I was looking around for a computer that would be good to install Vista on and get into some WinFX programming, specifically the WPF part of it. My current desktop system is pretty nice to work with, but I’ve also had a higher priority for large desktop real estate and so I never got into those really fast graphics cards that are needed to do Aero Glass. My desktop system is no slouch, but it’s one of these systems that have been extended manually over years, and it really doesn’t work all that fast compared to machines I see other people use – anyway, Vista will of course have a number of new versions released over the next months, so I couldn’t install it on my main working machine for now anyway.

So, up to this point I had the impression that the only way to currently get into that kind of stuff would be to get a pretty fast desktop machine with a modern GPU. I found I was wrong – apparently there’s pretty good support from ATI and NVIDIA, and this also covers a number of the notebook graphics adapters, like the Mobility Radeon series from ATI and the GeForce Go series from NVIDIA. I had pushed the topic of a notebook away for the time being because I found the Vista thing more important, and I thought buying a notebook now would be a waste of money or at least the notebook would leave a lot to be desired when Vista actually comes along.

My idea is now to use a notebook to install Vista pre-releases on it, also Office stuff of course, do a number of presentations with it, all these things that one normally does with a notebook. And when Vista releases finalize, I can migrate the work I’m currently doing on my oldish desktop system over to the notebook. Good plan, I hope. Now, I was looking around for a notebook I’d like and I found the Lenovo (was IBM) ThinkPad T60. That looks like a great machine to me, it’s got the fantastic keyboard that ThinkPads are famous for, it can take 3GB of RAM and it has a GPU that’ll be compatible with Vista right now.

The drawback seems to be: it’s apparently impossible to get one in the UK! I wasn’t even able to get a quote so far – Lenovo links to a number of resellers, but none of these seems to have a T60 to sell. Hm… wait and see, I guess.  Anyone have convincing suggestions for alternatives?

DDD day 3 is on June 3rd, 2006, and last time there I promised I would submit a session proposal myself this time. Here are the two proposals I just put in – I hope they’re not so specific that nobody likes them :-)

Refactoring made easy with Refactor!
Refactoring is the process of changing implementation details of methods, classes or other code entities, to promote readability, efficiency and/or performance, without changing the external interface of the code entity. Refactor! is a product that allows developers to perform Refactoring right there in the Visual Studio code editor. The aim of the session is to give an overview of the features in Refactor! and their use in C# as well as VB.NET projects, and to provide an introduction to the extensibility model in the product.

Designing a model based application architecture
 Basing an application on a model is a good idea because it makes it very easy to modify those parts of the application behaviour that depend on model data. But creating a useful model and the framework architecture to make it easily reusable is not a simple task. This session aims to describe some of the basic decisions that had to be made during the ongoing development of the eXpressApp Framework, a reusable application framework being developed by Developer Express.

And by the way – they’re still looking for speakers, so make sure you submit your own ideas as well!

I guess some of you have noticed that my blog has been offline again for the past four days, after a similar problem two weeks or so back. I’m sorry about this, it happens randomly, apparently because of some funny problem in Microsoft ISA Server 2004.

The first time this happened, I knew at least that I had made changes to the firewall configuration at the point where the problem crept in, but this last time I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything to the server at that time. In either case, ISA Server suddenly stopped routing in connections to my web server correctly – all access from inside, as well as other published services like SMTP continue to work flawlessly. I guess I’ll have to monitor this much more closely to find out what the problem is. The only way I have found so far to get things back to normal is to reboot the server – no amount of fiddling without a reboot has been successful.

Obviously I’ll try to find a way to stop this from happening, meanwhile if you have the impression that my blog is offline, feel free to drop me a mail quickly at oliver@sturmnet.org and let me know.

I’m going to be at DevWeek next week, at the Developer Express booth. We’ll be demonstrating the eXpressApp Framework, possibly also some of the other upcoming Developer Express products/product versions, like XPO, XtraCharts, XtraLayout Control, … Anything really, I guess. Mark Miller will be there, so this is also a great chance to get some first-hand info or demos for CodeRush, Refactor! or the free DXCore.

If you are there, drop by the Developer Express booth – I’m looking forward to a chat!

I was trying to integrate dp.SyntaxHighlighter (the highlighting system that I use for my source code in this blog) into Community Server. I’ve never before had a look at the inner workings of Community Server, so I may certainly be missing something.

To integrate the highlighter into a blog, two things need to be done:

1. A stylesheet must be added to (the head of) pages that want to use highlighting.
2. JavaScript code must be added to those same pages, preferably right at the end, but certainly after all elements (normally textareas) that contain code that needs to be highlighted.

The first thing I was trying to understand is how CS builds its pages. I found that with the default blog theme, the main body of a blog post page is rendered by the file Themes\Blogs\default\BlogMaster.ascx. In that file, right in front of the tag </CS:Head>, I added my new stylesheet reference:

   <CS:Style  runat="server" Href="/syntaxhighlighting/SyntaxHighlighter.css" ID="Style3" Enqueue="true"/>

At the end, in front of </CS:MPContent>, I added the block of references to JavaScript code and also the final call to the highlighting code:

<script language="javascript" src="/syntaxhighlighting/shCore.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/syntaxhighlighting/shBrushCSharp.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/syntaxhighlighting/shBrushXml.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/syntaxhighlighting/shBrushVb.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/syntaxhighlighting/shBrushSql.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/syntaxhighlighting/shBrushDelphi.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" src="/syntaxhighlighting/shBrushJScript.js"></script>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
  <!--
    dp.SyntaxHighlighter.HighlightAll('code');
  //-->
</script> 

Obviously Community Server doesn’t normally allow the necessary textarea tag in user posts, so I had to edit communityserver.config and add the entry <textarea name = "true" class = "true" /> to the <html> list under <MarkUp>. That done, I was able to create a post with a textarea and some C# code in it, and it was rendered correctly by the dp.SyntaxHighlighter code. Great stuff!

Now, the bad news is that once the theme for the blog is switched, my changes are useless. Why’s that? I switched to the theme PoisonIvy/Fire, and although there’s no other BlogMaster.ascx there, it doesn’t seem to use the one from the default theme. Apparently it doesn’t use any BlogMaster.ascx at all. Oh well. I wonder if there’s another mechanism that makes it possible to make changes in a place where they’ll be used automatically for all blog pages, regardless of the themes. Nobody in the Community Server Forums seems to care, or maybe I’m using the wrong search terms.