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I was lucky to get into my hands two new programming related books from Microsoft Press.
These books are "Visual Studio Tools for Office" by Carter and Lippert, and "Working with Visual Studio 2005 Team System" by R. Hundhausen.
Well, I have to confess that I haven't yet had the chance to read my previous programming books I got months ago (I've been reading "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" instead), but hopefully I can continue during the forthcoming Christmas holidays.
Last Friday, Delphi 2006 (or should I say Borland Developer Studio 2006) was launched here in Helsinki. I had a session together with Jason Vokes and Henrik Jondell.
Now that both Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Delphi 2006 are out, many developer have started to ask which is a better choice. Well, there are many sides on this coin, but frankly I don't understand these two tools are compared head to head.
In my opinion, if you want to use latest .NET 2.0 technologies, then there's currently only one choice: Visual Studio 2005.
However, if you already have a significant investment in Delphi code, then I don't see why there would be such a rush to Visual Studio, especially if you haven't yet used .NET at all.
Learning to develop .NET applications takes a while, and since the platform is so large, it will take years to master it. Even if you would jump today from Delphi to VS 2005, you wouldn't be productive (in real-world applications) in at least half a year. In that time, Borland probably has at least a beta out of Highlander, their .NET 2.0 compatible tool.
The bottom line: both Delphi 2006 and Visual Studio 2005 are excellent development tools for the Windows platform. One shines in .NET, the other supports both Win32 and .NET. From that perspectives, comparing these two is like comparing apples and oranges.
Converting raw images from a digital camera is both art and science.
However, you will quickly run into many different acronyms if you try to find information about raw conversion on the net.
So, here's a list of acronyms that are often associated with Canon EOS digital SLR cameras (DSLRs). I also posted the same list to DPreview's Canon EOS-1D/1Ds/5D Forum.
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ACR = Adobe Camera Raw. A free plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Photoshop Elements 3 and 4. Available here: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html
BB, BBP = BreezeBrowser Pro. A commercial product from BreezeSystems. Link: http://www.breezesys.com/
C1, COne = Capture One. A product from Phase One (http://www.phaseone.com/). Available in Professional and LE versions.
CS, CS2 = Creative Suite, Creative Suite 2. The version number of certain Adobe products, including Photoshop.
DNG = Digital Negative. Adobe's open archival format for the raw image files. For details, see: http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/
DPP = Digital Photo Professional from Canon. The free program that comes with your camera.
NEF = Nikon's term for raw image data. (Canon uses file extensions .CRW and .CR2 depending on model.)
PS = Photoshop. Adobe's de-facto image manipulation software. Available in flagship Photoshop and cheaper "Elements" editions. See: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/.
RSE = RawShooter Essentials, a product from Pixmantec. See http://www.pixmantec.com/. The Essentials version is a free download.
RSP = RawShooter Premium. The commercial version of RawShooter. It has more features that RSE and supports the latest EOS models, like the 5D and 1D MkII N.
RCE = RawShooter Color Engine. A plug-in module for RawShooter Essentials and Premium.
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This morning it was a cloudy weather at about zero degrees centigrade, and so I decided to take my new camera to a walk.
I also took my tripod with me, and tested many different shots. Also, I tried my Hoya ND8 neutral density filter to blur the sea, but I guess I'll still need a darker filter (or two stacked together) for optimum results.
Other that that, I'm very happy with my shots! The camera is indeed demanding (plus, I made a couple of simple mistakes), but that was to be expected. Great, this is where I wanted to be. And it should only get better.
Now, for those programmers out there, I found an interested Russian web site with information about Canon EOS firmware hacking. Dunno about copyrights with this site, but anyway...
Today I fetched my first DSLR camera, the Canon EOS 5D. It looks and feels cool. :-) Compared to my full-manual Canon FTb from 1973, this thing is full of electronics and automation.
We'll see if I can tame the beast in the time coming. Unluckily, since it's winter time again, I won't be able to take any daylight shots until the coming weekend.
As a side note, I did quick checking if there is any information available on custom firmware development/programming for this camera.
I didn't find anything for 5D or 20D for that matter, but there was plenty of information regarding 300D. It uses a NEC processor which to me seems like a x86 compatible one, but I could be wrong. In any case, some kind of DOS variant is the operating system of these cameras.
November is a busy month for me, and two more of my articles have been published in Finnish IT magazines.
The articles are "Automaattisesti käynnistyvät sovellukset kuriin" in Tietokone 13/2005 and ".NET mobilisoituu" in Prosessori Nov/2005.
Enjoy!
Have you ever heard of Windows Quality Online Services? Well, I haven't. But, now that I have, I must say it sounds interesting.
Winqual, as the nick-name goes, is a web site that collects information about software crashes. When an application crashes on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, crash data is sent to Microsoft (if the user chooses to do so), and with Winqual, third-parties can analyze this data.
Sounds like interesting stuff to me. I need to investigate this further.
Yes, it is anything but a surprise, but still worth noting: Visual Studio 2005 was officially announced yesterday.
Althogh quality issues have been reported with the RTM version, I feel the 2005 version is a great release. Congrats to Microsoft for doing it.
You might have already heard that Microsoft is including a feature called "User Account Protection" (UAP) into their forth-coming operating system version, Windows Vista.
The idea of UAP is to help users run their application with low-privilege user rights, and only elevate their rights to higher level when needed. The point of this is to keep security at a high level at all times.
Current Windows versions have a problem in the regard, since many operations are only available to administrators. However, especially in home and small office use, it is pain to log in with administrator rights (even with the Run As feature) just to get something done.
This is something Vista tries to make better, and I believe there are good grounds for this. But naturally, help is needed from software developers. MSDN has a great article available about UAP, which I can recommend.
The second-last print issue of the The Delphi Magazine (TDM) features my latest Delphi article.
The article, titled "Beefing Up Delphi Web Apps With XMLHTTPRequest" is about AJAX programming with Delphi. If you are interested in this, go and grab yourself a copy.
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