A very funny story from Raymond Chen. The punch-line is: And then one week they reported that they were eighty percent done, adding, “It almost links now.” I have GOT to use that in a meeting some time. I had an amusing time trying to explain the joke to my son too. »
Like countless others I installed vista yesterday after it went live on MSDN subscriber downloads. The experience thus far has been quite goood. I got aero glass with the out-of-the-box drivers on my Asus VX1 and GeForce GO 7400. A couple of devices (memory stick readers and the sound card) weren’t recognized straight away but installed without issue. My system gets a respectable 3.5 Windows Experience Index rating. 3D graphics is my “weakest link” at 3. »
I’m keen to start using the Windows RSS Platform more, in part to try out Doug’s nice-looking RikReader, and in part because I have another project which will probably use it. Although lots of people talk about how you can import and export your feeds from the Windows RSS Platform using OPML I couldn’t find any explaination of how to do it, and searching for OPML in the IE7 help returned nothing. It turns out is is pretty easy if you know where to look - click the “Add to Favorites” button right underneath the forward and back navigation buttons in IE7 (or press ALT+Z) and choose “Import and Export…” from the menu. Select “Import Feeds” from the list of options and select your OPML file. Sadly my OPML file of a few hundred feeds from RSS bandit was not imported successfuly. I can see a joyful night of XSLT in my future…..
I installed the new ‘Zune’ XP theme (you know how much I love brown and orange) after reading about it on Robert Ingebretsen’s site. I was curious to see how WPF rendered under it, given that under normal circumstances a “hacked” theme (one that is not signed by Microsoft and requires a modified version of uxtheme.dll to run) will cause WPF to revert to its windows classic theme (boring chiseled-grey) because it doens’t have appropriate styles to render the controls the “right“ way. »
With the 5th of November fast approaching those of you who haven’t seen V for Vendetta should hire it out and have a look. I’m no comic-book fanboy (many of whom seem to think the movie sucked compared to the “graphic novels”), but I liked it. I think to not watch it this week-end would be un-patriotic.
Sometimes I come across a piece of user-interface that brings a smile to my otherwise perpetually scowling face. Usually it is a fairly mis-shapen dialog or utility application. I smile because I can almost picture in my minds eye how this dialog was created. A developer needed a screen for something, one or two text boxes and not much more, so they created “the dialog”, maybe just to “try something out“ and always with the intention of removing it before the product ships. They discovered they needed a few more parameters, so a couple more controls were added in a fairly hap-hazard fassion. “The dialog” exposes “the feature“, something cool or quite useful. Admittedly “the feature” is more tailored towards power users, but it’s still pretty cool. The developer thinks of new parameters that would make “the feature” even more powerful and so adds them to the dialog. Maybe a few other developers or power users see “the dialog” and also like “the feature”. But why doesn’t it expose THIS parameter? New controls are added. Pretty soon the technical team are so used to seeing “the dialog” the way it is that they become blind to its strange appearance. Ship time approaches and the product goes through more thorough testing, and “the dialog” is discovered, but it is too late to be heavily re-worked. Instead it is given a cursory spruce-up.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen “the dialog“ in different guises (and I’ve probably implemented a few of my own too). Here are two candidates that were close to hand. I think the worst offender I ever saw was a WMI utility from microsoft - it was like a whole application of “the dialog”s thrown together. 
Here’s my quick checklist of things to look for if you’re trying to avoid create “the dialog“ yourself.
I downloaded and installed IE7 on my main desktop machine when it was released a few days ago. So far it seems fine, but from an “end-user” POV it doesn’t seem to have any killer features over FireFox (although for some users the zooming feature might be a nice enhancement over regular CTRL ‘+’). I came across this post from Nick Randolph which got me interested in the developer features, and in particular the “Windows RSS Platform” that is surfaced in IE7. »
It’s a few days into October, so where is WPF/E? At Mix06 the date for the first CTP was announced as “Q3 2006” or “summer 2006” (and generally when Americans say “summer 2006” they mean “summer for the NORTHERN HEMISPHERE 2006”…anyway…another rant). So where is it, huh? WPF/E PM bloggers Mike Harsh and Joe Stegman have been very quiet since then. Now I know what some of you might be thinking…. »
IE 7 will then import just fine.
Jim