Me and my family are off for our summer holiday. Alas the weather is not looking to good. My Vista tablet is coming with me. Installed the WinFX SDK and can toy around in solitary confinement, there's no internet there. It's not work, when it comes to the tablet curiosity is my driving force. An anonymous visitor left a very valuable tip...

Don't take this to serious, these are just some nice remembrances of the PDC 2003. Let me be the devils advocate for one moment. Why would you go to the PDC ? Last time it was hard to get to LA with fierce fires surrounding the city. Having made it other things heated the atmosphere, like beamer airstreams: Which reminded me of gathering round...

My first install of Vista was on a Virtual PC. Nice but my main problem was that it's sluggish and unresponsive. Even if it has a 2.Ghz Hyperthreaded CPU and a full gigabyte of RAM at its disposal. The cause of that, as discussed here on Joel on Software is Virtual PC's graphics driver. Vista relies on DX and Virtual PC's emulated S3 doesn't...

Last PDC, the 2003 edition, was one big flood of new things. It was the first time Longhorn (now named Vista) and Whidbey (now named Visual Studio 2005) were presented to the developer community. The coming, 2005 edition, will be on the same, by now almost today's, tools. There is a searchable list of sessions online. The majority is on the...

Äfter a crash course comes sinking in. This post is a rewrite of yesterdays one on events in VB.NET. I will concentrate on VB.NET include Daniel and chi's comment and after that I will return to my beloved C#. There are several ways to declare events in VB.NET. The usual one is using the handles keyword. As Daniel pointed out this can link an...

In my previous post on the handling of COM events I described how I was driven into the arms of VB.NET. A VB.NET class published to COM sinks events as desired, a C# class pops up a mysterious error 459. With the help of feedback I've been delving a little deeper into this. Events are handled by event handling methods. The way to set these in...

I am a C# guy. This is a matter of personal preference,  I know how to code with VB.NET but just prefer curly brackets. So far the differences were not really worth the (sometimes quite) flaming discussion, after all we're all programming against the same framework. But recently I felt forced into using VB.NET for a part of a project. Let...

I was struck by a post Make it as rich as possible by simplegeek Chris'An where he complains about the limitations of "normal" web apps and raves about the possibilities AJAX will bring to browser apps. When talking about morts Rocky Lhotka mentions VB6 as their development environment of choice to build rich Windows applications. Both very...

Having used both Crystal Reports (CR) and SQL Reporting Services (RS) for a web-app I'm fully convinced. I've had enough of CR for once and for all. Oh yes, I have build great reports with CR but it was a bumpy road. Getting it all to work was favorite blog fodder, the many responses tell I'm not the only one with frustrations. What surprises...

For my app I needed a back button. Internet explorer and other browsers have back buttons, most mice have them as well but I needed my own small link to drop on my forms. Implementing it was no big deal, given you consider one essential quirk. After browsing around on the web I consider it worthwhile to share my findings. The essential thing is...

Often I work for people with a Delphi background to introduce them to C#. No problem until we reach the conditional operator ?: The definition in the docs is cond-expr ? expr1 : expr2  but the examples are not that inspiring. The most common reaction is "we're not going to use that". Recently I found a very good way to use and demonstrate...

Microsoft has finally released the fix for the memory leak in the tablet PC. It's diguished as Windowx XP hotfix KB895953. Took a while. At the time (5 months ago !) I wandered how serious the bug really was for real life day to day tablet use, but the update shows it was quite fundamental. While updating you see tabtip.exe come flashing by,...

New York, Madrid, London.... SQL reporting services. All respect for the British flegma with which they respond to terror. They just go on with what they were doing. Having said that (what more can you say..?) I would like to add my micro-pennies by sharing some of my recent good experiences building reports with SQL reporting services...

As a yearly recurring event around TechEd Europe Juval Löwy did a presenation for dotned, the Dutch user group. It was a fascinating talk, for two hours we have been bombarded with some very fascinating idea's.   Juval's main message is "the is no such thing as recovery code". Your application starts in a certain well described state. As...

The PDC 2005 frenzy is heating up, on Codebetter you'll find poetic as well as total geeky starters. The content of the PDC is also starting to materialize. I skimmed all session and tracks for "Tablet PC" but did not find a thing. So what's next ? Convert my Tablet  to a beer coaster and stuff myself with conference snacks ? To be...