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.

Now that Developer Express have made a version of Refactor! available for free for VB.NET 2005 (see my previous post), why should one consider to spend money for the professional edition of the product? Detailed information on this topic is still in the works, but here’s the bottom line (quoting Richard Morris, the CTO of Developer Express):

The features of Refactor! Pro (R!pro) that are not in Refactor! (R!) include

• more languages (Visual Basic AND C#)
• more Visual Studio IDEs (VS2002, 2003, and 2005)
• the ability to tweak and configure refactor through the Options dialog
• extra Refactorings: 4 extra right now, but we plan more

Also R!Pro includes our Visual extensibility API - so you will be able to build custom refactorings using any .NET language. I am fully expecting to see VB developers building tools for their C# peers.

NB: A few of the extra refactorings (like “rename” and “safe rename”) will be available free of charge in the Bonus Refactorings pack available to developers who register R! but we plan a whole bunch of extra refactorings between now and the release of VS 2005 and some will be for the Pro product only .

Personally I’ve been using Refactor! Professional for quite a while during the beta program and I’d really recommend having a look at it. The C# support, for one thing, is very good and competes easily with the builtin functionality of VS 2005.

I hope more information will be available soon, for now this page tells about the Refactor! Professional edition.

As astonishing as this problem was, I found a very easy fix for it, suggested in the Microsoft Product Feedback Center, if you can believe it. Apparently, a similar issue was already in the beta 1 refresh that came out many months ago, but was never actually solved. I tried to make my voice heard here, maybe it’ll be fixed in the future.

Meanwhile, here’s what needs to be done to get networking back: Uninstall (or don’t install from the start) the “Microsoft Device Emulator version 1.0 Beta 2 - ENU” entry (BTW, anybody in this world know what ENU means? What’s the use of acronyms such as this in my installed applications list? Wikipedia gives a 404 when I search for it…) from the Add or Remove Programs control panel. Networking will be back to normal instantly.

Interestingly, in my normal workstation I’ve used the device emulator in the past and it used to work just fine. No idea what’s causing it to fail on the Tablet PC, and some of the other reports in the feedback center don’t seem to be using Tablet PCs at all. Oh well

Now I’ve finally had a look at the image library that comes with VS.NET 2005 beta 2. In a previous post I had commented on the video that Aaron had made about the library, and there seemed to be a number of varying views on the topic as well as on the final contents of the library.

So what’s in it? Well, it’s part light, part dark… The icons, at least those in Windows XP format (74 are included of those), have several different formats, ranging from 16×16 to 48×48 and from 256 colours to True Colour. The icons seem to have a good quality, although the range of images provided leaves a lot to be desired. There are also a few other icons (not in the Windows XP format) of lower quality. Together with the animations, which aren’t new for the largest part but come in AVI as well as GIF versions, the icons form the “light” part of the image library.

On the other hand, the images are just as useless as I feared they would be. Most of them by far are of a kind that I can’t imagine any use for in any consumer application, they seem to be directly ripped from the VS toolbox or some similar technical source. The other huge issue is that they come only in a 16×16 resolution. Different colour depths are partly provided, as well as variants with a magenta mask and without a mask.

So my conclusion is still: ridiculous. Anyone who’s tried to improve a medium-size end user application with proper graphics knows that you need a very versatile collection of images to do that. Already today, 16×16 is an image size that’s only just usable in a toolbar or a menu, with screen sizes increasing, this will be even much worse in a year’s time. I could suggest Microsoft thinks we all write apps that need a huge number of icons with colourful bricks in a suitecase, but I rather continue suggesting that Microsoft thinks it’s not their job to provide for nice graphics to use with their development tools.

You can find their original announcement here and this link at Microsoft tells you much more about Refactor! itself.

With the availability of new C# refactoring functionality in VS.NET 2005, Microsoft seem to have noticed the lack of similar functionality for Visual Basic developers. That’s why a cooperation was struck up with Developer Express for them to offer their fantastic DXCore-based refactoring product in a free version to VB.NET 2005 developers.

There’s lots of additional information on Refactor! available at the Developer Express website, also about the Professional version (which also works with C#, very recommended!) and the companion (parent?) product CodeRush for VS.NET. A white paper has been made available about Refactoring in Visual Basic .NET 2005 that’s really worth a read.

