Roland Weigelt

Am 17./18.10.2009 findet in Leipzig der .NET Open Space 2009 statt. Dabei handelt es sich um eine “Unkonferenz”, also eine Veranstaltung, bei der es keine feste Rollenaufteilung Sprecher / Zuhörer wie bei traditionellen Entwicklerkonferenzen gibt.

Kann so etwas funktionieren? Die positiven Erfahrungen des ersten .NET Open Space 2008 in Leipzig und des Ablegers .NET Open Space Süd 2009 in Ulm zeigen eindeutig: Ja!

Anmeldung und weitere Infos auf http://netopenspace.de/

Nachdem es letztes Jahr bei mir nicht geklappt hat, werde ich dieses Jahr auch in Leipzig sein und mich dort wohl viel im Arbeitsbereich User Interfaces und User Experience herumtreiben.

As I wrote in an update to my “The Future of GhostDoc” blog post, the uninstaller of GhostDoc 2.1.3 contains a bug which (under specific circumstances) may lead to losing your Visual Studio settings – I’m really sorry about that.

In the days after the first SubMain release in May (version 2.5.09150) I have helped the guys from SubMain in developing a working uninstaller for old GhostDoc versions, which is now included in the setup of the current GhostDoc version 2.5.09166 (published mid-June, though the website has been only updated recently).

So the “right way” to upgrade from an old “Weigelt” GhostDoc version (up to 2.1.3) to a new “SubMain” GhostDoc version (starting with 2.5.09166) is:

• DO NOT uninstall Weigelt GhostDoc
• Just run the SubMain GhostDoc setup

Everything else will be taken care of. Future updates (from one version of SubMain GhostDoc to another) also involve just running the installer of the new version.

Today is the day that I'm finally able to speak about why things have been pretty quiet lately regarding the future of GhostDoc.

I'm happy to announce GhostDoc has been acquired by SubMain, developer of tools like CodeIt.Right. The agreement covers the usage of GhostDoc's documentation generation technology in their products, as well as the availability of GhostDoc as a standalone product. SubMain will continue to maintain and distribute a non-crippled version of GhostDoc free of charge, and will make sure that it will work with future versions of Visual Studio like the upcoming VS2010. The first step is a new version 2.5 of GhostDoc that has been released just moments ago.

For more information please take a look at a Q&A with Serge Baranovsky from SubMain and me that covers past, present and future of GhostDoc.

As I already mentioned in the Q&A, from my experiences of working with the guys at SubMain (both on the legal and the technical stuff), I can say that GhostDoc is in good hands. The developers now have my issue tracking database where I collected and annotated all the feature requests of the recent years, but I also would like to ask every GhostDoc user to please let them know if you have ideas how to improve this tool.

I'd like to use this opportunity to say a big Thank You to all GhostDoc users out their for their (overwhelmingly positive) feedback over the recent years. Thank You!
 

Update: Important note for existing GhostDoc users
There are uninstall issues with the old GhostDoc version 2.1.3 (and versions before) that under specific circumstances may lead to losing your Visual Studio settings on Vista machines. I'm already working on a solution to the problem (with help from one of the SubMain developers), in the meantime please back up your settings as described in this step-by-step guide before uninstalling the old GhostDoc version. During uninstallation, if a Visual Studio instance pops up and asks you to choose a developer profile, choose one and continue. This will lead to the loss of the settings, which then can be restored by importing the backup you just made before. Note that you have to choose a profile; cancelling the dialog will lead to a corrupted state of the uninstallation.

The new GhostDoc from SubMain is using different install/uninstall/VS integration technology that has been proven in their other products and does not have such problems.

Update 2: Please read this blog post on upgrading to GhostDoc 2.5 and later.

Die Chance, eine XBox zu gewinnen, lasse ich mir natürlich nicht entgehen, daher hier meine persönliche Top-3 Liste der Entwicklertools:

• JetBrains ReSharper hat es mit gewissen Anlaufschwierigkeiten (Tests von früheren Versionen hinterließen bei mir z.T. einen zwiespältigen Eindruck) nun in der Version 4.5 auf Anhieb in die Top-3 geschafft.
   
