Is it really that simple

Working in the Apps dev space, you quiet often get issued with bugs and feature requests that users expect to be very easy to fix. As a general rule of thumb, I attempt to fix anything the user wants as long as it fits within the scope/budget for the project. As with everything though, quiet often a bug/request will be issued that is actually a lot bigger and more complicated than it initially appears.. And this brings me to something I've been sitting on, thinking about for a few weeks..

Over on CodingHorror is a post about a "bug/feature request" that seems to have been made into a big issue. It's a request to have the Windows Forms designer automatically default the forms font to Segoe... On the surface of this, its a pretty simple request...

The problem for me is that i use VS2008 and target Win XP AND Vista.. Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that Segoe is actually present on the target machine, and I'm not too sure if I'm actually allowed to distribute the font (I'm guessing I can't..).. This raises an interesting problem.. Windows Forms doesn't deal very well with automatic resizing. It can be done, but requires a lot of extra work, and because of this, I don't want to use Sagoe and risk the target machine picking the next best font..


Sure, there are options available, like having project settings determine the font.. i.e. a "Vista Only" option, but personally I think that allowing the users to just select the font they want works best..

Anyways, back to the grind...

I'm excited

At times, working in the IT industry seems to be a little slow, dull and much the same as the previous day. this has been the case lately with the media continuing to blast Microsoft over Vista. Everywhere you turn, there are complaints, "10 reasons why x is better than Vista" and any other thing you can possibly imagine.

As for me, I've had no major issues with Vista, I use it to work, i use it to play, and for the most part, it works.. Sure, there are one or two little things that I may think need improving, but that's the same for any OS..

But, I guess back to the topic, and that its the reason for my excitement.. The last few days have reminded me exactly why I love this industry. Here's why:

Tuesday I started a new Job, and we also started to get information flowing in from PDC2008. The big news items, well, here they are:

• Details on Windows 7 have started flooding in, it's Vista but it's better..
• The Announcement of Windows Azure.. Yep, the cloud computing OS
• And Office on the Web

I'm not going to go into details of each and every feature here, but there are a lot. I guess what I'm more interested in is the fact that a company who, according to the press is "struggling" to provide such wide ranging announcements and to even get a lot of positive feedback from folk who have been very critical of late.

I can't wait to get my hand on some of this.

Silverlight 2.0 Released

The title says it all.. And here's the link to the announcement. For me, this is what I've been waiting for, Silverlight 1 was nice, but lacked a lot of features that I personally believe were required to make it useful beyond media streaming and basic flash type apps.. Silverlight 2.0 brings in everything I need as a developer to really start pushing it for internal business apps developement.. Yay!!!

Current Reading List

I thought I'd just put up a quick post of my current reading list. So, here it is:

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
The God Delusion
Fish!

I don't know why, but I quite often find myself reading a few books at the same time.. Maybe I need to learn to focus a little more ;)

w00t

I just read over on Mitch's blog about some new features that are going to be included into the next release of TFS Power Tools. Each of these new features looks awesome, but one caught my eye in particular that I personally can't wait too see. that feature is the new Team Members folder. Not only will this allow you too visually see who is in your project team, but it will also provide integration with your *IM client for presence, notification and vital communication functionality.

I'm all for collaboration, and any tools that help me communicate better with team members is a win in my books.

*If your IM client supports it..

VS2010 & .Net 4.0

W00t, just a quick post to link up the announcement of Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net Framework 4.0. Here's the link

Oh yeah, just a quick wish on the collaboration side.. I want to be able to have multiple people working on a diagram at the same time.. Think of it like collaborative "white boarding" but.. well.. not on a whiteboard.. I know that there are a million tools available for basic whiteboard sharing, but they all ultimately end up requiring one person to convert it into UML/DML etc.. I'd just like to take the middle man (or format) out of the picture..

Can't wait too see where this all goes..

IE8 Beta 2

Most people by now are probably aware the IE8 beta 2 has been released. In my last post, I quickly touched on Ubiquity, and it's interesting too see that other people also believe that Accelerators (the feature formally know as Activities) goes a way to providing the same functionality, seems some people do get it.

Besides this, there are many other features that IE has been needing for a while. The biggest as far as I'm concerned is InPrivate, closely followed by the work done on performance (speed increase, memory usage etc).

Unfortunately I won't get a good chance to get my hands dirty until later today, but I'm sure looking forward to getting IE8 beta 2 running on my machine at home.

What a tool!

I was just over at Scobleizer and stumbled across his latest post about ubiquity. Somewhere in the post, he starts to talk about people who "get it" and people who don't. Or as he puts it, passionates and non-passionates.

His rant goes on about people who won't be bothered reading the instruction manual and watch the training video, and because of this, only passionate people will use it.

Now, I think ubiquity is a nice concept rolled up into a geeky, non-usable form. Blaming users for not wanting to learn what is in effect a command line for the browser seems to be a bit off the mark. If you actually spend the time to even read the first page about ubiquity, it talks about providing the "Verbs" (actions) on context menus. This is where the future is. It provides the features you need where people don't have to remember all the possible things they can do.

