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The Finnish Prosessori magazine has my three-page .NET/Visual Studio article and code example about Compact Framework (.NET CF) development. Also, the article demonstrates the use of a Qtek S200 Windows Mobile phone to develop a simple C# application.
Microsoft has some time ago announced a new version of the "Debug Diagnostic Tool" (DebugDiag) version 1.1 for debugging different types of applications, including those web apps running on IIS (Internet Information Server).
You can download your copy from MSFT Downloads.
In addition to the SQL Server service pack and the new Virtual PC 2007, there's also something being announced that interests me quite a lot, but is not related to software development. :-) It's a new high-end DSLR camera from Canon, namely the Canon EOS-1D Mark III. One word: Wow!
Taking a look at the specifications, there's a 10 megapixel sensor (OK) with 10 frames per second (impressive), Live View LCD (cool), new and lighter body with a shutter up to 300,000 shots (impressive, again), a new 45-point autofocus (AF) system (sounds great), two DIGIC III processors (sounds fast), and more. Good heavens, I want one! A completely another thing is whether I need one... :-)
As a not-so-small sidenote, Canon also announced a new EF 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, and a new EX580 flash. Not a small announcement for PMA.
I noticed just today that Microsoft has also announced a new version of its Virtual PC virtualization software, called Virtual PC 2007. The product is still freely downloadable, and there's also a Technical Overview document available (in XPS format).
Microsoft has announced the availability of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for their SQL Server 2005 database product. The service pack can be downloaded from Microsoft Downloads. Note that a different version exists if you are using SQL Server 2005 Express.
A list of fixes has also been published, along with a ReadMe document and updated Books Online (BOL) to reflect the changes and new features brought by the service pack.
Finally, after months of waiting, we are seeing the fruits of the spin-off from Borland, the new "developer company", CodeGear. Although I'm happy that there now exists a new version of Delphi, Delphi 2007 for Win32 and even a totally new product, called Delphi for PHP, I my criticize the silence during the first six months after after the announcement to sell the IDE tools. But history is history, and the products are here in March.
Of course, of these two products Delphi 2007 interests me most. It now fully supports Windows Vista, which is great -- including an enhanced set of VCL components for Vista use. Another interesting thing for web developers is the support for AJAX, but that could be something little too late, but once I get my hands on the final bits, I'll see. As for the PHP product, I'm not sure if I'm going to need one now that I've learned to love ASP.NET, but for some folks it could be just perfect.
Finally, a prediction. Although I didn't know a PHP product was in the works, I had seen all those PHP blog posts at CodeGear's blog, and it got me thinking that why would they blog about a "new" language (to CodeGear, that is) if something wasn't going on behind the scenes? Now then, they also talk about Ruby now and then, and thus I predict that a Ruby product will emerge in less than 18 months. Lets see if my prediction holds any value. :-)
Well, things happen. You might recall from my previous posts that I'm not a great fan of Adobe products (like Flash or Acrobat), but it seems the old Macromedia touch can still be seen in new products like Photoshop Lightroom, or "LR". I found it to be a product just like Dreamweaver: it just fits my hand well. Can't say that about Flash or Acrobat, though.
Nonetheless, Lightroom 1.0 is here -- it became available today. I immediately downloaded the trial version and used it on Windows Vista. Works like a charm even on VMware. I imported several dozens of photos, and tried keywording/tagging and developing them. Feels like a very capable and powerful tool, and neat to look at as well. I do have to seriously consider buying this product.
I woke up very early this morning, because my computer had started humming a lot. I checked what was the matter, and a piece of software I use every day had caught itself in an infinite loop, with the CPU utilization running at 100%.
I'm not sure how long it had been doing so before I woke up, but it got me thinking. During that malfunction, how many cents of electricity and how many grams of fossile fuels were wasted because the software malfunctioned?
Most people think that software is inherently green, because there's no waste. But, software runs the world, and creating software can be a major consumer of energy. As a software developer, you might still not view yourself as being part of the "save a tree" campaing. Furthermore, do you need to take part in the global climate discussions? My opinion is that, yes, you do. This is because software, even if it is itself "clean", it isn't produced cleanly, or doesn't consume any resources at run-time.
Instead, turn your thinking the other way around. For example, optimizing software can be thought of as a green act, because it can save CPU cycles, hard disk and memory. If you can't see the benefits on your own computer, think about copying your creation to 100 million computers. The numbers will add up!
Peer-to-peer is a magic word from few years back, and now Windows Vista provides us a new implementation of a nifty collaboration tool called Windows Meeting Space. For us software developers, what is the use of this utility? Well, you (and your team) could benefit from it just as other people, but there's another thing that matters to us: the APIs that Windows Meeting Space uses are open and available through the P2P.dll library (prototypes are declared in P2P.h). That's really cool!
