Cook Computing

The MS.COM Operations Tools Team WebLog has a useful tip if you working with component classes in .NET:

For those of you who like certain control classes to open in the code view (instead of the designer view) by default. You can use the following attribute on your class so when you double click on it you get the code view.

[System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategory("Code")]

I've now added this attribute to the XML-RPC.NET class XmlRpcClientProtocol which derives from System.ComponentModel.Component.

via Jason Tucker:

Google has released it's Desktop Searching tool into beta. Grab it here: http://desktop.google.com/

It indexes:

• Your Outlook and Outlook Express email. (Note that Outlook email is only indexed once Outlook has been closed and opened at least once after installation of Desktop Search.)
• The web pages in your Internet Explorer web history.
• Your AIM chats
• The files and folders on your hard drive (the ones you actually look at, not the system files only your computer uses).

Its just finished indexing my emails in Outlook. I like the ease with which you can search your emails. Much easier to use than Lookout. You can home in on just email, file, chats or web history results and there is a view for email threads. As for files: .txt, .html, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files are indexed.

Rael Dornfest has an article on O'Reilly Network.

monoForge is offering free asp.net hosting while in beta (via Tim Anderson). In case you can't bear to sully your sample Mono XML-RPC client with a connection to a Windows server, I've set up three sample XML-RPC services on monoForge:

StateName

SumAndDiffService

Test Math Service

All the code has been compiled using the Microsoft C# compiler (the samples running on this site) and simply copied to the monoForge site.

Matt Warren has a good post on his journey from being an unmanaged to managed code developer. His description of looking back into the unmanaged world describes my feelings exactly:

Years later, with lots of experience working in managed environments, Java and .Net, I've grown accustom to all those services and practices that at one time seemed not only alien, but flat out wrong. Now, I find myself completely on the other side of the fence. I find myself now looking at C code, unmanaged, raw, savage, and I cringe. Not because the code is poor or violates any rules, it's just running without the safety net. Whenever I see a fixed sized buffer on the stack, a flurry of asterisks or even an innocent looking 'new', I get a bit nervous. I start to wonder if the code was written correctly, if all the cases were handled, and if some errant state in a far off function will suddenly go astray, launching the processor into a tantrum, wreaking havoc across the codescape, a whirlwind of destruction that will quickly lay waste to even the cleanest lines of logic.

This does have the benefit that whenever I do C++ work now I'm much more careful. The metaphor that comes to mind is driving on an icy road: you know that any moment you may find yourself in the ditch. If you only ever work in C++ its easy to become complacent about the risks of implementing bad code. But I'm also more aware that the extra demands of C++ result in a very low productivity compared to C#.

Six months ago I set up an internal .Text installation for members of the development group I work in. The group consists of about 60 developers and managers, and is split over several sites across the USA and the UK. I hoped the blogs would be a step, however small, in building a developer community, something that has proved elusive so far. There are now 207 posts, many of them very relevant to the work we do, but unfortunately we have only 4 bloggers. I am on 132 posts, GC on 64, JB on 8, and GE on 3. Also, we only have a handful of people reading the blogs. There have been a couple of aggregators polling the blogs on and off, and only one or two people other than the bloggers read the blogs directly.

So the experiment has failed, at least in numerical terms. It also suggests that out of the 60-odd members of the group only a few are running aggregators, on the basis that anyone using an aggregator would most likley have subscribed to the developer blogs. The second point is perhaps more worrying because, if true, it means that our development culture is such that few of our developers have much interest in what is happening in the software world and don't want to learn about new developments in Java, NET, or whatever, the assumption in this case being that blogs are currently the best place to soak up information.

Maybe it takes longer than I think for a meme like blogging to penetrate the more silted up backwaters of the development world but I find it fairly depressing all the same.