A small gripe...

Not that you'll find many gripes coming from me, but here goes anyway..

Regular expressions. Or, more to the point, the fact that Visual Studio .Net has different syntax in the Find/Replace than the .Net Framework... C'mon... The tool that we use to write .Net code should use the same regular expression parser/engine as found in System.Text.RegularExpressions...

Anyway, that's my small gripe.. Maybe it will be fixed one day...

It's that time

For anybody who knows me, you'd know that I am an big Saints Fan. Probably not as much as Frank, but I still love them. In fact, I just love AFL in general. It's one of the few sports I actually follow and even play..

Tonight, as anybody in NSW and Queensland would know, It's State of Origin Game 1. It's one of the few games of Rugby League that I actually watch each year.

All I have to say is Go the Maroons!!!!

Another year of poor coverage

Living in a Canberra sure has some problems. One of the biggest problems is the AFL coverage. Channel 9 have the rights to the AFL with foxtel picking up the remainder of the games. The problem is that Channel 9 also have the rights to the Rugby League, which is always shown in preference to the AFL.
Tonight, the Saints take on Westcoast in the first game of the season. Unfortunately, channel 9 have decided to hold off the coverage until midnight so they can show the footy show..

No problems, I have foxtel.. I can just watch it there.. Nope.. it's not being shown until 11:30pm.
Turns out, Fox Footy is showing the game from 9:30 in NSW, QLD, SA, WA, yet ACT misses out...
Anyway, that's the end of my rant.. I can't wait until next year to see how much better the Channel 7/10 consortium do with their coverage...

ODP.Net Beta Released

Great news, oracle have just released a beta version of ODP.Net (oracle data provider for .Net) for .Net 2.0.

This release is awesome for the following reasons:

• Support for the Provider based Factories
• Connection String Builder
• Data Source Enumeration
• Schema Discovery
• VS2005 integration and support for debugging stored procedures

Best of all, ODP.Net should now work out of the box with Enterprise Library 2.0 without the need for writing provider factories and wrappers around the old Version..
Here are the links:
What's New
Download

Community Launch, and What I've been doing

Last night saw the Community Launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 come to Canberra. As expected it was a pretty big event, even when you take away the Microsoft, Readify and .NET Solutions guys, there were still heaps of people there.

If you want a list of people who attended, just check out Geoff's blog, as usual he has done an awesome roundup.

During the course of the night, I was asked by Darren what I've been playing with, to which I answered "Visual Studio 2005".. After all, isn't everybody.. However, on the way home, It dawned on my that I have actually been doing a lot more than that.

With Visual Studio 2005, several other community tools have been released (or are near release). These are some of the other things I have been playing with.

First, there is the new Composite UI Application Block, an awesome framework for building a Windows Forms based UI.

Secondly I have been playing with the tech previews for Enterprise Library 2.0. In particular, the data access components and Oracle's Oracle provider for .net. The problem with this is that Oracle have not actually released a version of their provider that supports the new changes in ADO.NET 2.0. As a result, I have had to create my own data provider that wraps around oracle own provider. It's been a fairly interesting process, and has given me a much better understanding of the changes from 1.1 to 2.0

Stay tuned for more information on all of these wonderful topics.

Speculation

Eveybody knows that GotDotNet's workspaces were supposed to be Microsoft's attempt to provide a community based site for collaborative development. This failed for a number of reasons, including performance, reliability and usability.

Many projects that started out using gotdotnet, very quickly moved to source forge.

In a vain attempt to make the site more successful, the GotDotNet team created a Source control plugin for visual studio. While this worked, the underlying engine was still to slow and unreliable.

Now, today several MVPs have mentioned that the GotDotNet team has something new and exciting up their sleeves, yet are unable to spill the beans. This leaves me with only one option, and that is to take a guess at what is going on...

Simply put, my guess (and wish) is that GotDotNet's workspaces are going to be converted into a pretty web based front end for Team Systems...

This makes plenty of sense. Microsoft have spent huge amounts of money already creating a collaborative development environment in Team Systems, and maintaining another environment that has proven itself to be lacking would be stupid...

In addition, modifying the Team Systems plugin for Visual Studio to work with the new GotDotNet team systems would be trivial.