• .NET Reflector braucht man einfach immer wieder, sollte daher auf jeder Entwickler-Maschine installiert sein.
   
• SonicFileFinder dient zum schnellen Suchen von Dateien in Visual Studio und schlägt dabei die in ReSharper eingebaute Funktionalität.

Erwähnenswert ist natürlich Visual Studio, das aber nicht in der Top-3 Liste ist, weil man es für Entwickler eigentlich schon zum Betriebssystem zählen kann ;-)

Ein erstaunlich reibungsloser Ablauf, sehr positives Feedback von Teilnehmern, Sprechern und Sponsoren – alles in allem war die dotnet Cologne 2009, eine Community-Konferenz für WPF und Silverlight, für mich als Co-Organisator zwar eine anstrengende, aber auch sehr befriedigende Angelegenheit.

Die Konferenz war eine Gemeinschaftsproduktion der von Albert Weinert geleiteten .net user group Köln und der von mir geleiteten Bonner Gruppe Bonn-to-Code.Net, die im Januar zu diesem Zweck den dotnet Köln/Bonn e.V. gegründet hatten, mit Stefan Lange als erstem Vorsitzenden. An dieser Stelle sei auch die Mithilfe von Stefan Lieser und Jan Welker sowie unserer Helfer vor Ort (Janine Gollub, Carla Hein und Alberts Vater) erwähnt. Ein großer Dank gilt natürlich unseren Sprechern und Sponsoren, nicht zuletzt Microsoft mit großartiger Unterstützung. Ein ganzer Tag mit zwei Tracks, 11 Sessions, Freigetränken und einem umfangreichen Mittagessen für nur 15,- Euro wäre ohne sie nicht möglich gewesen.

Es war nur ein wenig schade, dass wir frühzeitig Opfer unseres Erfolgs wurden und für die Anmeldung rund einen Monat vor dem Termin eine Warteliste einrichten mussten. So mussten wir leider vielen Interessenten absagen und für die 160 Teilnehmer vor Ort wurde es hier und da stellenweise etwas “kuschelig”.

Für das nächste Jahr – eine dotnet Cologne 2010 ist bereits fest ins Auge gefasst – werden wir in Bezug auf die Räumlichkeiten unsere Möglichkeiten ausloten, wobei der diesjährige Ort (die Microsoft-Niederlassung am Kölner Rheinufer) in vielerlei Hinsicht schon sehr attraktiv war.

Hier noch ein paar Impressionen:

Edit 2009-05-02: After a bit more fiddling around, things look a bit different now. Edits are inline and at the bottom of this post.

When I tried the Beta of Windows 7 a few months ago, the changed behavior of the Start Menu Search caught my eye immediately:

• Imagine you just installed Paint.NET on your machine
• You press the Windows key, and start typing “paint”.
• The start menu will present you “Paint” (for the Paint.exe that comes with Windows) and “Paint.NET”.
• In Vista, if you choose Paint.NET and start it, the next time you press the Windows key and type “paint”, the entry “Paint.NET” will be at the top. A nice feature, that even my dad picked up immediately. In his case the paint program he wants to start is “Corel Paint Shop Pro”. He doesn’t care about the company name or the exact name of the program – it’s the “paint thingy” he wants to start, and Windows key, “paint”, Enter does the job.
• Windows 7 knows better, though. Search results are always shown in the same order (Edit: things are a bit more complicated than that. search results are in fact handled like in Vista with the exception of shortcuts pointing to Windows programs. These are always shown at the top of the results. That’s why Paint.Net couldn’t move up in the result list). Maybe it’s about consistency and avoiding mistakes by people who don’t look at the result list before they press Enter. But frankly I don’t care. Giving me a wonderful feature in Windows Vista and taking it away in Windows 7 is plain cruel.

I posted a feedback (see note regarding the link) to the Connect website regarding this, but didn’t get any reaction from Microsoft (not surprising, considering the amount of feedback they must have gotten).

