Happy Halloween!!

No tricks, only treats tonight! Order before midnight October 31 vendor one year subscription to well formed for just $10.00. Check out the special offer page

Just started work on the November issue.

The Whidbey text editor.

It's not just the framework getting a makeover in Whidbey the whole I. D. E. is being upgraded too. Most notably the text editor has some new features. The context coloring system has changed so that now classes are also identified with a bold text. This includes classes that you define yourself. There is also a new method of indicating which part of the file has changed. When you load a file the left hand margin is clear but as you type a yellow area appears in the margin to indicate changes which have not yet been compiled. When you compile these yellow change indicators turn into green ones that show the extent of changes in the file during the current edit session. I found this to be very useful for quickly checking which parts of the file have been modified.

Get your RSS here...

Thanks to Roy Osherove's SiteFeeder I can now provide RSS for your news aggregators. This will give me more incentive to make announcements in here.

PDC underway.

Unfortunately this year I'm not going to the PDC, I was lucky enough to be there in 2000 when they announced .net and have been to Tech-Ed and PDC since but I'm very much an outsider this year.

One good thing however is that I did get e-mail from Microsoft this morning saying that as an MVP and Whidbey alpha tester I was no longer restricted in what I said about the current code. Keep an eye open here for insights into what's coming in windows forms version 1.2 and visual studio.net for the future.

I don't have them yet but I will very shortly be receiving a copy of the PDC bits of Longhorn and will be discussing that both here and in Well Formed.

Well Formed VB edition for October released

Just a little bit late this month the Well Formed VB edition is now available. one or two annoying delays including having to reformat my laptop and then set up a completely new computer system have contributed to what's been a relatively disastrous week.

I am just in time now to start on the November edition which I hope will go a little more smoothly than last month's. I'm looking forward very much to obtaining the PDC longhorns builds soon and will be doing a preview of the graphic system in a forthcoming addition.

Converting C# to visual basic

For some time now, Kamal Patel Has been running a web site with an excellent program to convert C# to visual basic. This can be accomplished in two ways, directly through the website or using a standalone program. Personally I prefer the standalone program because sometimes I don't like the idea of providing my code to web sites for conversion.

Generally the software works well but it has a few problems converting even simple classes and very often chokes on constructors. It also seems to have a problem with if statements and particularly changing curly braces in C# to the corresponding if, then, else, end if construct in visual basic.

It seems a shame that the software hasn't been upgraded recently to correct the simple errors because with such correction the software would be excellent. I often use it to convert examples written in C# into VB quickly and easily but I find I have to trim code or put it in in small chunks so that the converter doesn't tell me that it couldn't convert the code.

The end of an era

Sadly, today saw the last commercial flight of the Concord which left John F. Kennedy Airport for London carrying about a hundred celebrities. During its service life Concorde has been a victim of politics and despite its advanced design has been superseded by slower less advanced aircraft.

It almost seems as though the world is taking a technological step backwards by putting these marvelous machines into museums rather than keeping them flying. Worst of all the pig-headed attitude off the British airways bosses who prevented Richard Branson from taking over operation of the Concord a few months ago. I'm certain that if anyone could run Concord at a profit it would be him.

Having lived for many years under the flight path of Concord as it traveled from London to Abu-Dhabi I can say from experience that the noise pollution from a sonic boom is far less than that of a slow moving aircraft such as a 747 which moves across the sky slowly. I, like so many people, will be sad to see it go.

Voice recognition training pays off

After installing the voice recognition software yesterday, I have been through several of the training sessions and I decided to make this entry entirely by dictation.

You go through the training by reading to the machine. So far I've read text from a philosophy book by Bertrand Russell, the introduction to the war of the world's by H. G. wells the standard voice training manual, and I've also trained it to recognize such words as GDI+ FAQ, these words and phrases are put in individually and you speak the pronunciation for them.

In this entry I've made very few corrections by hand, a word here a space there, and since yesterday the program seems to be recognizing my voice very much better indeed. I'm impressed.

I think one of the advantage is that I have is that I use a very high quality microphone not one of the very small ones that come with many headsets or cheap audo input kits. The microphone is a Sony F. V. 320 which is a midrange home use microphone.