Something like this would blow sourceforge out of the water...

Tip #102 - DesignMode only works after a Component is sited

I could almost kick myself... the designer has been busted for months, and I never twigged to this.. I guess it was just easier to code my forms by hand...

The reason for this is simple, someone I used to work with decided all our controls needed to have consistent fonts and colours, without having to change the system settings (Gotta love UI standards). To achieve this, the customisation code as put inside control constructors. This broke all the designers.. I figured it would be an easy fix, just wrap all the customisation code in a check for DesignMode. After this fix didn't work, I just decided I didn't really need the designer anyway.

It turns out, the problem is that the DesignMode property on the Component class is simply a wrapper around the site.DesignMode property. Without the site set, it will always return false. Obviously, a control is not sited until AFTER it's been constructed...

Moving all of the code into the a different location, and suddenly we have the designer back.. yay...

Keyboards need to change...

I've been using keyboards now for over 20 years, yet there is one key on the keyboard that I never use (Not deliberately anyway..). It's the key that other people always use, right before I get onto the computer. It's the key that can cause you to lock your account. It's the key that causes people to SHOUT in chatrooms..

That key is the "Caps Lock" key...

Seriously people..

How often do you use it?
I know occasionally I bump it.. Then I have to press it again to turn it off.

I know my daughter likes it, but she's only 6 and just loves the effects...

I think the world would surely be a happier place if only this horrid key was removed...

*Don't get me started on the Break/Scroll Lock.... (Yes I've used them, but not for a long time...)

Cost of Slashdot

While browsing over slashdot this morning, I stumbled across a new study claiming that Microsoft's monopoly costs an estimated $10 billion per year.

This got me thinking.. How much does slashdot cost the industry, world wide per year..

So, I decided to just run a few quick figures (most of which are well under real figures..)

3 Million pages served per day (from the FAQ), and assuming it takes an average of 10 minutes to read each of those pages (including the linked pages on other sites and comments). Straight off, that accounts for 3,000,000 pages * (10 minute * 365 days per year) / 60 Hours * $50 an hour (a very low rate)... This equates to $9.12 Billion in lost productivity...

In addition to this, add in a similar amount for TheRegister and you have more than made up for the same so called cost of of Microsoft's Monopoly...

*Yes, I am aware that this study is floored, as I used Win XP and MS Calc for doing the sums.
**Yes, I am also aware that this is not a real loss to industry, as most of the /. people don't actually have jobs...

Google Moon

With tomorrow being the anniversary of the first moon landing, Google have released a special tribute.

Google Moon

Have a play...

p.s. Make sure you zoom into each of the landing sites...

System.Windows.Forms.TreeView

How often have you been sitting at your computer, working away, when somebody walks up to you and asks you to fix a bug (not that their are ever bugs in your own work). The bug seems fairly trivial, yet it's in code that has been working fine for a long time.

This is exactly what happened to me, and it's only taken myself and another developer 3 days to track down. In the process, I actually found out that I have been "abusing" the treeview control for some time.

Here is a cut down sample of the code which demonstrates the behavior.







Sure, looks good doesn't it... First time the code is ran, it works a treat. Actually, this code has worked really well for several months. That is, until somebody changed a single property on the TreeView control. That's right, just one property... Scrollable = false;

This one small change resulted in the treenodes not displaying at all, but still allowed the nodes to be selected.

Anyway, I have since found a fix for this, which is to wrap the offending Clear and Add(s) with BeginUpdate() and EndUpdate(), problem fixed.

As it turns out, BeginUpdate() and EndUpdate() stop the treeview from redrawing every time the nodes are changed, which from a resources perspective is a good thing. It also fixed my problem (the one with the code, not the one in my head...)

Anyway, I thought I'd share this with you all, and hopefully it will save you a few hours/days of pulling out your hair..

Searching for Yourself

Now, I have always been fairly careful when dealing with email addresses on the internet. I have both hotmail and gmail accounts which I use when signing up for anything where I am likely to end up with spam. Only when I trust people do I actually hand out my home or work accounts. This has served me well for a long time, until recently that is. Suddenly I started getting spam at my home account. Strange, because I have only given 5-6 people my home account, and all of these people can be trusted.

