The simple task of washing clothes...

I had a bit of an exciting thing happen on the weekend. Something that has left me marveling at the wonders of technology.

It all started when my lovely wife asked me to put on a load of washing. This is something that I have done many, many times before. Just like many of those times, I forgot to do something that really drives my wife crazy, I forgot to clean out the pockets of my work clothes..

I'm sure you are now wondering why I am telling you this. The answer is quite simple..I LEFT MY USB THUMB DRIVE IN MY PANTS. Not only that, I didn't actually notice until I pulled my pants out of the clothes dryer.

The end result of all this actually surprised me. After a complete wash cycle and 2 and a half hours in the clothes dryer, it still works.

IE7 for WinXP

Wow... I was just surfing over at channel9 when I stumbled across an announcement about IE7. Looks like we are getting the long awaited update for IE before longhorn is released.

I wonder what new features we will be getting? Is this limited to security updates and bug fixes, or are we likely to get new features that will revelutionise the way we browse

Partnering with Customers

Development is a costly game. Something that allot of small businesses cannot easily afford. Yet these same small businesses are usually the ones that can benefit most from a system that reduces running costs. What is the solution for this?

Something that I am starting to offer some of my smaller clients. Reduced development costs, for a share in the profits. A partnership if you like.

This on the surface seems to have a few extra advantages.
First of all, if a project really hits the mark, the potential return is greater than the lost income of the initial development. This is good, gut it is also a risk. A risk of lost income if the system fails.

However there is another advantage to an arrangement like this. Clients (business partners) end up being allot more trusting. They tend to allow the developers to make more technical decisions, simply because they also have a stake in the risk.

Is this something that is becoming common in the industry?
Is this a way for an independent software developer to secure a more stable income?

Hit me on the comments, Let me know your thoughts

Security Summit

It's 9:20pm, and I just got back home after a day at the security summit. What a day.

During the day, I managed to catch up with Geoff Appleby and a few other familiar faces. The sessions where awsome, Prashant (I hope that's the correct spelling) doing his Team Systems presentations, Andrew Coates (Click Once Deployment) and Greg Low (Sql Server).

After soaking up all the geeky information I could handle for the day, it was off to King O'Malleys for a few quiet drinks. What a turnout. Darren, Mitch, Geoff, Andrew, Greg and a few other all turned up, and much geek talk happened....

Anyway, It's time for some sleep now, because tomorrow it's back to real work...

I can see my house from here

A friend of mine sent me this link. Anyway, I found my house, I can see my boat, trampoline and yellow wheelie bin...

There is a god!

Well, maybe not. But at last there is this.

For those who don't want to follow the link, the guys over in Redmond have finally solved "The Designer ate my controls" problem. They are going to be releasing a patch for VS.NET 2003, and will also fix the problem in VS 2005 (Whidbey).

This has got to be one of the most annoying bugs of all time.

OMG

I was just reading a blog entry from Geoff Appleby which
contained a link to the new/changed language features in VB.NET. Now as a C#
man, I have kept fairly up to date with all the new features for C#, but I
thought why not see what is coming for VB.NET.

Anyway, while looking at some of the changes, I stumbled across this, which
basically allows a developer to explicitly define the lower bounds of an array
as 0.

Below is an example:

Public Sub declarelowerbounds()

    Dim monthtotal(0 To 11) As Double

    Dim cell(0 To 39, 0 To 19) As Integer

    MsgBox("Total number of elements:" _

        & vbCrLf & "monthtotal (0 To 11) length " & CStr(monthtotal.Length) _

        & vbCrLf & "cell (0 To 39, 0 To 19) length " & CStr(cell.Length))

End Sub

Underneath this example was a little note:

"The lower bound must always be 0, but your code can be more readable
when you explicitly declare it. Specifying both bounds also reminds the reader
that the lower bound is 0."

After picking myself up off the ground, I actually read the whole article,
and it does actually state that this feature is to improve code readability.

I can only imagine that this has been added to VB.Net in order to appease the
masses, I just wonder how long until people start to complain about not being
able to specify a non-zero lower bound..

Disclaimer: Although most of my development is done in C#,
I still do have a few side projects that use VB.Net.

Killing a Process

I was surfing over at channel 9 when I stumbled across an entry where someone was requesting a new method for killing processes. This is what they are suggesting.

I for one would love something like this.. Not as the main tool for controlling processes and the like, but it would be nice :)

Evil... I thought I was just misunderstood..

After seeing how evil (or not) Darren, Mitch and Geoff, I figured I had to set things straight..
I got 57% evil.. That explains some things.. I guess I need to work a little harder :)

Yay for me

Just before Christmas I got a pleasant surprise. One of the local Telstra shops managed to get their hands on a iMate PDA2K EVDO. I very quickly snapped it up.

This lovely device runs over the CDMA network, which meant dropping my existing GSM plan, and taking the plunge. I ended up taking a data only plan.

Now all I need to do is test how well skype will run. Hopefully I can ditch making voice calls all together and use skype with skypeout make traditional landline calls.. Here is hoping it will all work out.

Paint.NET

Here I was reading slashdot this morning, when I cam accross a link to Paint.NET.

Paint.NET is a graphics editor designed to replace MSPaint. Best of all, it's built using C# and the .NET Framework 1.1, and it's free.

Think gimp, but with a nicer user interface. I think I've found a new tool for my desktop, especially for touching up red eye.

