rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for March, 2007
March 28, 2007 at 1:39 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
As noted before, I recently started using Outlook 2007. It has improved my ability to track the myriad tasks on my list. Mainly this is due to its merging standard todo items with emails marked for follow up* in a single view.
This means I’m doing a much better job of getting back to emails than I used to. In fact, this has caused me to re-consolidate all of my email reading into Outlok 2007 (abandoning gmail).
Now in one place, with one view, I can see all the items on my list (of course, there are still too many, but that is another story).
There is still one thing missing, though:
FeedDemon is my RSS reader of choice. I often flag items there to read later; however, I rarely ever go back and read those posts.
I would like to see my flagged items (email and RSS) and todos together in Outlook 2007. How to solve this problem?
- FeedDemon changes (best, because then I get everything I want):
- FeedDemon begins supporting Outlook 2007 tasks, perhaps the way OneNote 2007 does.
- Alternatively, FeedDemon begins (optionally) using the Windows RSS Platform (presumably flags and “read” settings are persisted in the store, though I don’t know).
- Or I change: I start using Outlook as an aggregator. I used to do this with NewsGator in Outlook 2003. The experience was painful (don’t know if I should blame Outlook, NewsGator, or user error here). Maybe it is better now.
Thoughts or suggestions anyone?
* And tasks linked with OneNote and, as I understand, Project tasks.
Tags: feedDemon, GMail, OneNote2007, Outlook2007, rss
March 26, 2007 at 10:30 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Very cool — I installed it this morning (now it is a free download) and had it working in munites. This will make it so much easier for my company to handle the migration of our issue tracking from Gemini into TFS.
From bharry (excerpted heavily):
Today we are announcing that Microsoft has acquired DevBiz Business Solutions, the makers of the popular TeamPlain Web Access for Team System. TeamPlain is a web front end for VSTS that enables users to access the majority of TFS functionality from within a Web browser. The focus of TeamPlain is on work item tracking but it also includes some valuable version control capabilities (like viewing history/change sets, diffing files, browsing the source base, etc.), some SharePoint integration, Reporting services integration, and some upcoming build support. TeamPlain gives VSTS a new avenue to reach a broader array of people within the development team who don’t use Visual Studio today and don’t want to install Visual Studio clients on their machines. It also improves reach by enabling some access from non-Windows clients.
. . .
TeamPlain will become Microsoft Visual Studio Team System Web Access. Effective today, TeamPlain is available, at no additional charge, to users who own a Team Foundation Server and can be downloaded from here. It will be accessible by any user properly licensed with a TFS CAL. Support will continue to be provided by the current staff via the DevBiz online forums.
Source: Microsoft Acquires TeamPlain!
Originally published on Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:58:12 GMT by bharry
Tags: DevBiz, Microsoft, TeamPlain, TFS, VSTS
March 23, 2007 at 8:12 pm · Filed under .NET
I’m coming back from the 2nd Microsoft ISV CTO Summit up in Redmond (I blogged about the first one here). A good trip with worthwhile content. I’m not sure any of it was really new, but I did see some cool stuff:
Expression Blend
The tool for designers to design and build WPF projects. Definitely cool.
I had two questions for one of the presenters (Eric Zocher) afterwards: when will Visual Studio look as good as blend (e.g., Blend uses WPF and allows smooth scaling of its own UI). Answer: um, maybe never.
Since Blend is basically a developer tool (for designers) that can create and edit Visual Studio, does it integrate with TFS? Not yet.
Of course, these answers don’t take away from Blend at all (and certainly TFS will eventually come even though outsourced designers may get little value from that).
I’m no designer, but I’m looking forward to playing with it. Though they haven’t announced this part yet, I expect it will be made available through MSDN Maximal (or whatever they are calling it now) or through our Gold Certified ISV Competency.
WPF/E
This stuff is very cool. Actually, Scott Guthrie demoed the WPF/E Vista emulator that Savas recently linked to. The great thing here is the unification of the presentation story here. I won’t go further into the roadmap because it is never clear to me at these NDA events what is open knowledge and what requires the secret-squirrel decoder ring.
AJAX ASP.NET
I tracked this as a really good thing (to greatly simplify AJAX for .NET devs), but I hadn’t taken the time to look at it or the demos. It is really cool. Aside from all it can do, the coolest thing is how easy you can enable it for existing ASP.NET applications. I would have tried it out already (i.e., in our Digipede product), but I stayed out too late last night to get into it.
WinFx dead?