Now I’ve just installed Windows 7 RC and unfortunately the behavior still is different from Vista. So if there isn’t some setting which I didn’t see at first glance to restore the old behavior, if the code was even ripped out or disabled completely, then chances are pretty slim to see the Vista behavior back again (it’s an RC after all). This is so frustrating. Please somebody tell me that there’s a registry hack…

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Edit 2009-05-01: It may be that you have to be a member of the Connect program to be able to view the feedback when clicking the link.

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Edit 2009-05-02: I’ve now experimented some more with the Start Menu Search. I created 4 shortcuts in the start menu named “Company Product (A)”, “Company Product (B)”, “Company Product (C)” and “Company Product (D)”, with the last pointing to “C:\Windows\Notepad.exe” (the others pointing to programs somewhere below “C:\Program Files”).

After typing “product” in the search box, the default order of the entries was D, A, B, C. Entry D took first place because it pointed to Notepad.exe, a Windows program.

Then I started the program with the shortcut ““Company Product (C)” a couple of times and the resulting order of the entries was D, C, A, B. So entry C moved up, but couldn’t beat entry A.

Now comes the strange part: I created a shortcut named “Network” and typed “net” in the search box. The result: Paint.NET at the top of the list (from my previous experiments), then the shortcut I just created, followed by Windows’ “Connect to a Network Projector” and at last position “Network” (the Windows one). Strange. Next I typed “Network” in the search box, chose the Windows Network, and repeated this a couple of times. The result: My own “Network” shortcut still stayed at the top, the “Network” of Windows stayed at last position. There may be certain hidden logic behind this, but for a user it’s way too confusing.

People around me have been huge ReSharper fans for quite a while, but it took me until ReSharper 4.1 to actually give it a try. So I played around with it, liked the features and – uninstalled it after a few weeks.

I can almost hear the uproar of ReSharper fans “how dare you? This is like going back to writing code with Notepad!”. But honestly, version 4.1 did get on my nerves. I was constantly reminded that I had ReSharper installed, unfortunately in a bad way. Visual Studio simply didn’t “feel right” anymore in terms of performance. One of the many things that nagged me was that starting a new instance of Visual Studio for opening a solution always took a considerable amount of time.

ReSharper 4.5 is a different story, though. Of course, certain features need a certain amount of CPU and I/O power, that’s a natural fact. Of course there’s still a slight delay here and there compared to a naked Visual Studio.

And when opening a solution by starting a new VS instance, ReSharper is “cheating” a little my making its features available only after a few seconds. But that’s perfectly fine with me – when I open a solution I usually need some time to look around a bit before doing actual work, time that ReSharper can use for initialization. That’s much better than making me wait until I can even decide whether I opened the right solution.

After a full day of coding on two C# solutions that with 4.1 installed made everything feel rather sluggish all in all, I can say that now with 4.5 installed I never thought about going back to a Visual Studio without ReSharper. And now that I’m not constantly thinking about performance, I finally can enjoy the many nice features of ReSharper.

Indeed, if you’re not a ReSharper user, now is a very good time to give it a try!

Wow, das ging schnell – da lässt man sich ein klein wenig Zeit mit dem Schreiben eines Blog-Eintrags um die Community Konferenz für WPF und Silverlight zu bewerben, und schon muss man sich sputen, damit er nicht überflüssig wird!

Die Veranstaltung findet am 15. Mai 2009 in der Microsoft-Niederlassung in Köln statt und wird von den .NET User Groups aus Köln und Bonn organisiert.

Hier kurz die Fakten:

• 1 Tag
• 2 Tracks
• 12 Sessions
• 15,- Euro (inkl. Verpflegung)

Und jetzt schnell anmelden, denn die Teilnehmerzahl geht stetig der durch das Platzangebot gesetzten Grenze von 170 Personen entgegen!

Aktuelle Infos auch auf Twitter unter http://www.twitter.com/dotnetCologne, das offizielle Hashtag ist #dnc09