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If you are using Delphi, you might be aware of the code editor keyboard shortcut Ctrl+O,O (letter O, not zero) that puts the currently set compiler directives at the top of the currently active file. This shortcut, although no corresponding menu command is available, is useful when you want to remember which were those available compiler directives, especially $WARN and so on.
Since I had both Delphi 2006 (officially Borland Developer Studio 2006) and Delphi 2007 for Win32 installed on my laptop, I decided to quickly compare these versions. I noticed that Delphi 2007 has the following directives that Delphi 2006 doesn't support:
{$WARN TYPEINFO_IMPLICITLY_ADDED ON}
{$WARN XML_WHITESPACE_NOT_ALLOWED ON}
{$WARN XML_UNKNOWN_ENTITY ON}
{$WARN XML_INVALID_NAME_START ON}
{$WARN XML_INVALID_NAME ON}
{$WARN XML_EXPECTED_CHARACTER ON}
{$WARN XML_CREF_NO_RESOLVE ON}
{$WARN XML_NO_PARM ON}
{$WARN XML_NO_MATCHING_PARM ON}
So basically, the new directives are related to XML processing.
PS. CodeGear's web site has a new look, check it out!
Microsoft today announced that Windows Server Code Name "Longhorn" Beta 3 is now ready for download to TechNet and MSDN subscribers. For example, Longhorn includes the newish Windows PowerShell, which is a .NET based command shell that supports powerful scripting. And of course, there's IIS 7.0 as well for hosting web applications and web services.
I today noticed a nice little VMware Workstation 5.5 utility that I had forgotten: the Virtual Machine Importer that comes with VMware. This nifty tools allows you to convert Symantec/Norton Ghost and LiveState (nowadays Backup Exec System Recovery) images into VMware virtual harddisk images. The reason I had forgotten about this tool is that it lives in the Common Files directory, and doesn't have its own Start menu icon in Windows. But, it is available here (if you used the default paths when installing):
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VMware\VMware Virtual Machine Importer\v2vapp.exe
If you use Ghost or LiveState like I do, give V2VApp a try!
Certainly a nice birthday present from Microsoft: Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" is now available from MSDN as a Virtual PC (VPC) image. This Beta 1 release also includes Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Beta 1. Can't wait to get my hands on this virtual image!
Another free test from Microsoft: Application Platform Self-Assesment survey. This five-step questionnaire is aimed at ISVs, and with about 25 questions, you are given a simple indication whether you are going in the right direction and designing your applications so that they are modern and "people ready".
Microsoft has developed a free, ActiveX based testing tool for Internet connections and routers: Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool. The tool "checks your Internet router to see if it supports certain technologies. You can use this tool on a PC running either the Windows Vista or Windows XP operating system." If you want to make sure your connection and/or router is compatible with Windows Vista, you might want to give this tool a try.
Localizing applications (changing their user interface language into another language, among other things) can be difficult. For example, Visual Studio 2005 and C# let you set a Windows Forms' application form's Localizable property to true, and then work your way from there.
However, the problem becomes more difficult if you need to hand your application to be translated to another company, who are not software developers. They might not have Visual Studio, or might not know how to use it. In these situations, you might need to copy all text to an Excel spreadsheet, send it out, and then manually integrate the changes back. Additional issues like text that should not be translated (like URLs) can arise, unless the translation company is a good one.
W3C tries to address these issues with an XML based file format named Internationalization Tag Set (ITS), version 1.0. This is an interesting new specification, but I'd say there's still long way to go before this specification would work its way up to both .NET Framework and Visual Studio. But is is worth checking out, nonetheless.
This month, both the Finnish Tietokone and Prosessori magazines have pubclished my articles. In Tietokone, there's an article about Windows Vista and application compatibility. Then, Prosessori has my column about software components and their development/choosing.
Microsoft has just announced a new web site devoted to promote Visual Studio 2005 Team System: Defy All Challenges. This Flash-only (ugh) site is a game-like experience that displays a virtual world and along the way shows videos and other information about Windows Vista, Office 2007 and of course Visual Studio.
