JCooney.NET

A little over a week ago Paul Stovell and I had an amusing run-in with a computer-store sales guy when Paul went to buy a new graphics card to run Vista. He told us that Vista which would be shipping in “about a year” would require a graphics card costing $900 (Paul thinks he said $1900…either way, a lot). I’m nothing if not a spiteful pedant, and after doing some research I decided I would prove just how wrong this guy was by buying a sub-$100 AUD graphics card from THE VERY SAME STORE. One that runs “Aero Glass”/composable desktop/flip 3D and all the other flashiness that is built into Vista. I chose a AGP Sapphire Radeon 9550 - it was the cheapest graphics card I could find in the store with 256MB of video ram (128 MB cards could still be capable of glass, but I had 2 x 1680x1050 monitors and I wanted a nice experience). Also the Ati Radeon 9550 was on ATI’s list of chips that were supported for their Vista Beta2 Catalyst Driver.

After some deliberating about if it was worth $100 just to know how wrong this guy was, if this was a productive use of my time and energy, and much soul-searching I purchased the card today. Paul came along too. Unfortunately I didn’t get “the guy” but he was at the counter helping another customer when I finally made the purchase. I noted loudly that “vista is going to run great on this” - Paul said I received “a look” from the guy but unfortunately no more outbusts about Vista re-writes were forthcoming. The ATI drivers (about 2 weeks old) work great for a single display but have some serious problems running “Aero Glass” on both desktops - the drivers that came with Vista Beta2 don’t have any such problems so I’m up and running with them basking in the glory of 3200+ pixels wide of hardware-accelerated desktop. I bet WPF apps will look nice on this…

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After hearing all they hype over Quicksilver (a mac launcher that allows you to travel through time and rule the universe+) I thought I would have a look at the current crop for windows. I installed slickrun aaaages ago but never really got used to using it. I chose Launchy to evaluate for the time being - its an open-source app that does some of the things Quicksilver does (although Launchy is more of a “noun“ thing where Quicksilver seems more like a “noun verb“ thing). Overall I do find myself more productive with Launchy around, although I wish it would understand URLs and file paths and just open those in firefox/explorer. Adding c:\windows\system32 as one of the directories it indexes, and adding .exe as a type for it to index has added lots of useful tools at very close quarters. Scott Hanselman has a comprehensive review of Launchy and co. here.

well, if you believe the hype
+ hey, I thought OSX was soooo usable that all this would have been easy anyway

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Deepak Kapoor and I delivered a day of free WPF training “for the community, by the community” on Friday at Dimension Data Learning Services’ Sydney training facility in the CBD. We did the same session back to back, with about 12 people in each session. The feedback was generally very positive (except for two folk who were primarily mobile app developers, for whom we didn’t have a very good story beyond “maybe WPF/E”). There were obviously some people that are strongly considering this as a platform for future applications. »

Looks like Mr. T and I have another thing in common. Apparently he drinks double espressos too! I sure hope they make ‘em right for him…. »

As a subscriber to the ausdotnet mailing list I’m regularly faced with technical questions that seem almost completely devoid of the context necessary to answer them correctly. Your typical question might start off like this “I’m trying to display some customer details in a grid and can’t format the phone number field properly”. Is that Windows Forms? ASP.NET? Framework 1.0/1.¹⁄₂.0? A similar variety of context-free question goes something like “my users are reporting error X, what should I do?”. So can they reproduce this error? How many users have reported it? I don’t spend 24x7 stalking you on-line, what the HELL DOES YOUR APP DO ANYWAY? Because the scope of the ausdotnet list is extremely broad (ostensibly .NET related, but all kinds of technical and non-technical questions like “what’s your favourite desk chair” get raised) there is not the usual context associated with being in a forum about a particular technology. Next time you ask a question of anyone realize that not everyone is well informed about what you are doing and how and why you are doing it. Try and give would-be answerers enough information to respond without making too many assumptions.

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Deepak and I are doing a half-day of free training + labs on WPF in Sydney at Dimension Data’s training facility in the city on the 21st of July. If you’ve ever been interested in WPF this would be a great opportunity to get started. Places are limited, so register now to make sure you don’t miss out. I’m psyched. Thanks to our friends on the DPE team, and at Dimension Data for helping make this happen. »

The Windows SDK for Vista is a required component for WPF development (ironically except on Vista). Every CTP release it is the most difficult to install/download and there are often numerous complaints, troubleshooting tips and file check-sums posted in the WPF forums. Probably part of the trouble is the SDK’s size - its over 1GB, only a tiny fraction of which is needed for WPF development. The WinFx^H^H^H^H^H .NET 3.0 redistributable is only 50 MB. »

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The current project I’m on has just finished the planning phase for the next iteration. We do 1-month cycles, with around 4-5 days of planning up front. This release I asked to have this reduced to stop us losing time on the fuzzy front-end, so instead we had 3 days of design which I think has proven to be enough for most of us. One group of features that had fairly complex usability considerations and was technically challenging will probably take 1 more day, but the rest of us are ready to “get real”. »

Recent readify hire, and the only person I know who bought a BlogML t-shirt the DAY they went on sale Mr. Paul Stovell recently announced his side-project, “trial balance” - an app to help teach Year 12 level double-entry book keeping. He sent me a build of it a couple of weeks ago and it is very nice looking, and built using WPF. It sounds like his experiences with WPF have been quite positive (although I wonder how the two WPF talks I co-delivered helped to convince him). »