graemef.com

If you’re in the UK and you’re thinking of buying the extended version of the Return of the King on DVD, you could do a lot worse than head on down to your local Asda where you can pick it up for £19.97.

I was going to get a few and flog ‘em on eBay, but I thought a Public Service Announcement was more in the spirit of Christmas. Consider this information a gift from me to you.

I’ve installed the
November CTP of Visual Studio .NET 2005 Standard Editon, and here are my initial
thoughts (so far I’ve been upgrading a Beta 1 project to Beta 2).

• First, and most importantly, it comes with Beta 2 of the .NET Framework. IIRC, that
  means applications built with .NET 2.0 can now be shipped! Most of the following
  observations are on the changes in Beta 2, as I haven’t really done much with the IDE
  yet.
• It seems a lot nippier than Beta 1, but that might be because it’s “streamlined”
  in comparison to the Team System version I’ve been using thus far.
• It looks like the BCL teams haven’t been shy in refactoring the stuff in Beta 1:
  some bits introduced in Beta 1 have been moved to different namespaces (e.g. System.ComponentModel.Collections.Generic.BindingList<T>
  has become System.ComponentModel.BindingList<T>, System.Collections.Generic.Collection<T>
  has become System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection<T>), and some
  namespaces have been done away with altogether (e.g. System.ComponentModel.Collections).
• IEnumerable<T> now derives from IEnumerable, meaning
  that all classes implementing IEnumerable<T> need two implementations
  of GetEnumerator(). At first I thought this meant that they’d have to be
  implemented explicitly and a cast would be required to call GetEnumerator().
  But, of course, you can just implement IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() explicitly
  and leave the existing IEnumerable<T>.GetEnumerator() alone. Much
  nicer
• When editing a C# file, the left cursor key is sending the caret to
  the start of the current line (hopefully this is down to an option somewhere that I
  can switch off!).
• Cool new refactoring feature: If you use an unqualified class name in your code
  but it isn’t visible because you’re missing a using statement, you get
  the option to either qualify the class name by inserting the missing namespace in front
  of it, or insert a using statement at the top of the file. That made finding where
BindingList<T> had got to a bit easier!
• Ctrl-Tab now works properly (in the previous CTP you had to press it twice to switch
  to the next document - unfortunately that’s a habit that’s going to take some time to
  break!).
• Each project now reports the path of the assembly it generated. Handy.
• TestDriven.NET 1.0
  works just fine with this new version.
• Some of the default keyboard shortcuts have changed (e.g. Ctrl-E-D to format a document
  has become Ctrl-K-D)
• System.Windows.Forms.Form.AutoScaleBaseSize is depreciated and the
  compiler warning guids you to the
  Compatibility Considerations and Version Changes. Unfortunately, they don’t yet
  include Beta 2 details.

All in all, upgrading a reasonably-sized .NET 2.0 Beta 1 Windows Forms project to
Beta 2 was fairly painless. The thing that took the longest to fix was changing
references to System.Collections.Generic.Collection<T> to System.Collections.ObjectModel.Collection<T>,
but of course if your project doesn’t happen to use that class then you won’t have
that particular problem.

I’m having a break from RSS at the moment, and as such I’m not actively using FetchLinks. I think I’ll make it open source so those of you who do use it can hack/modify/improve it.

Gotta get Christmas sorted out first, though, so expect to see it in the new year… Watch this space!

Maybe the odd wire in your life isn’t so bad after all. I’ve retired my Bluetooth mouse and bought a new mouse with a wire. For the past year it has taken me up to 30 seconds to get the mouse working each time I return to my computer (involving a tedious process along the lines of wiggle it, wait, take the batteries out, put them back in, wait, wiggle, wait, etc…) and I’ve had enough.

Besides - it wasn’t quick enough for Half-Life 2.