The site looks great if you like the Doom style interface. Personally I found the site a bit difficult to navigate, but then again, I'm not one to play the modern games. Commodore 64 is still fine by me. :-)
I had the pleasure attending Intel Software's two-day "Intel EMEA Software Conference 2.0" in Lisbon, Portugal, Sana Metropolitan Hotel. I enjoyed all the technical sessions I attended, even though I couldn't attend the first few sessions of the 1st day because of my flight schedules. Especially James Reinders' presentation "Think Parallel or Perish" gave me new ideas about developing applications for those new multi-core processors.
Also, we had a lovely dinner at the St. George's Castle on top of the hills, great views from down there at sunset. Looking forward to the next conference!
Announcement day for Microsoft today: the codename Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (or WPF/E for short) is now called Microsoft Silverlight, as announced yesterday. For us developers, there's also a (and has been for a while already) a developer center on MSDN about WPF/E. They talk about Silverlight already on the front page, but most of the material still refers to the old codename.
What's also interesting is that Adobe has also just today announced Adobe Media Player (Flash needed, surprised?). And as eWeek reports, Microsoft thinks Silverlight is more than a Flash alternative. One thing is for sure: the competition around interactive web content is heating up.
Have you heard about .NET Micro Framework? It "the reliability and efficiency of managed code for developing embedded applications on small devices". And yes, you can use Visual Studio to do the job. However, compared to for example Windows CE, .NET Micro Framework does not support real-time functions, but other than that, many familiar .NET features are available nonetheless. Check out the MSDN developer center for the Micro Framework today for more details.
Friday evening, and time for some Commodore 64 gaming! Always happy with the classic Last Ninja, I decided to give it a try. However, I got stuck with the Triad cheat module, and I had to press all kinds of keys to finally figure it out (think a cat walking on the keyboard). So, I decided to share what I found.
Once you have your emulator (I use the CCS64 v3.1) running, choose File/Load C64 Files/Disk Drive/Device 8. Now navigate to your Last Ninja disk 1 (download here!), and press F2 to load and run the game. You will get to the Triad intro screen.
Now, press Space or fire button 1 on your joystick (on port 1). In the "Last Ninja Cheat By Mr.Z Of Triad" menu, you have three choices: Limited Lives, Starting Level and Start The Game.
Like I noted, it is a bit tricky to navigate between the three options, though, and the game can appear to freeze or hang at this point. But it is not, you just have to know what to press. In the CCS64 v3.1 emulator, you need to press Tab+Q to move to the next option and Enter to change option value. Finally, press Enter to start the game.
This screen is part of the real game (not the cheat anymore), and thus you need to set your joystick onto port 2. Now press Space to get that game started and the legendary music going!
Good luck!
A tip I noticed from a fellow ITpro.fi member: Windows Vista introduces the tiny little command named "clip.exe" which allows you to copy the output of a command-line application to the clipboard. By using the pipe command | you can forward the first command's output to be pasted further into another Windows application, such as Notepad or Outlook. Here's an example:
ipconfig | clip
A useful tool for those of us who already use Vista and/or Longhorn.
DotNETSlackers is running a LINQ introduction article series, that I found to be a good intro to the subject. They use C# for the sample code. If you haven't yet taken the time to check what's coming with the next version of Visual Studio and C# 3.0, this is one simple way to get started.
Many applications process vast amounts of data, and need to perform well in these situations. Intel has delivered many extensions to its famous x86 instruction set, such as MMX, SSE and SSE2. Although I don't code directly with the assembly language much anymore, I'm still happy to use class libraries and frameworks that are optimized for multimedia, high-speed calculations, etc.
With the forth-coming 45 nanometer (nm) processors (codenamed Penryn), Intel is announcing SSE4, a new collection of over 50 new machine language instructions to help multimedia data processing applications, and even compilers. There's a Intel white paper available that details these new instructions.
What's interesting in many of these new instructions is that they are quite high level, compared to many primitive x86 instructions such as MOV, ADD, and so on. Although the Intel architecture is one of the most widely-used CISC architectures, still proposition still holds.
