The ACM Queue has an interesting article on Building Collaboration into an IDE. The authors have been prototyping a version of Eclipse where IM, source control, screen sharing, and email augment the IDE. The goal is to give you more time to code while you spend less outside the IDE or away from the desk. Another goal is to provide additional context and traceability between code artifacts (source code files) and collaborative artifacts (IMs and emails). I couldn’t stop thinking of questions and ideas while reading, particularly along the lines of how easy it might be to build this with Longhorn technologies....

Reporting Services has an online launch web cast tommorow (the 27th). I’ve never, ever, ever, been excited about report writing software, nor about integrating report writing software into a product. It is one of those mundane tasks you have to get tough and do now and then, like going to your bi-annual dental checkup. However, there is something about a web service API and an XML based report definition language that makes me want to give it a go soon and replace the “other” reporting software in a current application I work on. I’m not alone in thinking the “other”...

I’ve just about had it with my Sony MiniDisc Walkman. It’s not the hardware – it’s the bundled OpenMG Software. My latest disappointment comes when I try to listen to .NET Rocks! The Sony doesn’t actually play MP3 and WMA files - you need to use OpenMG to record the audio content to a MiniDisc which uses ATRAC encoding. This is how it all works in theory. .NET Rocks was the first chance I’ve had to record a WMA to the player. It turns out the OpenMG algorithm for WMA decoding looks something like this: ...

In my last post I was wondering how to set the MappingName property of a DataGridTableStyle object with some generic code. This morning I fire up my aggregator only to find Chris Sells was thinking along the same lines, and being Chris Sells – he also provides the answer I needed.  I love blogs - especially the ones from inside Microsoft. Once again I updated the Auto Resizing Columns In A Windows Form DataGrid article with the new found information.

I just updated an article on OdeToCode which resizes the columns in a Winforms DataGrid to match the longest content. Although I'm fairly happy with the reflection method - I'm still wondering how to determine the MappingName property without an ugly switch statement. This feature was in the early beta of VS.NET - I wonder why it dropped?

I know people who will laugh at me but I am positive Windows gets a really bad rap on uptime. I was in crunch mode recently and hammering on my 2000 Server desktop at the office. I’d actually terminal service into the machine on my desk (while at my desk) so when I had to leave I could just disconnect the session. Later I’d terminal service from home over a VPN and pick up right where I left off. At one point I began thinking it had been a long time since I logged out of this terminal service session,...

I found a few interesting downloads over the last couple days. The Open Watcom C/C++ compiler 1.2 Get the binaries and source code here. I have not used a Watcom compiler for 10 years but I am curious to peek around the source code. (via Slashdot). Microsoft has a 45 day trial download for Virtual PC. If you are a dev and not running a VPC of some sort, you probably should be. For those of you into OLAP: Creating Large-Scale, Highly Available OLAP Sites is a must read if you are rolling out a mission critical solution with Analysis Services. Many good...

I was experimenting with Whidbey and found some really nice new features. My favorite feature, however, is the new File-system web site. You can keep all the files for an ASP.NET app in a simple folder – no dependency on IIS! This is great news. On several occasions I’ve been driven to screaming fits of hysteria with Visual Studio and where I want a web application to be. I’m tired of editing virtual directory properties and hacking .webinfo files. Simply copying code to a different location or computer should not be this hard (or this hard). The first time I put an...

So I follow a medical informatics blog since it is sometimes relevant to software I’m currently working on. The blog had a post about an Alabama Hospital trying out an “RN Robot”. This reminded me of a Wired article last year about a Hopkins trail with a “robotic medical surrogate”. I found this article interesting but also amusing because of the following two excerpts: "People love it. I was very surprised how much our patients enjoy remote video interactions via the robot," says Dr. Louis Kavoussi, a Johns Hopkins professor of urology and a pioneer in robotic surgery … One...

Currently on my bad software list is the MSDN search engine. It seems it has been many months since the search engine worked well. Last night a search produced results where the same article appeared about 100 times in the result list. Search results never seem to find MSDN Magazine articles, unless you go to the home page and search just magazine content. It used to find them. It seems very broke. On the good software list is Virtual PC.I currently have the following Virtual PCs setup: Whidbey - Windows 2000 Server with the Whidbey beta installed RSBETA - Windows 2000...

A newsgroup posting caught my eye and took me to the home of the Microsoft Performance Team. They are working on a guide for anyone interested in the performance and scalability of .NET applications and soliciting feedback. After reading just two of the chapters (on ASP.NET and ADO.NET) I realized this guide is going to be the reference for .NET performance. It leaves very few stones unturned and mentions or references almost every perf tip I know of (and quite a few I did not). Why do jagged arrays perform better than multidimensional arrays? When could an ASPX page get...

Watched the season premier of Celebrity Mole. I think the first season of the Mole (no celebrities) was much better – the puzzles and games were more interesting and harder for the players to solve. On the other hand, there is a lot more comedy in the celebrity version. There are some genuinely funny moments, but I keep wondering, with celebrities, that some of what happens is scripted (or at least encouraged). So my first guess at the Mole? Dennis Rodman. Usually the Mole has a reserved personality. Most people would not describe Dennis as reserved - but - the...

I have the .Text engine running in an application underneath the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit. This required a bit of fiddling, because the CSK installs an HttpModule at the application root. When a request goes to the Blogs directory (.Text), the ASP.NET runtime doesn't find the CSK module in the .Text /bin directory and throws an exception (the assembly is in the CSK /bin directory - one level higher). I thought this would be easy to fix with a tweak in the <httpModules> section of the .Text web.config:     <remove name=“CommunitiesModule“ /> However, I was still getting an exception. After some google searches I...