October 16, 2003

Radio must have sensed that I was considering switching blogging tools, since it started working again. My Radio has been completely unresponsive for the last few days, and just now it woke up. Anyway I'm playing with .Text, an interesting blogging tool that's especially interesting to me because it's open source and written in C# so I can do whatever I want with it. I know Radio is insanely powerful if you understand how to develop for it, but I don't.  I believe in the stuff Microsoft is dong to try to make it that your application exposes a scripting interface, and then developers can write stuff in whatever language they want.  I can control Word from Cobol.NET if I want to.  Therefore I don't really want to spend the time learning the custom scripting language that Radio uses since that's something I can only use in one place. My .Text blog is here. 7:58:44 AM    comment [] trackback []

October 6, 2003

While trying to figure out why VS.NET can't debug on my server, following some instructions, I ran aspnet_regiis.exe -i to reinstall the .NET script mappings.  This reset the security in my server such that it refused to run any .aspx file.  Pretty scary thing to have happen to your webserver, let me tell you.  It was easy to fix once I figured out what had happened, but for a while none of my web stuff worked and I had no idea why.   6:41:48 PM    comment [] trackback []

October 1, 2003

I want to post articles on the various problems I ran into making my .NET app into something complete (sometimes it's the details that take the most time).  Here's one:  How to let your system shut down properly when your app doesn't respond to the window close button by exiting.   7:57:57 AM    comment [] trackback []

September 30, 2003

I'm working on an end user GUI piece of software in C#! Wow, it took a while to get here but.. cool.  There's still a chance that the client might decide that requiring end users download and install the framework is a bad idea, but I hope that doesn't happen.  The software itself is pretty cool, hopefully I'll be able to link to it from here in a few days. I ran into some limitations of Windows Forms that I didn't expect, just stupid things.  You can't decide, based on a command line argument, whether your main form should be hidden or not, for example.  You can Hide() in Form.Load() but the decision of whether to maximize, minimize, hide or show the app normally is made after Form_Load.  What I ended up doing is trapping WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING and just tossing the first show window message.  That's not perfect. Another limitation is there is no equivalent of the FlashWindow API.  If you want to draw attention to your window without forcing it in the user's face, well, you can't.  I ended up using P/Invoke to call Win32 USER.DLL functions to get this stuff done, but that's ugly.  You shouldn't ever have to drop to Win32 in a Windows Forms app, IMHO.   6:31:45 PM    comment [] trackback []

September 28, 2003

Remotesoft Linker looks like a very interesting option for distributing .NET apps without the 23 meg overhead of the framework itself.  I need something like that right now.   6:43:02 PM    comment [] trackback []

September 24, 2003

AMD has released their 64 bit desktop chip, the Athlon 64.  Tom's Hardware Guide has a great review of it online, as do most other sites. Every review mentions the lack of native 64 bit software, and that's a good point, but one angle I haven't seen covered is that any JITted software, such as .NET code or Java byte code that's being executed by a 64 bit version of the runtime, becomes native 64 bit software. Now that we're going to have both the Itanium and Athlon 64 instruction sets, as well as the 32 bit x86 instruction set, developers are going to have to choose what targets they want to support.  Except for .NET developers, whose applications will run unchanged on any of them!  (And Java developers of course, they have the same benefit). I'm looking forward to seeing how the 64 bit CLR performs once one becomes available.   8:20:39 PM    comment [] trackback []

September 23, 2003

I added an entry to my "High-Quality Free Windows Software" page, for Avant Browser.  It's a web browser replacement that adds tabs and popup blocking, and does it in a fairly intuitive manner - it's become my main browser. I'm not sure why good quality free Windows software is so rare - most Windows software projects seem to be demoware or shareware or restricted in some way unless you pay.  Contrast this with Linux where you can get tons of completely free software from Freshmeat.  So I'm doing my bit to link to the ones that I consider cool..   8:40:13 AM    comment [] trackback []