Rudolf Henning

Al last the new Firefox 1.5 brower has been released. So far it seems a bit faster but its early days still. One thing to remember is that alot of 1.0.x extensions don't work yet on te new version but these should be updated within the next couple of weeks - hopefully.
Now at least you can drag and drop tabs and reorganise them in whatever order you want.
Additionally at least it doesn't loose your previous profile settings once you upgrade. Except for some extensions that are disabled everything went very smooth.
Amd another great thing - that msdn2 site problem with overflowing div tags that do not scroll is fixed now!!

Just read an article from the Mail & Gardian and I can't help to shout "Bravo Knysna"!!

Quote from article (appologies to M & G for copying)
"Knysna leads the way
Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON

How very satisfying to read the front page headline in last week’s “Business” insert in this paper. It gave expression to a desire inscribed on the very sub-conscious of this nation.

The headline to Lloyd Gedye’s splendid article was “Knysna’s ‘up yours’ to Telkom”. There are few in this country who, seeing that headline, would be able to resist reading the story it introduced. Anything which strikes at the fixed-line telephone monopoly with which South Africa has so long been doomed is welcome.

To paraphrase the immortal Winston: Telkom is a fiasco hidden inside a disaster enveloped in a national disgrace wrapped in Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri. Just like the old Posts and Telegraphs department used to do, Telkom jealously mothers its lucrative monopoly. When you deal with Telkom, you take it or leave it. There’s nowhere else to go.

Few will deny that these days Telkom is much improved from the times when getting a telephone took anything between 18 months and two years.
...
But back to the headline above. What the Knysna municipality is doing is erecting a rigid middle finger at Telkom’s ridiculously excessive charges for high-speed and voice-over access to the Internet. Knysna municipality wants to offer these as a wireless service. In other words, people signing up will able to access e-mail, surf, make telephone calls, all without ever using a phone line. Which is even better is that Knysna’s charges will undercut Telkom’s by around 50%. Telkom’s charges for its ADSL lines are, by any measure, absurdly inflated. In the United Kingdom my daughter pays £16 a month for uncapped broadband and that took all of three days to install -- on a line supplied independently of British Telecom. See if, for around R180, you can get a similar deal in our Telkom dependent telecommunications industry.

Here comes the expected surprise. Knysna’s planned breaking of the Telkom stranglehold is being challenged by Telkom, which claims the proposed Knysna wireless service is illegal -- even though it appears to be have been sanctioned by Dilatory Ivy herself. Telkom is also threatening to sue for loss of earnings. I’ll give you one guess as to who will be paying for this legal action every time one of us picks up a phone.

A few and much larger municipalities -- Durban, Tshwane, Cape Town, Johannesburg -- are looking at the Knysna option. More power to their wireless modems. Telkom must be humbled.
"
Hopefully more towns and Cities will wake up and do something similar. Not that Telkom should be destroyed or so. They have been keeping us going for quite a while and are not totally evil. It's simply a question that they must get some proper competition and stop their ridiculously high prices for broadband connections.

With the VS and SQL 2005 launch over it's time to start thinking about actually start using the new 'tools'. One thing keeps on coming back to me about the US launch where someone wrote that they could not help feel cheated that despite the launch suppose to include BizTalk 2006 as well nothing came of it. The (trail) software we received didn't even include the Beta! Oh well, I suppose we just have to wait a bit longer. Problem is that BizTalk 2006 is next to VS 2006 the most important thing I'm waiting for (except for the Lotto I want to win...).
The event was a lot of fun. I saw faces I haven't seen in ages. Seems everyone was 'too' busy this year to get out and do some 'living'. Shame on us all (me included)
As for the software that was included it is a bit of a pitty it is only a trail version. Some people in the states got the 'full' standard edition. I'd rather have a full non expiring standard edition than a trail professional edition of VS 2005. Of course, the ideal would be to get my hands on a full pro version...
Despite all the hype of the team services I see little purpose for it anything but bigger companies. In those cases it might not live up to their expectations esspecially if they have an existing development project lifecycle based on non Microsoft methodologies like RUP.
For the moment the express version of C# would have to do despite that it lacks a few small components I really need.
As for the launch event it was very good. Thanks Microsoft for the oppotunity to share in your excitement of a new range of products.
And can someone tell 'that' comedian that its not funny to make fun of Cape Town while your 'inside' 'Cape Town'.. hehe He did have a few other good ones though!

