Back to Blog index.
I to my disappointment, I tried testing Windows Vista build 5384 with VMware today, but it has a drawback: I cannot access the Internet inside the virtual machine. Very sad!
So far, I haven't yet been able to solve the issue, but honestly I haven't yet spent too much time with the issue yet. The previous betas worked like a dream in this regard. VMware Support forums also didn't seem to contain anything about this issue, but I guess I'm not alone. Gotta try VMware on another PC to see if it helps.
CodeZone is Microsoft's open community web site devoted to .NET and Visual Studio programming. I try to help the Finnish CodeZone site as time allows, and yesterday I had time for another short article.
This time, my article demonstrates how to create a very simple new component with C# and how to install it into the Toolbox in Visual Studio 2005. The article is in Finnish and titled "Oman komponentin luominen". Enjoy!
If you have ever had problems with security and permissions with .NET applications, you might have noticed that it can be tricky to solve which permissions you need to give your application for it to work. And it gets even worse if you are dealing with an application you didn't write!
Now, the .NET 2.0 SDK contains a handy command-line tool called PermCalc.exe to help you with these issues. The Permission Calculator Tool takes an .EXE or a .DLL file (assembly), and analyzes it. The result is an XML file, which contains, among other things, the permissions needed by the application, by each class or namespace. And even though the tool itself only comes with .NET 2.0, it can also analyze older .NET 1.1 applications.
I today noticed a new web page devoted to Windows Vista and WinFX (.NET) programming, called WinFXGuide.
Currently, this site contains links to other sites, but it promises to have it's own articles as well. All the most importants parts, WPF, WCF and WF (WWF) have their own sub-sites.
It seems Borland's DTG (Developer Tools Group, a.k.a. "DevCo") is back at the fast lane. That's great!
Michael Swindell posted few days ago a blog post and requested the community to send in their ideas about the DTG, it's new name, and so forth. It's time for you to participate.
If you have been using Borland products during the past few years, you must have noticed that most of the their products now require activation, usually through the Internet.
Now, all these activations and registrations go to one large database, that is called Sanctuary internally. Since I'm working for a Borland reseller, I often need to requiest somebody from Borland to open up more registrations for our customers, for example because they need to install Delphi into another machine, or move InterBase to a more powerful server, etc.
However, the problem has been that this database is internal to Borland, and nobody outside can access it. But today, this changed as BDN (Borland Developer Network) opened a new account service that has a button to view "My Registered Products". This lists shows the public information in the Sanctuary database associated with your e-mail address. Take a look, it's a great addition to the site!
It was maybe a year ago, when I first hear about Microsoft's Singularity project. It is a research project at Microsoft that studies the possibility to build a new operating system that supports only managed code. The idea is that current operating systems require too much overhead on managed applications, such as those using .NET or Java. If the operating system would run managed code "natively", then such application could perform better. At the same time, many security vulnerabilities would be history, given that the OS itself would be flawless.
There's also a recent MSDN Magazine article that discussed Singluarity. It reminded me again of this project, since I had already forgotten about it. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see what could come out of this project.
Finally there's a programmer's text editor that supports the "Duplicate Line" command. This is great, since I've been waiting for this feature since I stopped using SemWare's legendary QEdit in DOS (I can still remember the F4 key, which was the one to duplicate the current line). You could still use QEdit under Windows, but I prefer a GUI instead nowadays:
The editor that supports the Duplicate Line is UltraEdit from IDM Computer Solutions. This is a lucky thing, since UltraEdit also happens to be my favorite text/hex editor. I've so far been using version 10.20, but the newest 12.10 version support also code folding, multiple clipboards and Unicode, which are all features I've been waiting to see. It is time for an upgrade. For only $40, that's well spent dollars.
Taking photos has never been easier and more fun with digital cameras, but the problem is that many photos just sit on their user's hard drive, because they don't know how to share them.
Of course, there are dozens of tools available to help with this, such as Google's Picasa, but did you know also Microsoft has developed one? Well, it is called Max, and the interesting thing is that is build on top of Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF, a.k.a. Avalon. That's exciting, especially as I today watched a video from MSDN TV about what WPF can do. Amazing stuff.
If you have used .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, you might have noticed the new build engine, called MSBuild. This is the Microsoft incarnation of the famous (in C++ circles, anyway) MAKE tool.
The latest issue of MSDN magazine has an interesting article about the basics (and more) about the new Microsoft build engine. I just wish Borland would integrate MSBuild or something similar with their future version of BDS.
I had the chance to meet a Borland representative here in Helsinki today, and from what I heard, things are starting to look better for the "Developer Tools Group" inside Borland, or "DevCo".
We discussed the forthcoming products and roadmaps, and there are going to be new releases on all fronts. That is good, although I'd personally like to see some real dates, even if they would slip. I also helped to compile a "wish list" for the new company so that they can get up to speed quickly. Who knows, we might already have more news during the summertime.
