germany a chance to avoid my announcements of events, availability of slides, etc.