Thoughts about .NET. Thoughts about code.
Posted in .NET on Jan 13th, 2006
OK let’s do a simple review here. SQL Server 2005 was in development for what? Five years? Give or take a year. That is sixty months, or 1800+ days, however you want to look at it. A good portion of that time was waiting for .NET 2.0 to stabilize so that the CLR could be [...]
I’ve been bumping into Billy Hollis at developer events for the last ten years. Last time I saw him, we were riding in a taxi in Sydney Australia with a tremendous thunderstorm raging outside the cab. If you know Billy, you know that he was telling stories — funny and profound, all the way back [...]
Posted in .NET, VisualStudio on Nov 7th, 2005
Microsoft announced the pricing today for Visual Studio Express and SQL Server Express. Total cost to you, $0.00
That’s right, free, nada, nothing. This is really an INCREDIBLE deal.
From the Microsoft FAQ:
We are announcing a pricing promotion for Visual Studio Express – for the first year after the products launch on November 7th, 2005, customers [...]
Posted in .NET, Conference on Oct 23rd, 2005
It’s over, the first ever Seattle Code Camp in officially over. I spent Saturday and Sunday down in Federal Way Washington participating in sessions and workshops, meeting people and presenting several talks about programming. There were nearly 70 sessions scheduled in eight separate rooms. There were LOTS of sessions that I wanted to attend. Like [...]
Posted in .NET on Jul 27th, 2005
It’s finally happening. I’ve been talking to everyone I know at Microsoft about the benefits of distributing beta software releases as Virtual PC images. See this post from last year. Yes, nearly a year since I first thought of the idea and it has become a reality.
I’d like to think that I had something to [...]
Posted in .NET on Jul 24th, 2005
I’m really impressed with .NET 2.0. We’ve all seen the big changes (ASP.NET WebParts, Improved DataGrids, Generics, etc.) I’m constantly finding a new improvement or little nugget of goodness when coding.
Help
Case in point. The MSDN help files. Everyone always makes jokes about how badly the MSDN .NET help are written. It seems that the help [...]
It’s common in web programming to place links to resources on a page. The hyperlink tag is on nearly every page on your website. But what about Windows Forms?
In .NET it is easy to add a hyperlink to a form. At least it looks and acts like a hyperlink.
Add a LinkLabel to the form.
Change the [...]
Posted in .NET on Apr 15th, 2005
I learned a new Visual Studio keyboard shortcut today. Hide all the tool-bars (including docked windows) with Shift-Alt-Enter. Show them again with the same combination.
Posted in .NET on Mar 21st, 2005
I’m working on a website project for the next month or so. I was told that the site needs to look good in 800 x 600 resolution. That’s about half the size of my laptop monitor! I need to quickly size a window to a known size. I used to use a tool (BrowserSizer) but [...]
Posted in .NET on Mar 9th, 2005
If you are a .NET developer you know about the CLR. That big runtime that hosts our code and manages many of the features we take for granted in .NET. Improvements to the CLR will benefit any .NET application irregardless which language it was written. I’m sitting in Kit George’s CLR session here at the [...]