Interestingly, it seems that using voice recognition enables me to use a more relaxed style than I would normally use while typing. I don't know whether this would be a good or bad thing for technical article. certainly voice recognition enables me to input text much faster than I can type. I'm not much of a touch typist.

Is there anybody out there?

I'm just interested to know who reads this. You are probably a programmer and read the Microsoft newsgroups. To get a free subscription to Well Formed simply reply to this post before midnight eastern standard time October 23 2003. Remember to include your e-mail address and your preference for visual basic or C#.

Speech recognition

This is an attempt a speech recognition using the system included with office xp. -, very little of this is said (has had) to be edited by hand because it does a reasonable good job of recognizing my voice even though I speak with a thick English accent.
all use (I used) dragon naturally speaking once before and it is completely unable to recognize me because my accent wasn't American enough this however , is great. whether or not I can type faster than I speak remains to be seen. publish (I wish) it was clever enough to put capital letters at the beginning of sentences (missed period) you can specify punctuation. (hmm it capitalizes after a period) And even , if you feel like it, do things like added (add a) carriage return.

the additions are made by hand in [softwoods, other directions for the mistakes that the speech recognition system might (total rubbish. Try again)

the additions I made by hand, in brackets, (missed "are") the corrections for mistakes that the speech recognition system made. I find I have to denounce your eight (enunciate)more clearly which would be quite destroying (a strain) When dictating along (spoke " a long paragraph" here and it thought it was a voice command)

Well, that's enough for the momentall close (I'll post) again later.

The blogging Gestalt

...http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3093931

nuff said

AOL !!@!!$#$%%

How the hell does a pack of Viagra salemen get my AOL e-mail address if AOL don't sell it to them??

I use AOL because it's the only internet provider that sells an unlimited connection in this backwater hell they call France. I have NEVER used my AOL email address even once and yet I get between 10 and 30 e-mails a day selling me Viagra, Penis enlargement and various sexual services even though they don't realize that with a good looking blonde wife I need none of that crap!!!!

AOL must regularly sell thier e-mail lists because no-one could target a non-obvious email address like the pseudonym I use without trying about 20 billion others beforehand.

Out at last

Managed to distribute the C# edition of Well Formed today. After suffering from bugs and bloat due to overzealous application of new features it's ready for the readers.
Hit the well formed link in my links to the left there or look at the current issue

Grr.. Frustration

So many times I've been working on a project and been brought up short by fundamental bugs in the .NET framework. One would have imagined that by now, superficial, easy to fix bugs would have been dealt with but no...
Here I am with an article in work for the magazine brought up short by an attribute bug that must have been there for years! Does no-one use this code in the QA department at MS??

PocketPC

Well Formed will have a new feature this month. I am going to provide all the content in a form optimized for PocketPC so people can take the content on the road with them.
I did this using a FrontPage Add-In that re-works the pages for PPC and stores them in a mobile sub-folder of the main web. This add-in is available from MS here.

Saying thanks.

Just had a really nice note from a guy who I helped out online. He needed a soloution and I wrote one because I enjoyed doing it.

He asked me "Can I send you a payment, just to say thanks?" I said..

Treat yourself to a book, video or CD from Amazon using my link to get you there....

I get some click-through credits, You get a treat that you want and everyone is happy.

Databinding in ComboBox causes some odd problems

I did a short contract for a chap a while back and got the job of fixing his broken VB application. The symptoms were that of a crash but turned out to be a race condition caused by using a ComboBox control that was populated by a database using databinding. The SelectedIndexChanged event was wired automatically to the handler which went off and updated the form, changing the contents of the same combo box. Databinding fires SelectedIndexChanged and so this became a vicious cycle and the machine slowed to a crawl while the database thrashed the disk. I just posted a solution in tips and tricks...

Mr Irrelevant

Someone asks a perfectly sensible and valid comment in the newsgroup and some wally has to make a comment about it like it's a teen chat room.

What point is there to making dumb comments that don't help anyone??

Being an MVP now I don't feel like I can reply to the twerp and argue with him about how helpful he's being.

I'll just vent here instead.

Longhorn delayed till 2006?

