Fridathon: unstructured learning or hacking you can opt-in to do on any random Friday.

  • Open source projects and irresponsible use of incompatible licenses

    Posted on July 28, 2005

    I started working on a sample app I want to build on top of CAB. I evaluated using RssBandit components to do the RSS parsing, NNTP reading and some other goodies it will have. Problem is that I don’t like the GPL license at all, so first thing I did was to check RssBandit license as listed in SourceForge. It says it’s BSD, cool. But looking at the dependencies the project has, I noticed it’s using the #ZipLib, which is GPL-licensed and explicitly states that “Linking this library statically or dynamically with other modules is making a combined work based... [Read More]

  • CAB (Composite UI Application Block) hands on labs @ Redmond: fully packed and fun!

    Posted on July 26, 2005

    We’re having our first lab on CAB, with people from all over the country (US). It went incredible well. People seem to find CAB very useful and intuitive so far, and they certainly think we’re solving a lot of the recurring problems they find when building rich smart client applications. We got lots of good feedback. Very engaging overall. We got a very cool lab room at building 20 that contained a huge proyector screen and 93 seats with fancy LCDs with movable arms. Impressive. There was also an entire fridge full of Haagen-Dazs ice cream, which is always a... [Read More]

  • Working for patterns & practices rocks

    Posted on July 8, 2005

    For quite some time now, I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in various projects from Microsoft patterns & practices. I’ve already posted about the previous war room we had and also mentioned that we were improving it. Here’s a picture of the setup process: Finally, some pictures of the CompositeUI application block team, and a couple EntLib guys too: This time I didn’t have time to add the bubbles showing the names of each, but I will, eventually :o) [Read More]

  • How to show commands in a web project command bar

    Posted on July 1, 2005

    In the good old days of Everett (VS 2003), all project kinds, either web, win, class library, etc, shared the same command bar. You could put a command in all of them at once just by adding to that one. Nowadays, web projects (Venus) no longer use the C#/VB project systems. Hence, your commands in projects that were supposed to appear on web projects too, will certainly dissapear. In GAT, you specify the command bar you want a command to appear, as follows: [Read More]

  • Composite UI Application Block is out!

    Posted on July 1, 2005

    Peter is much more elocuent than me, so I’ll let you read his post with the announcement. CAB is a very important step forward for developing rich client applications with good architectural design. Don’t miss it if you’re doing/planning to do any further WinForms development. [Read More]