For those of you who were unable to make it to the user meeting last week, a gentleman by the name of Ayal gave a very enlightening presentation on the UIPAB. You really should get your hands on the code and play with it. For those who were fortunate enough to be there, I am sure you are very keen to get your hands on the code and play some more! Well the good news is that Ayal has now completed the first article in a three part series on the UIPAB, which is available here. Do yourself a favour, whether you are a windows or web developer, this is well worth checking out, I can't recommend it enough.

Be sure to check out Ayal's site as well, for a few more very well written articles on patterns and practices...


[UPDATE: Part 2 of 3 now available.]

The content presented at the One Day Security Seminar for Developers and Architects is now available on DVD.

You can request a free copy of the Security DVD from here . South African developers can obtain one via MSFT customer services on 0860 22 55 67 or Saevents@microsoft.com .

Some nice relaxing streaming 'music'. Thanks [Kent Sharkey] for the link.

For people who don't have much bandwidth, you can always download the content and listen to it on your local machine. What you need to do is right click the .ram link and save it to your desktop. Then open the saved file in notepad. Inside will be a link. Rename whatever is before the : to http (in this case rtsp), then just download that...doesn't always work for all streaming content, but often it does, and for people stuck in Africa with 31K dial-up modems (ie most Africans), it's the only way to be able to listen to streaming content...

(disclaimer: i don't have a 31K link, so i don't need to do this myself)

News42: Microsoft's battle plans out

Sound like a bargain to me...

Rumba

Unlimited Access & e-mail
Virus Scanning
Local call anywhere in S.A.
Dial up & ISDN same price
Fast & Efficient
No Contacts
Web Mail and POP3

XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) is an XML dialect that developers will use to author applications for Longhorn, the next version of the Microsoft Windows operating system. A new user services layer, code named "Avalon," lets you define a single set of markup pages and code which can then run as both a standard Windows Forms thick client application or as a browser-based thin client application. Under Longhorn, browser-based apps will have a much richer UI, while thick clients will become self-updating and share the same navigational model as Web applications. This is a big step forward from the current model, where thick and thin clients run on different platforms and require mastery of completely different technologies and development techniques.

This article describes how to generate a very simple but extensible XAML rendering engine that you can use to generate .NET objects from XAML markup, using standard object oriented design methods. Of course, the new features in Longhorn are not going to be available on Win32 platforms, so you can't reproduce all aspects of XAML development, but it's possible to author simple UIs using XAML now, and learn something about "Avalon" along the way.

Find out how to take advantage of XAML in your .NET applications today by building this extensible XAML rendering engine that accepts a XAML file describing a UI, and outputs .NET objects. [Adam Young]

(DevX article)

Yay! Wrote the first article for my blog this weekend - starting pretty lite - the article is a look at creating flags using bitwise operators in C#, VB.NET and T-SQL. The article deals purely on a functional level so that one does not get bogged down in trivial bit listings and such like and can see exactly what is required to make it all work.

Updated my list of South African software developers that are blogging. New additions are:

Brady Kelly
Jakkie Swart
Iwan Taljaard
Rudolf Henning
Johann de Swardt
Hendrik Swanepoel

If you are a SAfrican developer with a blog and would like to have your name on this list, please send me your details and i will add you with pleasure!

Also added a link to some free eBooks by Bruce Eckel. Highly recommended reading!

My fiance is currently looking for animal lovers or activists in Gauteng and the Western Cape, to put together an animal rights team, with clout.

For all those interested kindly contact...

Davina : - davinahg@magicmail.co.za (JHB)

-- or --

Heila : - info@pawtal.za.net (Cape Town)


Armand and I are also throwing ideas around for a pro-bono collaborative software development project to assist animal rescue centers with things such as finding owners of lost dogs, rehoming strays, perhaps even assisting them with marketing/advertising of their services via the WWW. The project is in (very) early conceptual stages but if you are keen to lend a hand in the development then please stand up and be counted!

Our next meeting will be taking place at the Microsoft offices in Jhb, South Africa on Friday 23rd April 2004.

When:
Friday 23rd April 2004
4PM - 7PM

Where:
Microsoft auditorium (see map)
Sunninghill, Johannesburg

What:
Overview of Whidbey and Yukon (Simon Stewart)
.NET Patterns and Practices (Ayal Rosenberg, founder of PDev)
--- The UI Application Block will be the primary focus.
Writing your own batch files (Johann de Swardt)
beers & food

[Simon Stewart :: BrokenKeyboards]

RSVP here.

I have shamelessly directed traffic here from SADeveloper.net a couple of times now, so here is a link back through them...

[The slides from the recent Security Seminar are now available via this link.]

Now if there where people that actually read this blog (hypothetically speaking), then we would be closer to even! :-P

With the South African elections just around the corner, i am reminded of one of my favourite paragraphs, by my favourite author...

The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To Summarize: it is a well know fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

-   Douglas Adams from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Some flip-side views on all the "Channel 9" hype filtering through the blogosphere...

Jeff's Junk: Why Channel 9 is stupid
Jeff's Junk: Fanboys, a better Microsoft and Channel9 revisited


Many solid points made - like the fact that any content provided via audio or video (ie non-text) is as useful as the length of your memory - which in my case is usually not great! I read a lot, and I always (mostly) remember where to go back and search for the answers i need, but there is just to much input to remember everything. Perhaps they will provide searchable transcripts or something in the future to circumvent this...

C# defines the following character escape sequences:

• \' - single quote, needed for character literals
• \" - double quote, needed for string literals
• \\ - backslash
• \0 - Unicode character 0
• \a - Alert (character 7)
• \b - Backspace (character 8)
• \f - Form feed (character 12)
• \n - New line (character 10)
• \r - Carriage return (character 13)
• \t - Horizontal tab (character 9)
• \v - Vertical quote (character 11)
• \uxxxx - Unicode escape sequence for character with hex value xxxx
• \xn[n][n][n] - Unicode escape sequence for character with hex value nnnn (variable length version of \uxxxx)
• \Uxxxxxxxx - Unicode escape sequence for character with hex value xxxxxxxx (for generating surrogates)

[C# Frequently Asked Questions]

Encountered the issue of needing to know if a client had the dotnet framework installed on his machine or not. Below is the VB6 code of the utility i wrote in order to determine this...

UI controls:

Control type                  Name:
Button                          Command1
Label                           lblFx1
Label                           lblFx2


Code:

Private Sub Command1_Click()
   Unload Me
End Sub

Private Sub Form_Load()
   If DoesFileExist(Environ$("windir") & "\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.0.3705\mscorlib.dll") Then
      lblFx1 = "Framework 1.0 is installed"
   Else
      lblFx1 = "Framework 1.0 is NOT installed"
   End If

   If DoesFileExist(Environ$("windir") & "\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\mscorlib.dll") Then
      lblFx2 = "Framework 1.1 is installed"
   Else
      lblFx2 = "Framework 1.1 is NOT installed"
   End If

End Sub

Private Function DoesFileExist(FN As String) As Boolean
On Error GoTo errh

   Dim a
   DoesFileExist = True
   a = GetAttr(FN)

   Exit Function
errh:
   DoesFileExist = False
End Function