<littlerant>
It seems Microsoft deliberately don't want Firefox users to use their new MSDN2 site. They use some funny html that generates scrollbars that do not work with the mousewheel in Firefox. Its such a hassle to scroll up and down now! ;) That all with a ... microsoft mouse!
</littlerant>

Perhaps I've become too spoiled using the mousewheel for scrollbars - but then that is exactly what its there for...
Please Microsoft, fix the msdn site so we can scroll again! *sulk*

Yesterday we had our November SaDev meeting and had Roger Wolter there to talk to us about SQL server 2005. One of the things he talks quite a bit on was the new broker services. I realized I've not paid enough attention to all the new SQL server technologies since I did not even know it existed! I've been much more interested in Visual Studio (Whidbey) and C# 2.0
The interesting bit (one of the) I learned yesterday is that even SQL Express supports the broker services (with limitations) and that it can be used in conjunction with a full SQL server to set up a full queuing solution. I found the following link about it too:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rushidesai/archive/2005/03/03/384520.aspx

This could be truly useful! This means you can get away with having to buy just one full license and use the broker services to satellite servers. That will give tremendous power in remote asynchronous computing.

Thanks Roger for all that info! Hope you remember us and all the questions we asked about features not currently in the product.

This is a 'gentle' reminder that we have a meeting this afternoon at Microsoft where you can get to ask some of the actual people that worked on Visual Studio a few questions and hear what they have to say. This include people like Roger Wolter and Eric Lee.
It starts at 19:00 at the new Microsoft offices in Pinelands. They are now in the office park where Softsource use to be and AST still is.

Hope to see you all there!

It seems the VS is becoming a bigger and hotter thing by the day. We have now another 'International speaker' that will be participating - Eric Lee, a 'Product Manager' (yeah, everybody at MS is some kind of Product, or something manager I know).

Per his description:
"Eric Lee is a Product Manager at Microsoft. He has worked in testing and development at Microsoft for just over four years. Before Microsoft, Eric worked at a small company in Toronto. Most of Lee's experience has been in GUI components and server-side programming. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario."

He is apparently very active on the VSTS team. That is for those that are still excited about team services. Personally I don't really care about team services as it seems way too expensive for the little it is worth. But that's just my opinion.

Remember it's this Thursday that we have the official launch at Thunder city. Who knows, perhaps some jet can give us a spin wishful thinking perhaps but I'm allowed to dream ain't I?

See you all there (if I have my weels back - another long story for those that have not read my blog, I mean rant about it.)

It's been a week and I've had plenty time to play with C# express. On the way we (a friend and I) did discover some 'strange' and buggy things but those seem to be the minority and (sofar) not critical. I'll try to list a couple of the good things and bad things that I can remember.

Good things:
Generics, generics and generics
Speed at which the IDE opens
General responsiveness (it might be early days though)
File version handler for opening .Net 1.1 and 2.0 files in appropriate version
Import and export of IDE preferences
Don't have to save project until closing IDE - nice for those quick try it out attempts
ListView control supports groups and background images

Bad things
Form designer corrupts designer code sometimes
Clicking on the 'Help' option under Options with no Internet connection seems to hang the IDE
Mysterious 'Open' button on the 'Browse' tab of Adding Reference (on collegue's machine)
No way to build MSI packages
IDE allows you to delete 'resources' from directory but when opening forms that use them the designer bombs out.

More to follow (as the memory kicks in)

I've started rewriting some common libraries that I often use in 1.1. These include things like a library to 'User Application Settings', sorting a ListView control's columns in detail view (require some updating for group support), an InputBox dialog box and an application to catalogue my CD's and DVD's.

[Update: I've been 'playing' a lot with the ListView control esspecially since I'll be using it alot in an upcoming utility I'm working on. Unless I missed something obvious or there are some undocumented api's there seems to be no way of actually properly sorting the columns(detail view) once groups are enabled - by this I mean the control is grouped by one column while sorted by another. It sometimes seems the sorting is 'random' or based on the order before grouping was enabled but I could not get consistent behaviour. I'm starting to wonder if grouping is worth all the trouble.
Another fairly irritating thing I discovered is that alot of the fancy refactoring that is in the full product was neglected in the express version. What a pitty.
One suggestion I have for the developers of the IDE is to allow multiple private fields to be refactored to properties. Sometimes doing one by one just is too slow.]

