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Joel On Software[^]
I know a lot of people like Joel's articles and I know a lot of people think he talks out of his arse. I like a lot of the stuff he writes, especially Painless Functional Specifications[^], The Joel Test[^] and Painless Software Schedules[^]. All three of which have influnced my own internal software development process.
I'll certainly be buying a copy of the book as it will make for a great resource and it will be something to give to each employee I hire, so they can get a better understanding on the ways I like to do business.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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>a lot of people like Joel's articles and I know a lot of people think he talks out of his arse
Both. He has good stuff to say, I just don't enjoy how he says it.
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Ian Darling wrote:
"and our loonies usually end up doing things like Monty Python."
Crikey! ain't life grand?
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Whilst MyXaml makes development so much easier and streamlined, it can be a bitch to debug object creation and trying to find out why properties aren't being set.
Marc has posted a great tip on adding breakpoints via mark-up. Have a read at Markup Breakpoints[^]
I'm sure this will give my development productivity a boost.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I'm working at a client's site this week.
Whilst they aren't the most technically literate people, they sure have a locked down internet connection.
No MSN Messenger
No CVS
I'll do a Shields Up[^] test tomorrow and see if they are blocking any of the dangerous ports too.
Still it is refreshing to see a small company taking their internet security seriously.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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RealDevs.net[^]
Always nice to see a new swing on the developer website playground.
Whilst I'm not overly keen on DotNetPuke forums, both Marc and Anders have a good pedigree as developers so it will be interesting to watch the site grow and mature.
Good luck with the site, at least I've got somewhere else to hang out whilst waiting for my code to compile.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I'm a big Lucas fan, however THX 1138 is one movie I never managed to get my head around. I only saw it once on late night television which might have contributed to the head f*** feeling. So I think I'll get myself a copy of the new directors cut DVD release[^]. The American Zoetrope documentary sounds interesting too.
Carrying on the Lucas theme, a new series of Clone Wars[^] cartoons is scheduled for next year. The first two series were very well done, even if some of the Jedi did seem a little too powerful for my tastes. Still, they did fit well within the Star Wars universe, certainly better than the 80's cartoons Ewoks and Droids.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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Star Wars Action Figure Archive[^]
Wow. What a collection! I can't believe they still make so many Star Wars toys. I do hope children are still buying them to play with and that the figures aren't being snapped up by collectors who just leave them in their packaging and look at them.
I still have most of my original toys, that were bought for me between 1978 and 1984. Not many of them are in good condition. A few were chewed by my dog, and a couple of Stormtroopers got a little damaged when they visited Hoth on a very snowy day in my back garden.
I wonder if these new toys stand up a little better than the old ones used to. We used to have stick blue-tac on their feet to stop them toppling over.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I'm playing around with a new RSS Feed Reader called Sauce Reader[^]
So far it's looking pretty good. I've had a few crashes, but I think I'll probably using it from now on rather than SharpReader. It's certainly the best I've used so far, plus it's free for personal use.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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Thanks for the link. I've just downloaded it and it looks good, if a little slow. (Well, my whole machine is running slow, so anything that takes slightly longer than normal is painful)
"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." --Zig Ziglar
The Second EuroCPian Event will be in Brussels on the 4th of September
Can't manage to P/Invoke that Win32 API in .NET? Why not do interop the wiki way!
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A new blog that seems like it may be worth reading, Visual Studio 2005 Team System[^]
I think the most interesting part of the first entry is
Now, with Visual Studio Team System, we are seriously asking, “With automation, how can we re-engineer our core IT processes? How can we remove the overhead from following good process? How can we make all these different roles individually more productive while integrating them as a high-performance team?”
This is something I've been pondering myself for a while. It's good to see somebody inside Microsoft is asking the same questions.
In this age of outsourcing development to the allegedly cheaper overseas options, I need to be able to write and build software in a more efficient manner. Any tool that can automate my development processes can only help me in my goal.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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>Richard Herring - English Comedian and Writer[^]
What a hoot, thanks for that link.
And the Sells brothers is a good one too.
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Christopher Duncan quoted:
"...that would require my explaining Einstein's Fear of Relatives"
Crikey! ain't life grand?
XmlTransformer, my latest CP article.
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My neighbours from hell are moving. Well, they've got their "For Sale" sign up. Yay! No more crap thrown into my yard from the kids bedroom window. No more knocking on my door asking for something to drink/eat. No more dog barking through the day when I'm trying to work. No more screaming matches when the mother tries to control her kids.
Things are on the up. Hopefully whoever moves in will be an old married couple about 75years old, with no kids/grandkids or pets.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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Michael P Butler wrote:
My neighbours from hell are moving. Well, they've got their "For Sale" sign up
How's that going? Have you got new neighbours yet. If the housing market near you is anything like it is up here in the Scottish Central belt you could have new neighbours move in a couple of weeks ago.
Michael P Butler wrote:
No more crap thrown into my yard from the kids bedroom window
I'm lucky the most I get chucked in my garden from the kids next door is an occasional football, and they are always quite polite when they ask for it back - And if I don't answer the door quickly enough they run into the go into the garden anyway to retrieve it, but if I appear they run out quickly as if they'd been increadibly naughty. It kind of reminds me as a kid when I had to ask for stuff back from the neighbours if I'd done something similar.
Michael P Butler wrote:
No more screaming matches when the mother tries to control her kids
That would drive me mad. My ex was the expert at screaming matches. The only thing was she was the only one doing the screaming.
