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

  • When a bug becomes a really useful feature

    Posted on September 24, 2004

    I have to take quite a few screenshots for Victor’s and mine last book and they have to be taken with 120dpi screen resolution. There’s no way I will use such resolution in my laptop, and I also have to test the app in a fresh machine. Of course, the solution is using virtual machines, and I started using VPC 2004. Well, I’m a keyboard guy, and as soon as I discovered that there’s no way of getting out of the VM control unless you click on the host machine, I started to get annoyed. Just by chance, I discovered... [Read More]

  • How to make Microsoft work for you

    Posted on September 24, 2004

    Microsoft Patterns & Practices (a.k.a. PAG or Prescriptive Arquitecture Guidance) ships guides and application blocks based mostly on customer feedback. They are now working on the next generation of Smart Client tools. If you develop rich client apps, you know it’s not easy to be “smart” besides just being “rich”. Now you have an opportunity to put MS to work on your problems by filling the survey they prepared for that. Believe me, they do extensive analysis on these surveys, and they definitely shape what’s delivered. [Read More]

  • Microsoft is listening

    Posted on September 11, 2004

    You may have heard about the MSDN Product Feedback Center: it’s MS’s new way of communicating with the community of users of their products, not only to report bugs but to receive suggestions. At first, I wouldn’t believe what they said: that most of what you enter in this site goes directly to the appropriate product group real bug database. I saw it with my own eyes. Believe it, and take advantage of it. I’ve reported some that have been fixed, and some others that are not fixed but allowed us to know why MS made certain decisions. You can... [Read More]

  • Behave properly on your posts

    Posted on August 2, 2004

    It’s rewarding to see other bloggers using the same approach I’ve been using for quite a while for collapsing code regions that maybe be of interest of those who want a closer look at what you’ve done, but not to all readers, specially on the aggregated site. If we could just get everyone else using the same, the main page would be much more pleasant. If you want to join this crusade, start using the following for your collapsible HTML regions: [Read More]

  • Transient state management in ASP.NET

    Posted on July 20, 2004

    I’m reading PAG guide on Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability (a must-read for every .NET developer), and I noticed they missed one of the most interesting and useful state management features ASP.NET introduced, the one I call transient state. This is the state that lives in HttpContext.Items, which only lasts for the duration of the current request, hence its characteristic of “transient”. It’s really awesome because you can pass information between modules, pages and controls with it, and completely avoid Session state. It’s quickly discarded as soon as the current request has finished processing, so it doesn’t impose any... [Read More]

  • Non-visual components in Web Apps

    Posted on July 16, 2004

    Whenever you drag a component on a web form, you get that nice area below the web forms designer, where these components can add designer verbs, extend controls on the design surface through IExtenderProvider, etc. This extremely cool functionality has vanished in Whidbey. Please vote the bug to bring it back!!! [Read More]

  • 100% Managed Wizard Framework from Patterns & Practices

    Posted on July 16, 2004

    The Shadowfax Visual Studio Wizards are built on top of a managed framework for constructing wizards automatically from configuration files. When the source code for the wizards is released, you’ll see that there’s minimum code in them, mostly for those parts of the wizard that actually need to modify information on the current solution, called Commands. The whole wizard UI is built from the configuration file. [Read More]