Author Archive

Apple released a developer preview for the new Xcode 4. In many ways its just catching up to Visual Studio but the new Jump Bar looks very useful.

All Apple needs now is a VM and maybe even a new language.

The latest post by Josh Smith gave me a chuckle: The MVVM Twilight Zone

The background

There is a saying that a piece of data does not exist unless there are three copies of that data. I have always agreed with that principle, but always came short of actually adhering to it. I used local backup solutions to make two copies of my data, but making that third copy was always deferred for later. Well in part because its been sitting in my OmniFocus todo list, my vacation starting this week, and also being inspired by Lab49 colleague Martin Harris’s post Diary of a cloud backup I have finally decided to make that third copy with a offline backup solution. Lets first see what the current setup looks like.  Read more...

Dominique Leca for UX Magazine in The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover describes the challenges in redesigning the Bloomberg terminal. The basic gist of the article being that Bloomberg users do not want a more efficient experience and have locked-in to Bloomberg’s complex interface to maintain a status. The article is worth reading especially since it links to IDEOs proposed redesign from 2007.  Read more...

Modern software programming paradigms and styles introduce layers and abstractions which divide functionality into multiple fragments of code. You no longer have monolithic codebases in which a programmer only needs to deal with only a few code files at a time.

I just ran into the Code Bubbles project, which abstracts aways the file and exposes code and documentations as arrangeable code bubbles on a expandable canvas. Its an interesting idea worth exploring and experimenting with.

Probably will need to check out the beta and play with it a bit.

About a week ago, I forever set my gmail settings to forward all my email to my personal mail account. I will no longer be using Gmail as an email interface for a number of reasons:  Read more...

Sometimes I find myself wishing that the name of the solution that you are currently in, is displayed along with the name of the project and file in the window title of Visual Studio .NET. This becomes more important when I am working with multiple solutions and I want to quickly switch between them use alt-tab.

After failing to find a solution after googling for a VS option or VS Addin that provides this functionality, I decided to roll my own. This is how I did it:  Read more...

Some useful Visual Studio Tips from the The top ten most visited tips blog on MSDN.

I particulary find useful the tip on the Find Combo Box. The Find Combo Box may be used a a mini Command Window so you can do something like:
1. Ctrl-D
Keyboard shortcut to get to the Find Combo Box.
2. > open [file]
Open any file in the current solution. The great thing is that intellisense works here for completing the filename.

Standardization is underway for the next version of C . The C comittee is hoping the standard is completed by 2009 thus giving us C 09.

Bjarne Stroustrup the father of C has a sneak peek of the upcoming features of the next version here.

It looks like the new C will make generic programming simpler to use. The new C will have “concepts” which are similiar to the where clause in C#. Concepts specifies the properties required of a type in a template specification. More information can be found in the article above.  Read more...

Martin Fowler has an interesting blog entry introducing Fluent Interfaces.

A thousand feet view of Fluent Interfaces is that it makes development in general purpose object oriented languages look more like programming in a natural language. Or more specifically more domain specific and “fluent”.

This is something that may gain popularity in the future, as the development community tries to minimize complexity in software development. Developing in the language of the domain focuses development on the domain logic and away from the machinery of the underlying technologies used to develop the application.  Read more...

I will now tell you a tale of exception handling in .NET 1.1. Be warned my fellow travelers that the road is long and treacherous, and unfortunately does not have a happy ending. May this serve as a warning for you travelers who need to deal with .NET, unmanaged code, threads, and exceptions.

So I am writing this Windows Forms application with the .NET Framework 1.1. The Windows Forms Application reads messages from MSMQ (Microsoft Message Queue). And on a ReceiveCompleted event handler I update some model objects with the data read from the message. Simple enough if everything goes right. If everything goes wrong on the other hand, it will lead you deep into issues beyond your control, and will leave you scratching your head in disbelief.  Read more...

Lets say you are developing multiple ASP.NET web sites on your Windows XP development box. And two distinct websites place pages on the root of the website. No problem you say, just create another site in IIS. Unfortunately MS disabled the ability to create other sites in the IIS snapin in Windows XP. Are you out of luck? No, because you can create sites in IIS. Just not from the IIS snapin. Follow these instructions below to do so:

Run the following from the command prompt:
C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>adsutil.vbs create_vserv W3SVC/2
C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts>adsutil.vbs copy W3SVC/1 W3SVC/2  Read more...