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Visual Studio Express 2008
2007-08-01 23:46:00
I'm a big fan of the Visual Studio Express 2005 range of products. They cost nothing and are pretty powerful. In some respects they're better than the full-blown version of Visual Studio. They are super quick to load and if you're using FTP to upload ASP.NET web sites, Web Developer is easier to use than Visual Studio. I've been using it for the FreeFlow web site for a while. So I took the plunge and downloaded the beta 2 of the 2008 version of the C# and Web Developer. First impressions are good. The install was flawless. C# comes with a WPF designer, so I can finally get down to learning that without having to hand-code it. The Web Developer version comes with some AJAX controls so I can play around with them as well. And it's still free. The question is will there come a time when all Microsoft's development tools are free? We're signed up for the Empower program so they are virtually free for us anyway and presumably lots of other companies...

Rain
2007-07-21 00:37:00
So there was a bit of rain today, almost enough to flood our house but not quite. And our roof leaked. But the shed is intact. Then as quickly as it arrived, it stopped. And a few hours later, all the evidence had gone. Here are some pictures.
More About: Rain

How rich are you?
2007-07-18 23:44:00
I've got a theory, not a particularly original theory admittedly, that we all think we're poorer than we actually are (something to do with our celebrity obsessed culture). It only takes a few seconds to plug in some numbers to the Channel 4 Rich -o-meter or The Institute for Fiscal Studies' 'Where do you fit in?' page to see how rich, or otherwise, you are. The Channel 4 one is interesting since it allows you to compare yourself to the rest of the world, which shows even a very modest UK salary is pretty damn good when compared globally. The Institute for Fiscal Studies' version is probably more accurate since it is based on household income rather than personal income.

Adding services to the Windows Workflow runtime and a simple activity imple
2007-07-17 22:45:00
There are two groups of Windows Workflow service that you'll come across. The first group are the well-known services that are used by the runtime itself (well-known because they are well-known to the runtime not necessarily to the developer using the runtime...). These are things like the persistence service, tracking service, data exchange service etc. You can use these services out of the box or you can inherit from them and modify them as required. Fortunately a lot of the methods in these services are virtual so you can quite easily hook in new functionality (and quite possibly get yourself in a whole heap of trouble as well). The second group of services are services that can be used by your own custom activities. At this point it's worth considering when using your own service makes sense. For instance I downloaded an email sender activity that required me to configure the SMTP host address and port as properties on the activity. Sinc...
More About: Services , Simple , Runtime

Blogging is like the lottery
2007-07-09 23:17:00
The lottery people Camelot used to say "You've got to be in it to win it". Of course the chances of a big win are tiny but if you never buy a ticket you'll never win anything at all. So it is with blogging, you're pretty unlikely to ever get a big crowd of people to your blog, but occasionally you might get that £10 win. Every post is another ticket in the blogging lottery and every so often you'll get a few hits from one. Which is what happened with my little post about SonicWall on Vista, if only because nobody else has bothered to post about it. And if anybody wants to know, the latest beta still has the same problems for me, Vista complains that two computers with the same IP address are connected to the network. But I'm coming to expect these kind of issues with Vista. Bring on SP1...
More About: Blogging , Lottery

Annoying Vista UI
2007-07-09 00:15:00
In Vista , Media Player and Photo Gallery have very similar user interfaces. The toolbar thingy at the bottom of their windows looks almost exactly the same. This is Media Player This is Photo Gallery But the big button in the middle works differently. If I'm watching a video in Media Player, the biggest button on the toolbar pauses the video. In Photo Gallery, it switches to slide-show mode, an operation that takes several seconds and I never want to do. If I'm not thinking about what application I'm in, I'll hit that big button to pause the video and see my computer grind to a halt whilst it does something I don't want it to do. Why have very similar UIs if the buttons do different things??? Consistent UIs are only any use if they behave consistently.
More About: Anno , Annoying