Lot's of scuttlebut going around about the delay of Longhorn till 2006. I have two minds about the whole thing. Getting IT departments to standardise on an OS and not have a blue fit if they're asked to change it is nigh on impossible. With many people only just adopting Windows 2000 and many still running on windows 9X and NT4 demanding a change to yet another is a difficult thing to swallow.

I would like to see Longhorn happen because a managed environment has proven to be better with .NET and the ideas of using the processing power of the computer to beef up the UI is also good. I mean, how many new ways can you paint a window?. A leap forward is needed and using the techniques that have been available to games programmers for years in the OS is a great idea.

On the other hand I don't want to have to wade headfirst into a new system when I've only just come to the realisation that XP was any sort of advantage to me.

I don't think a delay will hurt it.

Cluetrain

Rogue Wave's BOD should have read the Cluetrain Manifesto. They are the archetypal corporation who lost touch with their customers and believed in abstract authority instead of the authority of experience.

For what it's worth

I really despise the open source movement for promoting the idea that intellectual property should be given away freely.

If you want source code and you're not bright enough to write it yourself at least have the decency to acknowledge the skills of the person who is clever enough by paying them a fair price.

The trouble with the bazar is that it's full of struggling merchants trying to scrape a modest living and customers who are happy to take free samples and never actually buy the goods. Eventually the merchants will all go out of business.

Join the club

Checking out the MVP private groups I see that about 50 MVP's, well, maybe a bit of an exaggeration, started a new blog in the last few days. I really did come to this decision on my own!
Well, they do say, publish and be dammned.

Incidentally I just spell checked this because I can't type more than about 5 letters without getting the character order mixed up and "Dammned" is not in thier dictionary. "Dammed" is though. Not much of a spell checker...

Haloscan.

The comment system on this blog is provided by Haloscan. Thanks to Jonathan Maltz for pointing out this service to me. The moment I get pennies in my PayPal account again they'll get a donation.
As a one time creator of shareware and someone who basically makes a living through the internet, I reckon people who provide a good service should be rewarded for it.

Hits..

Hits are definitely up. For a specialized site 2000-3000 a day is ok I think.

Singleton App

Posted a new article in Tips and tricks. The singleton app. All pretty simple but a much asked question.

Googled!!

It's a good day!. I checked out my placement on google today and I've been flagging behind my old colleages at SyncFusion for some time. Today I'm top of the google list!!! WAY HAAAYY!!
Do a google for GDI+ FAQ.
The tips and tricks page comes up second which is pretty good too. Google for "windows forms tips tricks"
Have to go check my site stats now...

Just the way I want it (For the moment)

Enuff said...

still messin'

see if it happens again

Messing about

Just trying to get the template the way I want it. Ignore it for a moment. ha ha like anyone is goin to read this on day 1 :-)

Article idea.

Having looked all over the place for information on shell extensions in C# and found next to nothing on the subject I think I feel an article coming on. Well Formed will get the first bite at it this month.

Debugging a shell extension is not easy!

The last couple of days I've been working on a shell extension written in C#. The idea was to provide thumbnails for some custom file types rather than have some kludgy file browser encapsulated in the application.

I've found out a lot about the difficulties of writing a shell extension. Particularly debugging which seemed to be impossible at first glance. The extension is run by the system and doesn't show up in any recognizable form in the task manager. I did find out though that if you attach the debugger to the Explorer process you can stop the extension with the debugger.

Once used, the shell extension is kept alive by the system so any changes you make will fail to create the new dll because its in use elsewhere. Just terminate the Explorer process and the problem goes away. Sometimes Explorer starts on its own again so that you have access to the start menu and such, sometimes it needs running explicitly.

Let there be blog

I came to an odd conclusion today while answering my own posts on the MS private MVP news groups, yes, I said answering my own posts, that answering my own posts was the same as having a blog, so here I am.

Like many people I talk to myself when I'm working. Now I can write to myself too.

If you got here without going through the link on my web site then I suggest you visit there to get a bit more of an idea on who I am and what I do.

My GDI+ FAQ is the bit of my work that most people see. If you're a user of Windows Forms or GDI+ then there's probably something you want to know on that portion of my site.