For instance, there's PeerCollabEnumPeopleNearMe. I have to dig these interfaces once I have time, and see what they can do. Could be fun! :-)
In .NET, the support for almost automatic serialization can become very handy. Of course, since XML is everywhere, it is also possible to serialize objects into XML based formats with the XmlSerializer class from the System.Xml.Serialization namespace. However, if you've ever used this class, you might have noticed that it creates automatic namespaces "xmlns:xsi" and "xmlns:xsd" into the documents, something which you might find unnecessary. For example, a simple StringBuilder object might be serialized as follows:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <StringBuilder xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <Capacity>16</Capacity> <Length>0</Length> </StringBuilder>
Now then, the question is, how would you strip out or remove these default namespaces? Of course, there are many possibilities, but if your needs are simple, you could use the XmlDocument class and the following snippet of simple C# code:
// create an object to serialize StringBuilder testObject = new StringBuilder(); // create xml serializer XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(testObject.GetType()); // serialize to memory stream & load xml MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(); XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(); xmlSerializer.Serialize(stream, testObject); stream.Position = 0; doc.Load(stream); stream.Close(); // strip out default namespaces "xmlns:xsi" and "xmlns:xsd" doc.DocumentElement.Attributes.RemoveAll(); // save to file doc.Save(@"C:\Temp\Serialization Test.xml");
Here, the magic is done by the single call to "doc.DocumentElement.Attributes.RemoveAll". If you only have a single object serialized, the results will look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <StringBuilder> <Capacity>16</Capacity> <Length>0</Length> </StringBuilder>
The only problem with this code is that if you have multiple objects to serialize, you would need to repeat the call to the RemoveAll method for all top-level elements. Good luck!
CodeGear (Borland's new subsidiary) has today announced a new set of hotfixes for the Borland Developer Studio (BDS) product, including Delphi, C++Builder and the Turbo products.
CodeGear's Developer Newtork article 34049 contains download links to the patches and also lists briefly what has been fixed.
Mark Russinovich has started a new article series on the TechNet Magazine about Windows Vista's new kernel, and the enhancements and features thereof. The first article is now available at the February 2007 issue of the magazine, and is titled "Inside the Windows Vista Kernel: Part 1". The article is also naturally available online.
Yes, the TechNet Magazine is mainly for IT professionals, but that doesn't mean developers should avoid it. Instead, I've found many very interesting articles in it, which have also helped me to design better applications. And Mark's latest article doesn't fail in that perspective. Recommended reading!
I found on MSDN a page that interests me greatly: "Feature Specifications for Visual Studio and .NET Framework Orcas". This page contains a link to about 35 specifications and feature ideas about the forth-coming Visual Studio version/codename "Orcas". For instance, there's a plan to make Visual Studio support multiple framework versions with a project option, as detailed in the "Pseudo Multi-targetting" document.
Note that all the documents are in XPS format (XML Paper Specification), which requires you to install .NET Framework 3.0 so that you get the reader for these documents (if you are not using Vista already). But as an avid .NET developer, you probably already have .NET 3.0 isntalled. :-)
Finally, Ajax for ASP.NET 2.0 developers! Microsoft has just recently announced the availability of ASP.NET AJAX, version 1.0. Go download your copy today and start enhancing those C#/VB.NET web applications!
I recently downloaded the latest publicly available beta of Microsoft Expression Designer, which at this time is Beta 1. The beta itself is easy to install, however I had some real trouble to install the pre-requirements (.NET 3.0) on a Windows XP machine that had had several beta versions of .NET installed. Nonetheless, I got it working in the end.
The Expression product appears to work pretty well for a beta release, and I found the interface to be quite intuitive. Feels like an old Adobe product called ImageStyler, which I liked a lot for its simplicity. It is also very neat to be able to use the Edit / Copy XAML command (Ctrl+Shift+C) to copy any object(s) to the clipboard in XAML format, or simply export the whole drawing (file) as a XAML file.
You can download your own beta 1 release from Microsoft's web site.
The latest issue of the MSDN Magazine has a good introductory article about Microsoft's new tool for (SQL Server) database users: Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals.
Among other things, this new program, aimed at database people, allows them to:
Sounds like a good plan to me.
There are times when one needs to use the US keyboard layout on a non-US keyboard, and that can cause problems when you can't recall from the top of the head how to get letters such as [, ], \ and ? typed in.
Now, Wikipedia has a great article about the different keyboard layouts, and this article also has pictures of many of the available keyboard layouts, including United States, US-International and the one I use here, the Finnish/Swedish layout. Just for the future reference, here's a shot of the US keyboard layout:
It's February already! A quick update for today: a new "altered" photo has been posted, and I've also rescued one more archived article from 1998 onto my Publications page. The article is titled "How To: Screen Savers in Win95 ", and as the name suggests, this article talks about using Delphi 2 (from 1996!) to write screen savers without using the VCL. Enjoy!
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