So, I can understand someone which passion getting excited about ubiquity, but taking an elitest stand and saying that it's no good for anybody else is just a complete load of crap as far as I'm concerned. I think maybe a bit of critisism about the form it's been delivered in is probably a better approach to take than bagging people who prefer to use the mouse than type commands into a black window.

An example of what I think would work, is based on what is provided on the ubiquity page.

The scenario: A typo on a blog (ironic that this post probably has typos too..).. They highlight some spelling mistake on a web page and use ubiquity to highlight by typing in the highlight command. The next step is to select a larger amount of text with the highlighted part to give more context of where the mistake is. They then type into ubiquity "email too xxx".. This opens gmail and starts a new email filled with the selected text and the Send To address filled in.

How I think it should work:
Select the typo and right click. Select actions->Highlight.
Select more text and right click. Select actions->Email

This is what IE8 does through activities. The difference, it's not done in a non-user friendly way using a command line tool.

Anyway, time to stop ranting... Ubiquity is a nice tool, I just think it's not quite ready for normal users.

WPF Datagrid CTP

Well, for anybody who managed to miss the news, Microsoft have just released the CTP for the WPF Datagrid.. It requires the .Net Framework 3.5 sp1, but that's just a small little update...

Anyways, so far the best link I've found for it is here. So take a look and have fun..

*Just a little side note.. I'm sure this is one of the last big things that people are holding out for with the adoption of WPF, though to date I've managed pretty well without it..

MS Bob Lives!!

lol, Frank just linked this up on twitter.. Long Live Bob!!

Windows 7 Wish List

I read an article this morning (can't remember exactly where) that had a wish list for windows 7.. This list included things like Minwin, UI changes, diagnostic tools etc.. While I liked some of them, I tend to think that some of the items didn't really appeal to the geek in me.. And too be honest, I think windows appealing to geeks is important.. They help to drive adoption in the industry.. So, I thought I'd throw out a list of things I'd like to see:

• Express Development tools as part of the install
• A decent graphics package
• A serious Voip package
• Serious Support for Multiple desktops
• Diagnostic tools, memory checker etc..

Now, I understand that Microsoft are actually in a bit of a pickle as far as some of these are concerned. I'm sure they'd love to include lots of things, but may be restricted due to Anti-Trust type things.. So, my proposal is this, a package manager like what's available in most linux distros.. Make it easy to download tools from Microsoft, they don't have to be included in the OS, just easy to get.

Now, once again, this could still cause problems. I suspect the Package Manager will still have to include links to 3rd party apps. This though shouldn't be a big problem. Allow companies to easily register their products, and provide easy categorisation. Allow users to choose apps to install by category and popularity. By default only provide the 5 most popular items for a given category..

Now this system is likely to also require some sort of payment system, but I'm sure this wouldn't be too hard. It's about making people life easier, and as a geek, this really appeals to me.

Anyway, that's my little list of what I think would help windows re-capture some of the "geek" kudos.

I was away for a bit...

Well, it seems that in my time away (and the quick cleanup of my email account) that I missed out on something. It seems that the old AusDotNet mailing list has been replaced. The new one is here.. I've just re-subscribed, I guess I'll see soon if this new one works :)

Purple Monkey Dishwasher

Back when I was little, we used to play a game called "Chinese whispers". I'm sure you know the game, everybody sits in a circle and someone starts whispering a message into another persons ear. This message then gets relayed to the next person and so on until the message finally gets back to the last person. Quite often, by the time the last person received the message, it was garbled, changed, lost information or had new information added. This happened consistently even when the message was very simple (hey, we were only kids..)..

For me, I learned that the more people who are involved in a chain of communications, the higher the risk of information being incorrect when it reaches it's target.

Unfortunately, I still see this type of thing happening in my day to day work. It's not uncommon for developers to be 3-4 times removed from the users of a system. Now what makes this worse is that the information being passed around tends to be a lot more complicated than when we were we little kids. Complicated business requirements, processes, legal requirements. None of this is particularly easy on the best of days, but after it's been through the process, it's almost guaranteed to be incorrect when it gets to the developer. The only question is how incorrect.

Now, don't try and read behind the lines here for any hidden messages about Business Analysts, expert users etc.. There is none of that. They are all an important part of the process. So is keeping the developers in the loop on communications. There are a hundred different ways to do this, from the simple CC on an email through to using forums for all requirements gathering etc.

Think about the Chinese whispers situation at your work and see if you can't do something to help the message get to the developers in a clearer way.

*Yes, the title is a classic line from the Simpson's where a message was passed through a crowd at a protest rally. The message made it to the Edna, complete with Purple Monkey Dishwasher at the end. "We'll show them, especially for the Purple Monkey Dishwasher comment!"

My GMail Account...