<rant>
A week ago my car broke down - overheating and blowing the top gasket. I had it pulled to the nearest volkswagen garage (Barons) so they can have a look at it. That was on a Friday so I expected that they cannot start work immediately. On the Monday they said they will phone me around 10:00 . So I waited. Eventually late the afternoon they phoned to give me a quote. Well, I knew it had to be fixed and it is going to cost me so I said go ahead. At this stage still no mention how 'busy' they are.
I phoned the Tuesday just to hear if there is any news yet. Got told they are very busy and they'll get to my car once they have a chance. Fine I thought, they are probably still busy with it slowly....
On Wednesday I phoned again, just to hear if there is any progress. This time I got rudely told 'No we are busy' and they have not even started nor do they think they will even have time to begin this week. They have 'bookings' for two weeks ahead and cannot help people in need.
Well, if that's their attitude why didn't bother to tell me it will take at least a week to start looking at my car. Hell, I would have got someone else to look at it and it could have been done by now. I really don't care how 'busy' they are - if they have a labor shortage or not enough room to work in that's their problem. I had no way to know beforehand the car is going to break and book it in advance. If I did it would never have happened!
Does the fact that I'm not driving one of their 'latest' models make me any less worthy? That was the impression I got when I booked it in with remarks like 'hell, its not even on our systems anymore...'.
To be honest I doubt I'll ever take my car back to them or bother to buy a car from them in the future (provided I have the money which is another story).
Sitting without transport for a whole week and being lied to in the beginning is not my idea of good service.
I hope the Volkswagen bosses read this one!
</rant>
[Update: It's now more than a week and still they have not even begun. At least they promist this morning that they will begin today. Lets hope this time they keep to what they say.]
[Update 2: At last I have my car back. The 'damage' to my pocket was not as bad as 'quoted' but still heavy. There is still some oil around the engine which could be from the previous 'blow out'. At least I hope so otherwise it means they haven't fixed anything really and it will happen again!]

Just had to post this...

Only a week remains for the launch of Visual Studio 2005 (for us Cape Towners).

I don't know if there are any room left but please book a place if you want to be there!

tick, tick tick...

On a lighter side. Those that always wanted to know how to clean your own keyboard and too scared to ask...

http://www.thetechzone.com/?m=show&id=431

Next time: how to survive the end of the universe - by Douglas Adams...

I may have hit the first snag using the Express versions and possibly the full VS 2005. It seems debugging in some cases are completely broken and the debugger that comes with VS2003 is completely MIA. Right now I'm still trying to run a repair of VS2003 to see if I can fix the broken debugger. It all started when I discovered some ASP.Net 1.1 app is giving 'aspnet_wp.exe  (PID: 3476) stopped unexpectedly.' errors.
At the same time I noticed getting DCOM errors 'The server {73B25FFD-F501-437B-8B11-7F0DE383964F} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.' which seems to indicate the 'Machine Debug Manager' has a problem.
I then loaded a normal Windows appplication I wrote in VS2003 and tried to run it in debugging mode - It eventually timed out with an error that stated that the debugger cannot be started and needs to be reinstalled.
Thus I had to resort to rerunning the VS2003 setup to try and repair the debugger. Keep your fingers crossed that it will work and that it won't go and break C# Express again!

[Update: It seems the debugger problem is resolved with the repair but the original problem with some ASP.Net 1.1 app that we all use at my company (shared component) is still not working... :( ]

Something interesting to keep a watchful eye for open is db4o that will also be implementing something similar to MS LINQ with 'Native Queries'.

http://www.db4o.com/about/news/release/2005_11_14.aspx

"SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 14, 2005 - db4objects, creators of the leading open source object database, today announced availability of db4o Version 5.0 for Java and .NET, introducing "Native Queries," which express database queries in native semantics of the programming language. This eliminates the need for developers to learn additional non-mainstream APIs such as JDO, OQL, or SODA and initiates a new level of productivity for writing truly object-oriented software applications."

I just received one of those 'scam' messages that claims you must do some stuff to secure your Standard bank account (And I don't have an account with them)

It goes like this:

From: Standard Bank [BenschopBenettarfhnkbr@standardbank.co.za] <- probably fake
Subject: 'Standard Bank' Email Security - <email censored>

Dear Standard Bank Member, 

This e-mail was sent by the Standard Bank server to verify your e-mail address. You must complete this process by 
clicking on the link below and entering in the small window your Standard Bank account information. This is done for
your protection - because some of our members no longer have access to their e-mail addresses and we must verify it.
To verify your e-mail address, click on the link below:

http ://www.standardbank.co.za/LeiBgRrf4iHL3NjaMuC8OtCKvDdyXDLv65HF7e9zseJBCM7rxW1p5h1l1b2m4e

-----

In heavens name don't go and click on it. If you are so stupid to do it you probably deserve to be caught. Actually, I would not have even noticed this message since my Norton anti spam caught it and I just happened to looked at whats in 'that anti-spam' folder.

Now go and warn all your mom's and dad's that do not know the difference between a scam email and a real one (and actually has a Standard Bank account ;) )