The free download of Refactor! for VB.NET 2005 is available here: http://www.devexpress.com/vbrefactor

There are three ways to get support for this version of Refactor!. You can contact the Developer Express support directly at support@devexpress.com, the Visual Basic IDE Forum at Microsoft’s is open to questions and suggestions at http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showforum.aspx?forumid=65 and finally Developer Express have opened a newsgroup called devexpress.public.dotnet.refactor.vb on their news server (you can find all the information you need to get connected to the news server at http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Newsgroups.xml.)

I have just finished installing VS.NET 2005 beta 2 on my Tablet PC for the second time, with the exact same result: I can’t get any networking whatsoever to work on the system.

What I did is really quite simple: I cleaned up the system very carefully because there had been an installation of beta 1 on it before. I found a lot of information about that on the web, like here, I also had collected some experience doing that a few times with the CTPs (on a different system). I’m reasonably sure I didn’t miss anything important, because my main workstation, which has been through a lot more cycles than the Tablet PC, works just fine with beta 2 after the same procedure.

I ran through the setup without noticing anything suspicious. No errors, nothing. Rebooted at the end… and after that’s done, I noticed that my wireless connection didn’t come up any longer. I checked and double-checked everything to do with the connection, but found no problems at all, apart from it not working. The behaviour was rather interesting: the wireless connection was just showing that it wasn’t connected, but searching for available networks didn’t really seem to do anything. You know how this normally takes a few seconds once you click the “Refresh” link in the dialog? This didn’t happen, in fact nothing seemed to happen at all.

Finally, I found there was a newer driver available from the Motion support site. I had tried one of these drivers in the past and had had some problems with it, so I had reverted back to the standard MS driver for my mini PCI Intel card. I thought I’d download that newer driver and see if there was any tool in the package that might help me find out if maybe the antenna was broken. After downloading the driver I found that it was a little difficult to get the thing over to the Tablet PC without having any network connectivity…

I decided to plug a network cable in and go that way instead. That was when I found out that networking was just completely broken on the machine, nothing to do with the wireless card at all. The built-in fast ethernet card had the same problem: it seemed to be connected on the hardware level (for example, Windows noticed when I unplugged the cable), but it wasn’t possible to get TCP/IP running over the interface. In the Connection Status window, there was no TCP/IP information at all and a click on the Repair button gave an error message saying “Windows could not finish repairing the problem because the following action cannot be completed: Failed to query TCP/IP settings of the connection. Cannot proceed.”

I tried using DHCP and assigning a fixed address. I tried all the same things with the wireless adapter, no difference. I rebooted all the time to be sure there wasn’t any problem with that. Nothing. Finally, I restored the system to a restore point before the VS 2005 beta 2 installation and everything went back to normal immediately. Then I cleaned the system up once again, I installed the whole beta 2 once again. The result was exactly the same.

Obviously it’s possible that this has more to do with the beta 2 of the .NET framework than with VS itself. As parts of the Tablet PC tools are written with .NET, it’s probably possible that there’s some incompatibility there. But apart from the networking problems, the system seems to work just fine, even VS itself works just fine. But I need my network… I’ll keep looking for this, and I’ll keep everybody posted if I find the reason. Please tell me if you have any idea where I should look!

VS.NET 2005 beta 2 is finally available in MSDN subscriber downloads, as I’m sure I’m not the first to report. Now if only the download would use more than a third of my download capacity… So we’re talking tomorrow at the same time, if things keep up. Hm.

I’ve heard similar information from other sources, but now Mark Bower said it out loud in his blog post: VS 2005 beta 2 is nearly there and should be available for MSDN subscribers a while before the 25th. Early next week, or maybe even a little earlier than that?

In a recent post, I announced a plugin that would bring a few features from nostalgic Emacs days to the modern world of Visual Studio 2003 and CodeRush. I received some feedback on that first version and now the Updated, Fixed and Obviously Much Better New Version^TM is available.

To start with, here’s the download link again, for the current version: CR_ElectricEditing-current.zip
If you need instructions to get the plugin installed, review my first post on the topic, please.

Now, what can that fantastic plugin do? I’ll show you some screenshots and provide some explanations with them.