Telstra Problems

My recent dealings with telstra (the telstra shop to be exact) has left me somewhat confused.

See, I've been waiting for a few months for the arrival of the iMate PDA2k EVDO. After the official Australian launch, I popped into my local telstra shop and asked if they had it in. The simple answer was no, and they had no idea when it would start to ship. However, they did put my name in their special book and promised to call me. That was a few months ago.

A little over three weeks ago I got a phone call, as expected, to let me know that the PDA2k EVDO had arrived and was now shipping. Unfortunately I was busy at work, and unable to get into the telstra shop for 3 days. And this is where my problem really begins. See, Telstra shop underestimated the popularity of these devices, and had already sold out. So I asked if they could order in another one for me... "No sir, we can't do that. We just get the phones shipped to us. How about we give you a call when they come in." was the reply.

Last Friday I got fed up with the wait, so I popped in to the Telstra Shop once again, and they still have not received any new phones. It turns out that they have absolutely no idea when they will get more phones in. As it turns out, the telstra shops do not place orders for phones, they just magically turn up, and then they sell them. So, I have to wait until they turn up magically.

I think it's time the Telstra Shop (telstra owned and franchised) need to have a good look at their internal systems, because if any other business ran the same way, they would not last very long.

Anyway, back to the waiting game....

VS2005

Just read somasegar's blog, looks like the VS Dev team are really getting a wiggle on with Beta 2.
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/11/28/271395.aspx

I for one cannot wait..

Partial Classes

Partial Classes are a new feature of Visual Studio 2005. Basically they allow you to spread code across multiple code files. I have heard a lot of criticism about partial classes, mainly the whole "If you need partial classes then your class is too big".. Not so.

A good use for partial classes is with typed datasets. A lot of developers I have talked to use typed datasets for all of there Business Objects. The only problem is when you modify the database, then re-generate the typed datasets, any custom code is lost. By having the additional code defined in a separate file, this problem can now be avoided.

My only complaint with partial classes actually has to do with the functionality of visual studio 2005, more than partial classes themselves. My development team has a standard in place, where developers are required to use Overrides where possible instead of events. An example of this is using OnLoad override instead Form.Load event. Now, when you double click on a form in VS.NET 2k5, VS automatically creates a Form.Load event handler. In VB.NET, all you have to do is delete the actual event handler and all is fine. C# is a different matter. Not only do you now have to delete the actual Callback method, you now have to locate the "Hidden by Default" partial class containing all the designer code and remove the declaration for the Event Handler.

I actually dropped by the VS beta site http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/ and left a suggestion to allow the user to override the action performed when double clicking, but unfortunately I was told it was too late in the development process to look at that.. Hopefully we will see a change in Orcas??

Write Only Properties?

I was recently going through a colleagues code and noticed that in several places he had added write only properties. i.e. Set without a Get

In this case, he just happened to be a little on the lazy side, but it got me wondering, how often do people actually need to use write only properties. What are the reasons for having them?

The only possible thing I can think of would be security (all be it very limited), but surely there would be very few places where this sort of functionality is required.

I'm interested to hear other peoples feedback on this.

A new Addition

Last wednesday saw the arrival of the latest addition to my little family, Alisha Jay de Bear.
Now the tally sits at 1 wife, 2 girls, 0 boys. I feel the odds are stacked against me :)

Back where we started?

Yesterday a bug was uncovered in an old application what was written in VB6. The bug had to do with forms not being unloaded because of some of the nice features in VB6. I'm talking about the Global Forms collection and the Default Form Instances.

Both of these features where useful, but lead to a large and dangerous group of people who produced a lot of bad, buggy software.

Until this recent event I was very impartial to the fact that the VB.NET dev team decided to re-introduce the Default Form instances into whidbey. Now I'm not so sure.

Are we going to end up with hoards of ex VB6 developers writing apps in VB.NET using the default form instance. I think yes.

I suspect the real reason behind this decision is to make the transition of VB6 developers to .NET a little easier. I think however, that we could well end up with many of the old habits that proved to be a problem in VB6 reappearing in VB.NET. This in turn could easily lead to VB.NET regaining the old stigma of VB6 in the general development community.

I for one am more than a little worried.

Yay

I finally got my wireless network card working on my laptop..

Who would have thought that just changing the slot the network card was in would fix my troubles...

Maybe I need to get my laptop checked.. :(

Oh well, at least I can now blog from in front of the TV..

COM Interop, the not so easy way

I have just read yet another article on msdn about how easy it is to create a .NET assembly that is callable via COM. It is really easy...
Now for my complaint... I have not seen a single article from msdn that actually goes into details of how to make sure that you .NET assembly maintains it's binary compatibility when you recompile...
Top that off with the wonderful CodeBase registry key that .NET puts in for you, and you will spend hours trying to debug deployment of you com component.

This article was just posed up on the MSDN site, it's yet another sample that shows how easy com is, yet it still misses all of the really important bits of information...
Visual Basic Developer Center: Database Developer Corner: Calling

Keep an eye on this space for more information on COM Interop..

Until next time...

This is cool

I was just browsing around on the VS.NET 2005 Beta site, when I cam across something really interesting. The Online MSDN library for the beta has been setup to make finding help really easy. Give this a try:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/library/System.Windows.Forms.aspx

It works for any namespace/class in the beta...

I really hope they keep this after release..