However, with SSE4, we developers get our hands on instructions that help us calculate CRC32, manipulate strings, count the number of enabled/set bits in a value, round floating point values, and find min/max values even with a single instruction. Wow, I must say!
I can imagine how much these additions could make applications more performant. Can't wait to have the .NET runtime to support these new instructions in the IL-to-x86 JIT compiler.
In the April issue of the Finnish Tietokone magazine, "JK" sent feedback about my recent Windows Vista tips article. His painpoints seemed to be that I was not able to deliver eight proper tips (gaming is not a proper tip) and I worst of all, I happened to suggest trying out XPS, when everybody else uses PDF. Let's take the case of XPS first.
The state of things today is that you can't create PDF files with Windows itself. To be able to do that, you will need either Office 2007 from Microsoft, of any of the available third-party applications. Adobe, Jaws, Nuance, etc. Even though it would be great if Vista could be able to print PDF files out of the box, it just won't. PDF is the current industry standard, but I fail to understand why a little competition from Microsoft would do harm -- especially when PDF and XPS are different in both aim and functionality. When sending documents to a friend/colleague, it is still better to send XPS files than the original Word or Excel documents, if the idea is that the receiver doesn't need to modify the document.
Yes, I am for standards (what would be the Internet for example without TCP/IP?), but JK's letter gives the impression that if it's a Microsoft invention, it must be bad -- if it is by Adobe or anybody else, it's always good. And, if I happen to like a Microsoft feature, I must be a sales guy. Hmm.
As far as technology goes, PDF is far from perfect, and since I have a programming background, I do like XPS because of its power, conceptual simplicity (XML+ZIP) and because it can be quite easily created from applications. PDF was never that, and most probably won't. Like many of Adobe's creations, PDF is nice and pretty, but not easy to use/create/automate (pick your poison) in the enterprise. In short, the XPS Writer virtual printer just happens to be part of Vista, and it is not my interest to keep quiet of the feature just because some people don't like it.
Finally, the letter mentioned wasting space to mention Chess and Mahjong in Vista as a power user tip. Well, unlike JK said, there never was Mahjong in Windows, until now with Vista. And since we IT professionals/developers use our computers thousands of hours yearly, it is only clever to chill out sometimes -- even in front of that same PC.
Seems like Microsoft has listened to its developers: two of the new Expression products are now part of MSDN Premium! That's a great addition to the developer's "dream pack" what MSDN is, at least in my opinion: all goodies in your hands. According to Somasegar's blog entry, the Expression Web and Blend (once it is ready) will be available to MSDN subscribers. Hopefully, we developers soon get our hands on the other Express products as well. :-)
Happy Easter to everybody!
Now that Office 2007 is here with its XML based file formats (such as .docx for Word and .xlsx for Excel), the question about how to read these files from .NET/C# code quickly arises.
Luckily, MSDN has a new article to demonstrate this. The article shows how to unpack the ZIP file format using the classes in the System.IO.Packaging namespace, and then use regular XML techniques to read data from an Excel spreadsheet. There are also Code Snippets available to extend Visual Studio's IntelliSense.
Of course, you will also need to understand the file formats. Luckily, the specifications are public, and an ECMA-376 standard. The specification documents are available for free in five parts. It is interesting to note how the Office documents are much smaller than the PDF counterparts. Co-incidence?
Also, eWeek also just reported that the document specifications will probably get an ISO standard stamp before the cold autumn evenings are here.
I received an e-mail from Microsoft today -- one that I confess I had waited to arrive. And it did.
The e-mail awarded me the MVP status for another year, I'm very happy to be part of the gang again. It is now the third time for me in a row, but even so, I don't think one gets the nomination easily. The due thanks go to Microsoft!
Welcome, April! It's no wonder that today many companies have a tongue in the cheek, and Google is no exception. See for example their TiSP announcement, the Toilet Internet Service Provider. Want one? Call +1 650-253-4713 today. :-)
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