Deletion

One part of the functionality is related to deleting stuff. Not only stuff, but quite specific stuff, namely whitespace. Have you ever noticed how cumbersome it is to get back to the point you where working at after accidentally hitting Return? Electric Editing provides the Electric Backspace function (Hungry Backspace is what is was called in Emacs, for good reasons) that deletes all the whitespace left of the caret in one go. The standard options for that look like this:

With the exception of deleting recent electric insertions (which wouldn’t make much sense), the same options are available for the Delete key:

In addition to the pure functionality, a hinting option has been introduced that allows you to anticipate exactly what will be deleted if you use the Backspace or Delete at any time. The hint lines will always reflect the exact options you have set for the above features. You can switch hinting on and off and configure its color:

Here’s a screenshot of the hints in action, with the color set to blazing red to make them clearly visible.

Automatic linefeeds

The remaining functionality is all about automatically adding linefeeds when certain characters are inserted in the code. There are several options for this, which should really be quite self-explanatory. You can have linefeeds inserted before and after opening and closing braces, as well as after the semicolon. By default, the braces don’t get any linefeeds added if the caret is within parentheses at that moment, because it’s assumed that you want to create an inline array initialisation, like here:

  MethodInfo mi = typeof(MyClass).GetMethod("DoSomething");
  mi.Invoke(anObject, new object[] { one, another });

If you want to insert linefeeds before braces, you have the option to do that only if the caret isn’t already on an empty line.

Important: The semicolon also jumps to the end of the line before inserting itself. Because of this, there’s a conflict with CodeRush’s own smart semicolon feature, which you need to switch off to get the Electric Editing semicolon to work correctly. To do this, enter the CodeRush options dialog via the menu entry DevExpress/Options… Then make sure that the Level (the combo box in the lower left corner of the dialog) is set to Advanced or even Expert. Navigate to the page Editor/Auto Complete/Intellassist/Parens & Brackets. On this page, deactivate the two options “Smart semi-colon”, one in each of the settings groups. I hope the following screenshot makes this clearer:

That’s it then. Have fun and don’t forget to give feedback if there’s anything you like, or don’t!

One thing I loved back in those days when I was using (X)Emacs as a development platform was the fantastic support for editing programming languages. Obviously, C and C++ were the programming languages everybody wanted to edit at the time, and Emacs had various editing modes for these languages. The culmination point was the arrival of CC Mode, but even before that the c mode and c++ mode for Emacs had features that were called “electric”.

Years later, IDEs in the MS world have finally caught up with some of the features that Emacs has to offer in terms of code formatting (VS 2005 promises a lot in that area). Nevertheless, the ease of typing is still not comparable… certainly not without tools like CodeRush. Based on CodeRush, I created a plugin that lets me use some of the “electric” features I remember from Emacs: hungry delete and backspace and automatic newline insertion for the semicolon and the opening and closing curly braces.

I have implemented the features in such a way that hungry delete and backspace should be available for all languages (you can switch on and off every single feature on a per-language basis via the CR options dialog, look for the Editor/Electric Editing page), but the electric semicolon and braces are only available for C# at the moment. If there’s interest in having this work with C++ I might look into it, let me know please. Or does someone actually have an idea how that could be usefully implemented for VB.NET?

Currently I have tried the plugin in VS 2003, because CR itself is giving me a hard time in VS 2005 (beta 1). As soon as beta 2 is finally available, I’ll try it out on that platform, until then I expect there might be problems due to the new features the editor in VS 2005 brings.

Another thing I haven’t tried is running the plugin on the basis of a DXCore installation without CodeRush, so YMMV if you try to do that.

Now, here’s the download: CR_ElectricEditing.zip

To install, just unzip and drop the file into the DXCore Plugin directory, which by default is at C:\Program Files\Developer Express Inc\DXCore for Visual Studio .NET\1.1\Bin\Plugins.

Disclaimer: I have taken the greatest care to create the plugin in a way so that it won’t format your hard drive or damage your system in any other imaginable way. If it does that anyway, that’s your own bad luck for downloading and installing stuff from the internet.

Have fun!

I’ve always been wondering what would happen when the number of icons in the VS.NET 2003 splash screen exceeded 10… because it looks like the splash screen would be “full” then. But I always thought okay, they didn’t think about this very well.

Hm… now I found out, it stretches to make room for additional lines: