Making it happen
Archive for October, 2005
New software
Oct 25th
As you can see (well, not you that use the rss), I’ve changed the software for my blog to Community Server. The installation was a pain and in the end I had to revert to asp.net 1.1 for it to run, although it appeared to work almost with 2.0 but threw “access denied” when getting into the administration subsystem. While I had the idea to write some a quick vb tool for migrating the .Text database to CS, I found this tool that made it.
Now, some improvements I’ve seen:
Visual C++ add-ins
Oct 21st
Which ones do you use ? I can’t live without Window Tabs (too bad they don’t update it anymore) and Visual Assist (I remember some time ago I was very reticent of using it – considering the real Visual C++ coders don’t need such tools). Well, in the *very* beginning I was working with IntelliSence disabled also, based on the same arguments 
.
C# Generics
Oct 20th
I found a very nice feature of generics in C# 2.0: you can enforce the template type to be a class and also to be derived from another class / interface:
public abstract class VRCollectionNode
So using the “where” keyword you can add contraints to the T type (here: to be derived from VRNode).
Canon
Oct 18th
As I couldn’t find Canon SDK (required for digital camera usage) for download, I have just started reverse-engineering the DLL interfaces. Currently I’m sticking SDK code pieces from the net as posted by people that had problems with it .
MFC Grid
Oct 18th
I’ve hacked again the well-known MFC grid because I didn’t get the virtual mode to work with the tree control (as you know, the tree control attaches to the grid and enables dynamic row hiding). So it’s far easier to store the required data a hidden cell field and then modifying the GetText() cell method to dynamically get the needed text.
Next-gen Microsoft technology
Oct 18th
I got some insight on Microsoft’s next technologies during a developer conference they have held around here. Following is a short brief on what they presented, as my comments will be available afterwards and more detailed.
– Visual Studio 2005 (I’m very interested in this as it will be my primary development tool – lots of innovations here, mostly all are already in the Beta 2 I am using)
– Visual Studio Team System – this definitely rocks, it generates a portal for managing the product (with bug-tracking, project management and source-safe functionalities included, also it even has settings for the project management methodologies like agile or planned)
– Visual Tools for Office (or something like that, basically you can do .net apps embedded in an word/excel document, like VBA but way nicer)
– SQL Server 2005 – I liked the new Management Studio but otherwise the new features are sql extensions for tasks like accessing web services and so on – things that shouldn’t be done from sql server
– Windows Communication Foundation – pretty boring stuff, I hope I won’t have the chance to work with it
– Windows Workflow Foundation – this idea was cool but until now I didn’t have the need of using workflows in my designs (I actually thought about this pattern before, but, as I said, didn’t implement it because there was no need for it)
– Windows Presentation Foundation – here we didn’t got info on the next DirectX but rather XAML only, not very detailed though as the conference was finishing. All the “Foundation” components will be included in Vista.
Of course, the interesting and cool stuff will have more details coming.
Bird flu on … Slashdot
Oct 17th
Here. Between lots of high-tech news and geeky stuff. Well, this is news subject number one here in Romania and that’s why I couldn’t stop laughing when finding it also on Slashdot.
Internal blogging for software projects
Oct 17th
Where I’m working I find it pretty successfully (that’s my opinion though … I’m sure the client’s opinion is the one that matters ) – anyway I highly recommend communicating with the customer using a blog specifically for this.