Michael P Butler wrote:
Things are on the up
Best of luck with the new neighbours.
"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." --Zig Ziglar
The Second EuroCPian Event will be in Brussels on the 4th of September
Can't manage to P/Invoke that Win32 API in .NET? Why not do interop the wiki way!
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Meant to post these on May the fourth, but forgot. Still, I can't wait till next year so I'll post them anyway.
Two fun Star Wars games that put you in the two of the classic trilogy battles.
The Battle of Endor[^]
The Battle of Yavin[^]
Just goes to show what you can do with a 3d-engine and a copy of Visual Basic.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I've been working on a RSS reader recently, but got sidetracked when I realised that there wasn't an HTML display control as standard in the Windows Forms library. This was a bit of a disappointment because I'm trying to build apps that don't need to do any Interop with Win32.
Still it looks like WinForms 2.0 [^]will have a native control.
For the moment I guess I'll have to wrap the shdocvw.dll and borrow a few ideas from here[^]
Although, first I'll do some research and see if a Mozilla control exists.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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>Still it looks like WinForms 2.0 [^]will have a native control.
Though that seems to just be a wrapper around the Win32 control too.
Whidbey includes a new control named the WebBrowser control. The WebBrowser control is a wrapper of the IE ActiveX browser control. from windowsforms.net
Or am I misunderstanding that?
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Christopher Duncan quoted:
"...that would require my explaining Einstein's Fear of Relatives"
Crikey! ain't life grand?
XmlTransformer, my latest CP article.
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Paul Watson wrote:
Still it looks like WinForms 2.0 [^]will have a native control.
Though that seems to just be a wrapper around the Win32 control too.
I use native as in sense that it'll be part of the System.Windows.Forms namespace and as such will be distributed with the .NET 2.0 runtime rather than having me having to redistribute the Interop wrapper dll myself. Plus the bits in the other link should be included, rather than me having to handle them myself.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I installed RealPlayer a few weeks back, mainly because I wanted to make use of BBC Radio 7's Listen Again[^] functionality.
And do you know what, it has been very well behaved. Okay, when I installed Real I had to go through the options pages and disable lots of their "extras". Once that was done, I've not had a single problem. No unwanted pop-ups or attempts to sell me a full version.
The quality of sound is quiet impressive too, even on my 64k line, certainly better than Media Player when listening to live streams. Media Player had an annoying tendency to "jump" when I used the my bandwidth for other things, where as Real manages to keep a smooth playback (with only a slight reduction in playback quality)
So Real isn't as bad as you think, providing you take a little time during installation to disable the features you don't want.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I’m taking a break from writing my Customer Relation Management app to work on my CTI products.
I’ve decided to move from MFC front ends to using C# and MyXaml[^]. This allows me to make use of the code-behind feature of MyXaml, so that I can integrate easier with third party databases. Previously, it has either meant writing a plugin-dll or using the integrated VBScript engine. Plus the added advantage that the look and feel can be modified on the fly to suit the client’s requirements, without having to recompile the entire application.
My simple Desktop Call-Pop application has already been converted and works well, although I’ve had to work around a couple of issues with MyXaml and Notification Tray icons.
I’m now working on my main desktop telephony client app. This has a more complicated user interface and I’m having issues getting the right look and feel with WinForms. I’ve been playing with the Dock and Anchor properties, but find they are a little lacking. I was hoping not to have to write any code for positioning the controls, but so far I’ve not managed to do what I want. Still, it is early days.
Marc Clifton has posted another interesting article on using MyXaml and his Application Automation layer[^], which has given me food for thought on how best to build my CRM app.
It is becoming clearer that I need to find ways of reducing the cost of development and reducing the amount of time it takes to build a business solution. My company’s aims are to provide software solutions to people’s businesses processes, but the companies that could benefit most find the costs are too high. I’m going to try and implement some of the ideas presented in the AAL and see if they will help me to achieve my aims.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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Seeing as Chris and the team have provided us with this cool blog, I might as well make use of it.
I've been trying to get my own blog setup on my personal domain. I've been trying to use dotText[^], but I am having technical difficulties getting it to work right. (a. I'm new to 2003 Server, b. Trying to do SQL user access via Osql is a pain in the ass)
My .NET knowledge grows slowly. I finally figured out how to get a data-grid to work like a listview (full rowselect/no editing etc). I was helped a great deal by the TaskVision Sample Application[^]. It has already done all the hard-work by creating its own System.Windows.Forms.DataGridTextBoxColumn derived class that disables the editing and draws a full-row select highlight bar. At least know I understand the principles of the DataGrid. There is nothing like a working sample to make the MSDN docs make sense. Thanks go to Heath Stewart [^] for pointing me in the right direction.
So I've now got a data-grid defined in MyXaml[^] that is filled with data from a stored procedure call, using databinding. All done via mark-up. My next problem to solve is how to pass parameters to the SqlCommand object. Setting up the parameters is easy, the hard bit is figuring out how to refresh the bound Data-Source and making it generic enough so I only have to write a few lines of code per data-form.
Useful link of the week
Windows Forms FAQ[^] - Very useful for the novice starting out writing Windows Forms code.
Michael
But you know when the truth is told,
That you can get what you want or you can just get old,
Your're going to kick off before you even get halfway through.
When will you realise... Vienna waits for you? - "The Stranger," Billy Joel
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