I finally got something working I've been interested in doing for a long time: using Delphi to write Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, aka Avalon) applications. Well, today I finally got it working, and I feel excited!
I'd love to give you the details here, but since I'm just preparing an article about Windows Vista for The Delphi Magazine, I'll save the details there. If you cannot wait, send me some e-mail.
If you have been following MSDN closely, especially Exchange Server programming, and have read through my past blog entries, you might recall the codename Monad, the .NET version of CMD.EXE, the command-line shell of Windows. Now, Monad had become a public beta program, and there's also an official name for the product: it is called Windows PowerShell. I'm sure most IT pros will run into it sooner or later, so take note of the name. And remember, you heard it here first. :-)
After downloading and installing Borland Developer Studio 2006 Update 2 (Delphi 2006 Update 2), I thought I'd recompile an old .NET 1.1 WinForms application that I wrote with BDS 2005.
When you open an older project with BDS 2006, it is clever enough to convert your assembly references for the 2006 release (BDS 4.0 internally). This step goes nicely, but one I played around a bit with my application, I suddenly started to get these error messages when pressing F9 to run the application:
Project MyDelphiProject.exe encountered unhandled exception class System.Resources.MissingManifestResourceException with message 'Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture (or the neutral culture) in the given assembly. Make sure "QueryForm.resources" was correctly embedded or linked into assembly "MyDelphiProject".
Now, I recall running into this problem earlier already with Delphi 2005, but then I thought it was just an user error. However, now I managed to run into the same problem many times, and thus I want to show you the workaround. (I'm still unable to exactly reproduce the problem, but it will happen with WinForms applications.)
The problem occurs because Delphi somehow truncates your resource file references in your project's .DPR file. For each WinForm in your application, there should be an $R directive with the following format:
{$R 'unit.form-class-name.resources' 'unit.resx'}
However, for some reason, Delphi sometimes truncates these to simply:
{$R 'unit.resources' 'unit.resx'}
That is, the name of WinForms class is left out. If this happens, your project will not either compile and/or will refuse to run. To fix it, simply return the $R directives to their prior state.
I attended an Intel software reseller meeting earlier this week in Munich, Germany. It was nice to learn how the hardware giant things about software development (FORTRAN isn't dead), and how multicore processors will be the future.
These multicore processors will also require attention from us software developers. Most applications today are single-threaded, but that won't just do with the newest processors, and even less with future processors. If you want to offer the best to your customers, think how you could start making your applications multi-threaded.
Lately, I've needed to test and install lots of different software: small utilities, bigger applications, and many things in between. And I thank God that VMware has been invented. Otherwise, I'd screwed my Windows installation many times already.
It's time that installation program developers act up. Yes, if you develop applications to the masses, it is good and necessary that installation is simple and smooth. Not that many questions need to be asked.
But, when it comes to power users, does your installation program give the options to choose what the installation program should do? Think about it: how many times have you installed an application just to see that a new folder has been created under My Documents? Or that Windows Shell or Internet Explorer settings have been changed without asking if that was OK? Or, custom toolbars have just popped up in Word?
Personally, I just hate when applications do that. Yes, I too want to have easy installation programs. But, when I choose the Custom setup (I always do), where are my choices? Nowadays, almost the only differences between the standard and custom setup routines is the fact that with the latter, you can select which program options are installed. But nothing else.
That is wrong. A custom setup should give the options to the user. Of course, that means that creating installation programs comes more difficult. But, if you don't understand why you should spend more time writing those custom installer options, or worse, you don't know how to do it, then you shouldn't be writing installation programs in the first place. Sorry, but that's the way it goes.
There seems to be conflicting news about what Borland is doing at the moment in regards to the company without the development tools. Yesterday, eWeek reported that Borland lays of about 300 people.
But at the same time, Borland has announced a new organizational structure. That is to say that the "DevCo" is now a really separate unit within Borland. The interesting bit is that this press release is still not visible on Borland's official press release page.
So far, if you wanted to keep the files in, say, your laptop safe, you had used products like Utimaco SafeGuard Easy or PGP's new Whole Disk Encryption (WDE). But, Microsoft is not letting other products grab the whole market. Instead, it is introducing a feature called BitLocker Drive Encryption (BDE) on Windows Vista operating system.
At this point, there's already quite a lot of information available regarding the BitLocker technology, TechNet being one. But what would this kind of feature mean for software developers? Think about the older Encrypting File System (EFS). Do you need to know this feature exists?
The answer is yes and no. As for your application, using EFS is transparent; you can continue to use your files exactly the same way even if they are encrypted by EFS. But, as a developer you also need to think about security, and it is your part to educate that your customers can use EFS to enhance the security of your application. So at least for performance, security and troubleshooting purposes, yes, you need to be aware of EFS. The exact same applies to BitLocker. And of course, these two technologies can help you keep your own files secure, too.
› Blog Archive