The Complicators
2007-07-05 23:19:00
I was under the impression that computing was meant to make our life easier, but it seems there's a bunch of people out there who want to make my life more difficult through poorly thought out APIs or badly designed user interfaces. I call them the complicators. There are three types of complicators. Dumb Complicators - These are the developers who aren't really too hot at programming. They copy and paste and generally fumble around in the dark until they have a solution that seems to work, then quickly move onto the next problem, not thinking too much about how the UI or API they've just produced will be used in the outside world. This may be down to inexperience, the need to get something out there ASAP or just a lack of interest in producing quality software. Evil Complicators - The second group of complicators are a cynical bunch who complicate things to make themselves indispensable to their company. Depending on how cynical I'm feeling, I may confuse either of t...
More About: Cato

Something for the ladies
2007-07-04 17:32:00
Or more specifically any mothers who've stumbled across this site. My other half has set up a website dedicated to providing tips for mothers and parents in general. There are other sites out there providing similar resources (Mumsnet being the obvious example if only due to their legal problems with Gina Ford) but Mums Guide is providing a different angle on things. She was after a link from the Random Pub Finder (due to it getting many more hits than this site) but I couldn't for the life of me think of any kind of link between pubs and parenting.
More About: Ladies , Dies , Some , Adie

Aren't web services meant to solve interoperability problems?
2007-07-03 21:17:00
Somebody has written a web service using JBoss. I'm trying to call it from .NET 1.1 or, heaven forbid, the MS SOAP toolkit. And neither of them can call any operations that have parameters, which kind of restricts what we can do with it. I guess one solution might be to have methods called method1(), method2(), method3() etc all the way up to MAXINT. Doesn't seem a great idea. Or perhaps an ASP.NET 2 web service could call the JBoss web service and expose the functionality as another web service? Yeh it's daft, but it might just work. So could it be the folks telling us web services were the panacea for all our interoperability problems were actually just snake oil salesmen? Surely not...
More About: Services , Problems , Web Services , Interoperability , Rope

Adding icons to custom activities
2007-06-25 21:25:00
In a few places I've worked, it seems like some people's jobs pretty much entails selecting and adding icons to development projects. Nice work if you can get away with it and that's what I spent some time doing the other day. It's actually ridiculously easy to add an icon to a custom activity. In fact it's just the same as adding an icon for any component. Add the image to your project, set its 'Build Action' property to 'Embedded Resource', then add the following attribute to your activity class.[ToolboxBitmap(typeof(UserActivity) , "user.png")]The icon will then appear in the toolbox and will be shown when the activity is rendered in the workflow designer. It's possible to completely change the rendering of the activity and I may investigate that at a later date, but this simple addition seems to provide the biggest bang for buck.
More About: Icons , Activities , Custom

SonicWall VPN Client for Vista beta
2007-04-30 00:40:00
One of the problems I've had with Vista is the fact the SonicWall VPN Client doesn't work with it and SonicWall haven't released a new version for Vista. Well they've finally got their arse in gear and released a beta version of the VPN client. Send an email with “subscribe” as the subject of the email to gvc40-join@listserv.sonicwall.com if you’re interested in participating in the beta program. It kind of works for me, although after a while Vista complains that two PCs are connected to the network with the same IP address. Then everything falls apart. Restarting the VPN client and my wireless connection fixes the problem. 
More About: Beta

Phew, it's not just me
2007-04-29 21:33:00
First off, Canary Wharf is one weird place. I haven't been there for a while but it's almost like it has a dress code, everybody is wearing a suit, or shirt and trousers at the very least. So when I rolled out of the station in my old jeans with a few days facial hair growth I thought I'd be picked up by the police as a terrorist suspect. Fortunately I didn't bump into any police men. I was fairly sure Credit Suisse wouldn't let me in either but perhaps they'd been warned that a group of geeks was visiting. I was attending a London .NET User Group meeting for a talk about Windows Workflow. The first part of this talk was reasonably interesting, although it was clear the presenter has been reading the same book as me, so a lot of it wasn't new to me. But things got interesting when one of the guys who's been developing a WF application at Credit Suisse talked about their experiences. The things that came up were pretty much the same issues that I've come up against. Fi...