Now, Every so often, I find myself wondering how many people read my blog. I find the easiest way to check is just to do a search in google, and see how many hits I get. This has proven to be quite fun. Funnily enough, this has never shown up any links to my mail accounts other than hotmail or gmail.

After reading this article on SMH I decided to try MSN to see how it has come along. So I entered my name, as I always do with google "Eddie de Bear" (With the quotes) and hit search. You can imagine my horror when I discovered the first site returned was infact a list of contacts that someone had carelessly entered into a public sharepoint site. I have not linked to the list, as I think it's probably wise that the person responsible removes the WHOLE list, before anybody else gets upset...

It looks like I have not infact been as careful as I should have been.

Anyway, the person responsible has been emailed, and asked to remove my details, and possibly even secure the site, not that it's gonna make much difference, as the account listed has now been replaced...

Got IE? I have

I was just over at Channel9 and noticed a post about the Get IE site. It's just like the Get Firefox site, only it's for IE.

And no, this site IS NOT a Microsoft Site, it's just some dudes who where a little bored...

I found it a little funny, so I figured i'd share it with you all...

How did they patent this..

I bring you yet another fine example of the US Patent office.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/search-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=Serialization&s2=XML&OS=Serialization+AND+XML&RS=Serialization+AND+XML

Working Hard..

It's been a while since I posted to my blog, not because I have nothing to say, but because I have been busy working. For the last few months, I've been racking up around 60 Hours a week. This is on top of Football training twice a week, Football game once a week, and indoor cricket once a week.

In addition to this, I just purchased a house... So in the small amount of extra time I've had, I moved house.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking, how much time do other people spend working?? Do most people just do their 37.5 or 40 hours a week??

Let me know!!

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2?

Wow, is this for real?
http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/betaexperience/

I can't wait for this.. :)

Is Canberra not important enough?

I finally got around to reading this months MSDN flash (which looks great by the way frank) and noticed that there is another MSDN Update happening in April.

Time to sign up....

Hang on, where is Canberra???

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Canberra has a fairly large development community, based around delivering services to a heap of government departments. Some of these people even have input into technology procurements. Surely this is a market that has just as much importance as Perth and Adelaide??

Anyway, I just thought I'd let people know that I am a little disappointed by this.

Time to climb back into my shell and get some work done..

ZoomInfo

I was just over at New Scientist when I stumbled on an article about a new web crawler, which has been developed by a Recruiting company. Basically, you can enter your name into the search box, and a few seconds later you have a resume, created from information available on the internet.

I have to say I was somewhat sceptical, how could they create a resume for me?? Anyway, I went over and gave it a try, and my results where as expected.
"No Web Summaries were found for Eddie de Bear".

Anyway, I was not going to let that stop me from givin git a good test, so I entered a few names of high profile people and was very suprised about the results.

For those of you like me, there is actually a link that allows you to build your own online resume, the only problem is they need your credit card details....... For verification only.... I guess I'm just going to have to try to get my name all over the web instead..

ZoomInfo

I was just over at New Scientist when I stumbled on an article about a new web crawler, which has been developed by a Recruiting company. Basically, you can enter your name into the search box, and a few seconds later you have a resume, created from information available on the internet.

I have to say I was somewhat sceptical, how could they create a resume for me?? Anyway, I went over and gave it a try, and my results where as expected.
"No Web Summaries were found for Eddie de Bear".

Anyway, I was not going to let that stop me from givin git a good test, so I entered a few names of high profile people and was very suprised about the results.

For those of you like me, there is actually a link that allows you to build your own online resume, the only problem is they need your credit card details....... For verification only.... I guess I'm just going to have to try to get my name all over the web instead..

GMail and my PDA2K

As I have written about before I have an iMate PDA2k (same as the XDAII) that runs over EVDO/CDMA. One of the many reasons I got this was so I could check my GMail account from work (It's not allowed due to policy...).

Anyway, I was somewhat disappointed when I first tried, and I got redirected to a screen telling me that my browser was not supported. That was a little over a month ago.

Anyway, I figured I'd check to see if gmail now supported more browsers... Guess what... It does... Now I can check my GMail from anywhere.

Oh, Yes, I am aware that I could use POP3 to access gmail all along, but that does not give me the same functionality for searching etc.