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41 days ago
Visual Studio is pretty good. 2008 came a long way and I really enjoyed jumping to it with some production apps with the beta 2 release. But I also had those same thoughts about VS2005, and to be honest, VS2003 was a god-send after VS2002. I guess the point is that when something is new, such as an IDE or a language, you start to learn all the little tricks, and they’re all great. Productivity is enhanced, you discover new ways of doing things, and you hit this little peak for the year where you really enjoy what you do. Invariably that peak levels off as the new and interesting becomes the common place. You start looking forward to the NEXT release and the productivity gains it will bring. I call this the ‘Developer Circle of Life’. We are invariably bound to it and cannot escape. Whatever we have now, we want it faster, with new features, and some new technologies to boot. Its those middle months that suck the most, the longing, wishing you were using V.Next on your current ...
184 days ago
I’m doing a bit of WPF at the moment for a company in Sydney and also working on a WPF project in my spare time. Tonight I came across this issue and thought I’d document the simple solution in case I run into it again in the future. I have a ListView that takes up the full width of my window. I’ve edited the ListViewItem template to put a border around the items. The code looked like this: <ListView BorderThickness="0"> <ListView.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Border Margin="10" Padding="8" BorderBrush="Red" Background="GhostWhite" CornerRadius="12"> ……. my content here …. </Border> </DataTemplate> </ListView.ItemTemplate> </ListView> The problem was that the border was only as big as the content ...
245 days ago
“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.” From: http://findingada.com/ I only heard about this today to be honest. Perhaps that makes me part of the problem, I’m not sure. I don’t want to go into the gory details of equality in the workplace. What I do want to say is that there is definitely a clear lack of female role models in the industry. That’s why this pledge is so important: there are a lot of women out there doing excellent things in the community and that’s why I’m writing this post: my pledge to talk about a woman in the industry that I admire: Catherine Eibner. Catherine is one of the most community focused people I have ever met, male or female. A single mother who also started her own company, while kicking off the Sydney CRM user group, a podcaster and geek girl, a regular attendee of Sydney user groups in general and frequent speaker herself, Australia wide. Catherine was awarded the MVP ...
270 days ago
Fractals are interesting creatures. They are the visual representation of complex mathematical functions. Writing a fractal generator was something I always wanted to do, and recently found the time. My initial motivation was to discover if fractals were able to be generated using parallel processing, which they most certainly are, so I set off with a clear goal in mind: a multi-threaded fractal generator. This post is the result of that work. I’ll start by linking to Snagy.Fractals.zip. This zip file contains 3 projects: a core fractal library, a console app, and a WPF app. The 2 apps use the fractal library to generate fractals in both single and multi-threaded scenarios. Mandelbrot One of the most common functions is the set of numbers defined by Benoit Mandelbrot in the Mandelbrot Set. This function relates to the concept of Complex Numbers and the plotting of co-ordinates on the Complex Plane. This particular branch of mathematics is complex and I’m ...
298 days ago
I was lucky enough to get an early invite to Live Mesh (I was working at Microsoft at the time). Back then it seemed more like a concept than an implementation there were that many flaws. I tried it for a while, but fell back to folder share and other technologies. Mesh got uninstalled. To be honest, I hadn’t looked at Mesh since that time. Until today. It all started as the result of a TFS engagement I had just finished consulting on down at the Gold Coast. I decided to build a TFS Resource Pack for all the common files you typically need on a TFS engagement. For example, VSTS SP1, TFS 08 SP1, SQL Server 2005 SP1, TFS sync tool, TFS migration tool, Branching Guidance document, TF Power Tools, Team System Web Access SP1, the list goes on! Usually I just download these tools on site at the client but I figured it would be easier to have a portable HDD with all these items (I don’t own such a HDD but was willing to buy one). I ran the list of items in my pack past some internal ...