More Vista pain
2007-04-27 12:19:00
I finally cracked. I'd had enough of the complete lack of support from Dell about my lack of sound on Vista . The guy said he'd get back to me, of course he never did. Emails to Dell got no response. Yeh I could kick off another support call but it would just involve several hours of them uninstalling and installing drivers and failing to get anywhere, which I've been doing pretty well myself for several months. To top it all off, Dell sent me an email asking me to fill in a questionaire about my customer service experience. When I clicked on the link, all I got was a message telling me my access had expired. They even sent me a reminder to fill in the survey a few days later, again access expired. Hey Dell, there may be a reason you're not getting much feedback on your customer service... So I thought, stuff this I'll buy a new soundcard, £20 and all my pain will go away. It all started out really well, Vista recognised it, went away to find the drivers and everything ins...
More About: Pain , More

Recruiters - how about reading my CV?
2007-04-24 23:06:00
I'm not looking for a job currently but my CV must be out there somewhere on the internet from the last time I was looking for work. And it's pretty clear quite a few recruiters just do a keyword search and send out emails without actually ever reading my CV. So I've had emails about C++ positions, which I haven't touched for almost 10 years, PHP jobs, which I'm familar with but wouldn't consider a strong point, testing jobs and even jobs in the US. Maybe the 'throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick' technique works but I suspect it's not highly effective. I tend to remember the recruiters who actually bother to ring me up and actually listen to what I have to say and if I ever need to contact a recruiter again I'll go to them first, since they appear to care about placing people in the right job. The others are simply helping to confirm the bad reputation that recruiters have.
More About: Reading

The ZX Spectrum is 25 years old
2007-04-23 21:13:00
And how old does that make me feel?* Get an emulator and download some great games at World of Spectrum , read more about the mad genius Clive Sinclair at Wikipedia. * Short answer - very
More About: Years , Year , Ears

How to solve virtually any technical problem
2007-04-21 00:27:00
People ask me technical questions all the time. I have no idea why, I don't know any more than anyone, perhaps the fact I can find the answer to these problems leads people to think I actually know the answer. So I'm going to present to you the two steps to find the solution to almost any technical problem. Google for it - The internet holds the answer to pretty much any question you can ask. The key to finding the answer is to know how to search. This is pretty much trial and error, if one search doesn't bring up the answer, try another phrase until you get something that looks related. If you're getting a specific error message, search for that. Another point to make here is that if you can't find what you're looking for, consider whether what you're trying to do is a good thing to be doing. I remember trying to find information about hosting .NET WinForms controls in Internet Explorer and not having much luck at all. This was a big red warning lig...
More About: Technical , Problem , Virtual , Virt , Virtually

Buy less crap
2007-04-17 22:41:00
The idea touted by Red that somehow we can help charities by buying more stuff is frankly preposterous. The idea put forward by Buy (Less ) Crap is to not purchase more consumer tat and donate the money we would have spent to charity instead. Now that seems much more sensible. How many fecking iPods do we need anyway?

Doogal's guide to parenting
2007-04-16 11:29:00
You can read every book by Gina Ford you want but from my vast experience (ahem) there are only two things you need to master when bringing up a child. Bribery and blackmail. 
More About: Parenting , Guide , Renting , Rent , Parenti

No really, total rewrites don't make sense
2007-04-13 22:53:00
I just found this fairly old blog post about rewriting Delphi apps in C# which sits so well with how I think (and puts the point across far more eloquently than I could ever do) that I had to post the link. The bottom line is if you have an old code base to maintain, rewriting it completely may seem like an attractive option, but there are other ways of getting to the same place without throwing away years of investment in that old code base.
More About: Sense , Real , Make , Ense , Total