A long time ago, I signed up for Gmail beta.. I honestly thought it was the best thing since sliced cheese.. Around that time, I was signed up for the AusDotNet mailing list at work, and decided to move my subscription across to Gmail. Not long after, work banned all web mail. Gmail included.

For some time after that, I managed to keep track of everything at home, then later on my mobile phone. By this stage, I had also subscribed to SQLDownUnder. The amount of email pouring in was huge. I got a little behind with my reading and before I new it, the amount of emails were just too much to keep up with using the poor mobile interface for Gmail. I stopped checking this account.

Just today, I got a bright idea.. I'll check this account, clear it out and start using it again.. I thought that maybe the interface had improved... And, for the most part it has. It's way better than it used to be. The problem, it still doesn't have any easy ways to deal with large amounts of data. There are all the normal features like a delete button and the ability to mark items as read. Cool... Except I have 1972 emails that need to either be deleted or marked as read.

What I want (and this applies to live mail as well) is the ability to say "Mark all emails read" without having to select them in the Mobile interfaces. I can do this for my junk mail, so why not my normal mail??

Anyway, back to it, only 99 pages of email to clear from my mobile :)

A little Tip

Just remember boys and girls, to setup impersonation before you call ChannelFactory.CreateChannel otherwise your impersonation won't work... Also, another little tip.. Regardless of when you revert the impersonation back to the original identity, the open channel will still be impersonating!!

Mobile Live Blues..

It seems as though there has been a recent breaking change with Live Mail. See, from work, I usually keep track of my live (hotmail) emails from my mobile device (i-Mate JasJam) running WM6. Unfortunately, sometime over the last week, Live Mail no longer detects my phone as a mobile device and attempts to load the full version for IE.. As you can imagine, this does cause a problem.

So, for now, I just have to make sure I specifically head over to mobile.Live.com and then click on the Mail link from there.

Oh yeah.. I also have another small little gripe.. Accessing sites on a mobile device, I generally have to pay for all my data downloads, and for anybody else in Oz, they would know that it's fairly expensive. Another feature of Mobile Live that I'm less than impressed with is the Ad Banners.. Screen real estate is limited AND data data is expensive.... Not happy Jan!!

The New Hermit Crabs on the Block

As a father, I often get to learn a lot about things that I normally wouldn't kow anything about. Over the weekend however, after a trip to the local pet shop, I discovered something that has left me somewhat changed.

Before I tell you what I know know, let me set the scene.. See, my sister and her kids once had several pet hermit crabs. These hermit crabs were kept in their little tank, and just kind of lay around, occasionally moving around the tank and not really doing much else. Occasionally they would be given a few new shells that better matched their size. The problem was, they were all plain old boring crab shells. Sure, they did vary in size and shape a little, but apart from that, there was really nothing that made one crab stand out from the next. Those poor little boring crabs...

Enter the new range of designer hermit crab shells!!! All the newest crabs on the cat walks are wearing them...

All I can say is I'm shocked.. and changed forever!!

My Phone Battery

Over the last month or so, my little i-mate JasJam has been performing a lot worse than expected. The battery life has degraded to the point that I could not leave it on overnight.. 7 hours standby is about all I was able to achieve. So, I got of my backside and ordered a new battery. It arrived last week, and I have to say, I'm extremely happy. It's running like the little champ it should be. I'm a happy man!!

Save XP???

Ok, so, I thought I'd put up a post for something that has been bugging me a whole lot lately. And that is the immaturity of some people out there. Just today I read (where else but slashdot, the whole thing seems to have started with neowin) about Microsoft asking people to stop calling their customer support requesting an extension to Windows XP availability and support. This really got to me on a few different levels.


First up, it's just making life difficult for people who really need to use the support lines, yet these people who have XP running fine on their machines are happy to push their own agendas at the cost of others.


Next up is this. If I wanted to go out and by a brand new 2001 Mitsubishi Magna.. Guess what? I can't.. Why, it's discontinued.. It's a business decision they made to not make it any more. Do Mitsubishi still make enhancements to the Magna.. Nah ah... Are they under warranty anymore.. Nope.. This is not just unique software and cars either. Try it with nearly any industry. Power tools, sports equipment (yep, new golf club models every year!!), clothes, phones, TVs, Stereos, iPods.


Every business tries to moves forward. Sometimes products are successful, sometimes new products are failures. Now, as I've said before, I'm very happy with vista and office 2007 (though there are a few things i'd prefer were a little different..) but at the end of the day, Vista is the successor of XP which had a remarkably long shelf life compared to many other things in I.T. and in this case, much longer than the type of support you get in nearly any industry...

Anyway, back to my original point. Grow Up!! If you don't like it, use Mac, Linux whatever.. Just grow up...

That's my 2c for the day :)

Help Microsoft Donate

I just noticed a post by Nick Hodge about Microsoft Donating to The Smith Family (a charity). The problem is, they need your help. Pop over to this site and watch the video. For every person that views the video, Microsoft will donate $1.

(Just a note, I'm sure this is a promotion to help spread the Silverlight love, but I think it's a very worthwhile cause non the less.)