I had a chance to ask Scott Guthrie directly about whether the WinFx name change was an indication of the death of the managed Windows API (as I argued here). His response, basically, naaah. Just a marketing change. I still disagree, as long as the managed API rides atop Win32, it isn’t the actual Windows API. In this case the managed API is either dead or were waiting for Singularity.
Swag
These events always come with some swag. This time we got a strange floppy neoprene folder (for small laptops here) and what I think is a screen cleaning cloth (though looks like a compressible handkerchief).
Cheers, though, to Microsoft for not giving us a bunch of junk for the landfill — I include in this: lamps, USB speakers, travel clocks. Also, I think it is great that they didn’t give us a whole bunch of resource CDs, trials, betas, etc. Last time they did and these are mostly useless. Not for the content, but because we all already have this content in MSDN or available through other partner programs.
They did give us one useful thing, though: a Vista Ultimate DVD/license. Frankly, that is my kind of swag.
Tags: ajax, asp.net, Blend, CTO, ISV, Microsoft, Swag, vs2005, WinFx, WPF, WPF/E
March 16, 2007 at 1:20 pm · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
If you will be in Denver on April 5th, come by and see my good friend Nathan Trueblood present on the Digipede Network.
From John:
The presentation is part of a Microsoft HPC event in Denver on April 5, 2007, featuring the new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS), the Digipede Network, and other Microsoft HPC partner offerings.
All details about this free event, as well as the link to register, are here.
Source: Digipede and Microsoft — HPC Presentation
Tags: .NET, Digipede, Grid Computing, HPC, Microsoft
March 13, 2007 at 8:35 am · Filed under .NET
While I haven’t had a chance to play with Orcas, I have been following the new language features. Scott Guthrie and Bart De Smet talk about the new automatic property feature in recent blog entries.
Basically, automatic properties allow you to replace this common pattern:
private string name;
public string Name {
get {
return name;
}
set {
name = value;
}
}
with
public string Name { get; set; }
Very cool. I’m all for writing less code (not because I’m lazy but because it means fewer lines of code to maintain). Even better, it allows you to change to the old property pattern when necessary without breaking your public contract.
But, I do have two questions:
Binary serialization
I was a little surprised to find the way the underlying automatic field is named. In Bart’s example the public property is Name. The underlying field generated by C# is <>k__AutomaticallyGeneratedPropertyField0. This most likely won’t conflict with any other fields you might have in your class.
So far so good.
But, what about binary serialization? If you attribute your class [Serializable] and want to use the default serialization features of .NET without implementing ISerializable, then it becomes hard to get the full benefit out of the automatic property.
Why? Because if you need to convert from automatic properties to the old pattern, your class will no longer be able to deserialize previously persisted objects (without writing a bunch more heinous code).
Question 1: Is there an attribute to set the automatic field name?
Debugging
To make it easier for our customers to debug their code with Digipede’s public APIs, we use the following attribute on all of our private fields:
[DebuggerBrowsable(DebuggerBrowsableState.Never)]
This makes it so the debugger will not display both the duplicate values of the private field and public properties.
Question 2: Is there an attribute you can put on the automatic property to hide the underlying field or is it automatic?
I suppose I should install Orcas and answer these questions myself , but in the interim, do any readers know the answers?
March 1, 2007 at 2:39 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
Tuesday, I had lunch with J. LeRoy.
He probably doesn’t remember it this way, but he convinced me to make the switch to Office 2007. It went something like this:
Jim (All paraphrased):
- I have finally given up on Outlook.
- I’m sick of waiting for five minutes for it to start.
- It never closes when you click on the ‘x’.
- Business Contacts Manager constantly asked me to reinstall its database.
- Which database is that? I remember installing a database.
and the one that convinced me:
- It does some really cool things with tasks (and follow-up).
That was it. I had to install it.
Having the tools to manage my to-do list efficiently is kind of my Holy Grail. I have tried various tools and not been happy with any of them. So I have fallen back to using tasks in Outlook which are synchronized with my Treo.
This works okay, but Outlook 2003 treats tasks as some kind of afterthought.
Outlook 2007 is a much better job with providing a usable UX integrating tasks (and the calendar) across many different views.
And for me, it doesn’t take very long to start. It also closes when I click on the ‘x’. I suspect that Jim is having add-in trouble. Something (probably Business Contacts Manager) is keeping Outlook alive when it shouldn’t.
Now, I’m using the entire Office Ultimate suite. More on that as I actually start to use it.
Tags: JLeRoy, Microsoft, office, Office2007, Outlook, Outlook2007
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