Swimming to New York
2007-04-11 23:01:00
I'm not the first person to point out the humorous suggestion from Google Maps when you ask for directions from the UK to the US (see step 36), but it got me thinking. One of the shortcomings of Google Maps is that it has no knowledge of anything but driving so it won't advise me to jump on a plane if I want to get to the US. For that matter if I ask it how to get to London Waterloo from my house, it doesn't know anything about trains so again will tell me how to drive there. It doesn't know anything about congestion charging or parking charges either so doesn't realise only the super rich or super stupid would ever consider driving into central London. Transport for London has the opposite problem because it completely ignores the driving option, which in some circumstances might make sense (try taking public transport from SW London to SE London without dying of old age on the way for instance). A while ago I wanted to investigate transport options for getti...
More About: Swimming , New York , York , Swim , New-York

Method calls on value types and boxing
2007-04-05 00:05:00
It was DevWeek 2005 and I was in a session with Jeff Richter about low level .NET things and I foolishly asked him a question. He looked at me as if I had asked the most dumb question ever asked by anyone, so I decided not to follow up on my question, even though I didn't feel he'd really given me the answer I was looking for. So what was the question? Well he was describing boxing of value types and how it can cause performance problems so it was best to avoid it where possible, even though it's not always clear when boxing is occurring. I'd asked didn't boxing need to occur for any method call on a value type. On reflection I'm not sure this was a particularly dumb question but I've never really got fully to the bottom of it, mainly because it's never really been much of an issue to me. But here's my take on it, which may or may not be accurate. Boxing is only going to happen if the method call is a virtual method where the value type doesn't override the ...
More About: Calls , Type , Call , Value

The number one internet resource for Metastorm crap
2007-04-03 23:12:00
It's always interesting to look through the search terms that have led people here or to the other sites I have something to do with. It's certainly a great work avoidance tactic. So I was pleased to see that the term Metastorm crap had landed somebody here. Then when I did a search for Metastorm crap myself I was even more pleased to see I'm number one for that search term. So there you are, come here for all the Metastorm crap you could ever need... In fact I've just done a search for Metastorm shit and I'm number one for that as well! I must point out at this point that although the words may have appeared on the same page, they didn't actually appear in the same context... OK, they do now, but I'm not implying anything, OK?
More About: Internet , Inter , Storm , Source , The N

Some useful web resources
2007-03-31 22:31:00
I came across a couple of useful websites today which I thought I'd post here for others and for my own information. First is Domain Tools, which provides the usual Who Is lookup and a whole lot more. Most useful I thought was the SEO text browser that shows how a website looks to a search engine and gives a few pointers to how your pages could be improved for SEO. That site led me to About Us, that is an interesting attempt at generating a Wiki for websites. I imagine this could become an interesting site to browse and find new sites to visit. If nothing else, adding your site will add another inbound link to your site. Another useful resource that I didn't find today but follows on from the SEO text browser above is the HTML Validator provided by the W3C. Running your site through this will show any problems with your HTML code. I've no idea if valid HTML will improve your search rankings but I'm fairly certain it won't hinder them.
More About: Resources , Source , Resource , Useful , Sources

The evil #if DEBUG
2007-03-30 23:19:00
I recently received a bug report for an ASP.NET site I've been maintaining but when I went off to test out the problem running the site through Visual Studio eveything worked fine. Slightly confused, I went back to the live site and immediately reproduced the problem. So I thought the problem must be caused by the site not being in sync with the the development box so I uploaded the latest code. The problem was still occurring... I was fairly unfamiliar with the code so I started stepping through it. You've no doubt guessed the problem by now from the title of this post. There was some code wrapped in an #if DEBUG directive that actually overrode the parameters passed into the page via a query string. I removed that and the problem on the live site was reproducible in Visual Studio. But I wasted an hour or so getting to the bottom of it. So the moral of the story is don't change behaviour of your code with #if DEBUG statements. The only use I've found for #if DEBU...
More About: Evil , Debug

Not everything is high priority
2007-03-26 12:01:00
If every email you send to me is marked as high priority, they tend to lose their impact, I assume none of them are important. What will you do when you really do want to send me a high priority email? There is no priority zero... I presume you're familiar with the boy who cried wolf?
More About: Everything , High , Ever , Thing , Priority

