A while ago I wrote an article titled Taking part in a System.Transactions transaction, with some details on how to create your own class that takes part in a transaction, instead of just using the standard functionality.

Now Sahil Malik has posted a new article that's certainly worth a read because it contains information on recent changes in VS .NET 2005 beta 2 (I haven't found the time yet to look into these changes myself) and another practical example of implementing one's own transaction participant. Go read it!

Today, I saw James Kendrick brag about his three headed desktop, and I thought well, that's something I can better him at. So here's a picture of my five headed desktop (six if you count the calculator that accidentally made the shot :-)):

Click the image for a slightly larger version

Huh, now we're talking :-) And that's just before I turn around to look at my second desktop computer and the laptop!

I was just watching the recent WinHEC 2005 Keynote webcast by Bill Gates and others, and one topic that was new to me (I haven't been following all the early details on Longhorn too closely, so maybe I've been missing something) was the mentioning of Metro, an XML based document description language that's apparently going to be the native spool format in Longhorn.

Interesting idea, but I don't think that's very new... anybody remember how the Postscript/Display Postscript combination used to work on the NeXT Computer? Current Mac OS X versions use a printing system that's based on PDF in a very similar way, and it seems that Microsoft wants to create competition to the PDF format as the most wide-spread platform-independent publishing format as well as Postscript as the most wide-spread document description language, right down to the printer hardware.

I haven't read the specs yet, but I find it hard to imagine what advantages the end user is supposed to have if yet another so-called standard needs to be adopted, by software developers, end users and hardware manufacturers. Sounds like one of those typical MS features: they always say things like "when you use our software, everything will work much better... as soon as everybody's using it, that is". I'd rather hear them say "when you use our software, you'll be able to integrate with existing standards and mechanisms much more easily, out of the box". Of course the world needs new standards to evolve, but supporting existing ones should be more important, in my opinion.

Update: I really meant to mention the links to the Metro Print Path FAQ and the Metro Specification.

Two bugs have been fixed in this one:

1. When an electric delete operation was triggered while the caret was in virtual space, the caret would jump to the start of the virtual space, often the start of the line. This could happen to you, for example, when you had a new line inserted somewhere (maybe because you had used the electric semicolon in the previous line) that you didn't want. You'd hit delete to get the next statement in the next line to move to the caret position, but the caret (together with that next line statement) would instead move to the start of the line.
2. When the caret was within the "block" of a for statement, meaning the code surrounded by curly braces following the for statement, the electric semicolon would not trigger. This happened because the plugin couldn't distinguish between the caret being between the parentheses following the for statement (the part with the variable initialisation, evaluation, modification, where electric semicolon obviously doesn't make much sense) and the caret being in the code block behind that part.

To get the latest version (and for links to additional information on the plugin), please follow this link. To prevent confusion, I've now created a central page about the plugin instead of providing download links in all the various blog posts.

I'm not going to make the same mistake again as last time and try to provide an updated version in the old location... so, although there are only a few fixes, the current version has its own place on this page.

Here's the link to version 1.1.3: CR_ElectricEditing-1.1.3.zip

In this version, the checkbox that can switch on and off the whole plugin functionality should finally work correctly. A bug has also been fixed that occurred after an electric semicolon had been entered: the next electric backspace deleted far too much code.

I have tested this version in my VS.NET 2005 beta 2 installation and it seems to work just fine. A bit unexpected, but nice :-) So, have fun with it!

There have been two other posts on the plugin to this point. The first one, here, has information on the installation procedure, while the second, here, describes some of the functions in more detail and has important information on the compatibility of the electric semicolon function with standard CodeRush settings. If you haven't read them, it's recommended you do so.