Andrej Tozon's blog

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VS 2005 July CTP

I've been working with Visual Studio 2005 intensively for over a month now and one thing that annoyed me most was this bug, which caused certain keys to stop responding in VS IDE. It first happened during my VSTO presentation on NTK and its been haunting me ever since.
I downloaded and installed July CTP a few days back and after experimenting with it a bit, I decided to go with it completely. Keys dont seem to freeze anymore, IDE looks more responsive, there are a few new settings and some cosmetic changes (like tabs).
VS installation, however, indicated that SQL Server Express did not install correctly, but looks like its working anyway.
On top of all, WSE 3.0 July CTP, which goes along with VS2005 July CTP, was also released yesterday.
Busy summer

On a side note VS 2005 Beta 2 VPC image is also available for MSDN subscribers. Yes, the whole shebang (Windows 2003, Office 2003, VS 2005 Beta 2, SQL Server 2005 CTP) already installed and ready to use.

Microsoft NTK2005 conference, Portoroz

I'm back from the 10th NT conference, held in Portoroz, Slovenia, where I gave a talk about Visual Studio Tools for office 2005 and had a lab on deploying applications using ClickOnce. I will post PowerPoint presentations and demos on this site in a few days. If you have a question about using these new exciting tools and technology, you're more than welcome to post a comment here or email me.

CodeZone SI/SLODUG portal

There's a discussion going on here and here about the new SLODUG portal, which was recently put up by local developers' community. By the developers, for the developers. So, what's the problem? I don't really know the reason why they decided on the MS' CodeZone implementation; personally I think it's not intuitive, limited and somehow outdated. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly agree we developers need a meeting place to share our knowledge but the problem might lie elsewhere. Go to David’s si.Blogs page and count how many developers’ blogs are listed. Not many. I think we should first encourage our developers to start their own blogs by putting up a site like www.codebetter.com or www.dotnetjunkies.com, then syndicate all blog entries and integrate them with a simple forum (e.g. in a way that blog comments show up as forum posts). Looks like codezone-si certainly is going this way, but the tool, chosen for this, might be a bit awkward.

I wish the codezone-si catches on, we need this kind of community. However, making people contribute to it, is another story.

 

Patterns & Practices Enterprise Library

If you ever used any of the Microsoft Application blocks  in your application, you'll love the Enterprise Library, released by Microsoft Patterns and Practices group. The library is composed of seven application blocks, all extendable, designed to work together and, what's best, very easy configurable with new  Enterprise Library Configuration Console.

The library includes QuickStart samples (C# and VB.NET), application blocks' source code (with unit tests).

Excellent stuff. Go get it!

news:// in the Outlook Express

Wow, so long time and no posts…

Anyway, this one took me quite some time to figure it out: I use Outlook Express as a newsgroup reader and I was used to starting it by simply typing news:// in the command prompt. I don’t know, I’m just more of a keyboard guy and I liked this shortcut; I don’t really use desktop icons and, if possible, start Word by typing winword.exe.
So, invoking OE from the command prompt worked fine for me, until I installed XP SP2 on my machine. From that moment on, OE just wouldn’t  show me newsgroup posts anymore. All the newsgroups were there, the posts were retrieving from the server successfully, except when I clicked on one to see the whole post, this app just moved the selection focus to the newsgroup name again. Weird. I knew this was somehow connected to the security enhancement features of SP2, but I just couldn’t find any information about this issue anywhere on the net. Maybe because this wasn’t really an issue. After a month or two, I asked myself a question: how many people starts their OE the way I do? And I went and finally started it “the proper way” – by Start menu. Woohoo, works.

Google Desktop Search

Wow! When I installed Lookout a couple of months ago I thought it was great having all of my emails indexed for instant access. And now comes this great tool from Google. First, it installs as its own web server running on port 4664. After that, it indexes some of your office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Email (Outlook, Outlook Express), temporary internet pages and AOL IM conversations. It even integrates into your common Google search page (http://www.google.com/) by adding the Desktop option on the page and including your desktop hits among the web results. Searching speed is just amazing. Very useful also for searching for the files you know you once downloaded from the web but cant remember which folder you have put them in :) As this is a beta product, I am sure they will add indexing support for even more file types in the future. Cant wait.

Other news Im excited about: Looks like Visual Studio 2005 is going to support C# Edit and Continue feature after all. Yes!