Meaningful descriptions for enums
2007-03-24 19:47:00
Getting a string representation of an enum is pretty simple, just call ToString() on the enum. However, we often want to have a more user-friendly string to display to the user, that includes spaces and the like. I guess one way of achieving this would be to override ToString on our enum class, except you can't override ToString in an enum... And how to go the other way, from the string representation to the enum? The solution set out below uses an EnumDescription attribute that can be applied to the values of an enum. Now I can't claim to have come up with the idea for this, I think I first saw it on Richard Blewett's blog, but his archive doesn't seem to go back as far as it should. Saying that, I've also made quite a few alterations so I can claim some of this code as my own. The use of generics means it will only work with .NET 2.using System;using System.Reflection;namespace Utils{ /// <summary> /// Attribute used to give textual descriptions to enums. /...
More About: Script , Meaning , Meaningful , ENUM

Not liking Vista so much
2007-03-21 23:18:00
Doing a search on Google for 'liking Vista ' brings up this site as the third in the list. I'm not triyng to show off by saying this, but it perhaps shows that there's not that many people who are liking using Vista. And I'm slowly moving from the liking Vista camp to the not liking Vista so much camp. To be fair most of the problems I'm having probably aren't Microsoft's fault but they are still annoying. My major problem is the lack of sound coming out of my Dell Dimension machine. This was forgivable initially since I installed Vista before it hit the shops but even though Dell have released new drivers I still can't get anything to come out of my speakers. Vista thinks everything is OK, the only indication that something is wrong is the 'Failed to play test tone' error message when I do a test of my speakers. I've contacted Dell and talked to a tech support guy who said he'd get back to me and I've never heard anything from him since. It see...
More About: King , Much

Dude, where's my AdSense revenue?
2007-03-21 22:50:00
I was never going to become rich from my AdSense income, but I used to get a small amount of spending money from it. But over the last few months, even though I'm getting more hits to my sites, I'm getting less and less money from ads. I think it's down to the fact that I'm getting less money per click. There was a time when some clicks would earn me a dollar or more (which, to be fair, seems ridiculous) but now I'm lucky to get more than 20 cents per click. So I guess the question is whether there is a general downward trend in prices being paid for clicks or if Google is taking a bigger slice of the action. Of course it could be just me who's suffering from this and it may be something specific to my sites causing the lack of cash. 
More About: Adsense , Dude , Here , Ense

Twitter - What the ...?
2007-03-20 17:16:00
I don't get it, why would I want to use it? Why would I even want to read it, do I really care that complete strangers are on their way to work or having a dump? Even if there were people on there I knew, I wouldn't be interested. "Hmm, it's 11pm at night, what do you know, my rate Roger is off to bed, what a fecking surprise" I believe we are meant to be looking for ways to save energy these days, so if anybody has access to the power switch on the Twit ter server, just turn it off. You'll be saving us from the most pointless website ever and helping the environment at the same time.
More About: What , Hat , Twitter , What The

Has my fire really gone out?
2007-03-18 21:16:00
So Paul Weller asked in 1993, to which the obvious answer was "In short yes. The Jam were pretty good, The Style Council had their moments (although sometimes in an unintentionally laugh out loud way) but your solo career has been pretty unspectacular". Just like the vast majority of musicians, Weller started suffering from Musician's Dementia when he hit the age of 30. Rather than produce anything worth listening to, they start to make sad facsimiles of their older material or they try and branch out into new genres and tend to look ridiculous. So it is also true of IT? Do programmers in their 30s suffer from Programmer's Dementia? Have I got it? Would I even recognise it if I did have it? Am I just producing a sad facsimile of what I was doing in my 20s? Have I lost the ability to pick up new skills? Is there a good reason why coders over 30 are viewed with suspicion? Or is this just the start of my mid-life crisis? Surely 10 years too soon.
More About: Fire , Real , Gone , Really , Ally