I didn’t know this: http://www.viemu.com/index.html

I believe some people think I’m a pervert because I sometimes use VIM on Windows and I actually know how to edit stuff with that thing. Even worse, I think it’s a great little editor. But… well, it looks as if there are a lot of people crazier than me – they are using VI embedded in Visual Studio, and they pay $49.95 (excl. VAT, and only as an introductory offer) for the privilege. Count me out there… I think a little evolution every now and then is not a bad thing.

And if you happen to work for NGEDIT Software: do you have a clue what a very important reason was for VI to become as popular as it did? Easy: it’s been either “just there” on all the Unix systems of the past, or it’s been free to get and install. Just something that comes to mind…

Update March 2008: Amazing - now it’s $79!

VS 2005 has been the only application so far in which I have found a problem that’s clearly related to incompatibility with the new desktop composition done by DWM (Desktop Window Manager). It works for the most part, but apparently it has problems calculating the positions of certain on-screen elements. For example, with composition activated, the Intellisense popup always appears in front of the text I’m editing. Really just a small issue, but a pretty important one…

Switching desktop composition off for VS helps – Vista deactivates composition for the time where VS is running and re-activates it again afterwards. Not nice, because it also deactivates nice things like flip-3d task switching… does anyone know of a better solution?

This is one funny thing I found while fiddling around with WPF, Cider and the other parts from the newest CTP release: every now and then it’s required to rebuild the complete solution. I suppose it’s not meant to be that  way, but I’ve had all kinds of interesting effects. One time there was a weird exception coming up at runtime, telling me that a Button can’t be cast to a ListBox. The other time it was just some initialization code for a control that was apparently being executed, but didn’t have any effect. Rebuilding the complete solution helped in both cases and my guess is that the problem came up when I made some changes to the XAML code of a window.

So if your WPF app seems to behave oddly, always remember rebuilding the solution – it might help.

One of the fantastic new features in WPF is the way many controls can use other controls (and a lot of other things apart from what would usually be regarded as controls) as content. I wanted to try this out, and I created a little sample program.

I started with a small WPF application that has a window with a ListBox control in it. Then I created the following class:

   public class WowContent: StackPanel {
        public WowContent(params string[] entries) {
            Orientation = Orientation.Horizontal;
	
            Button button = new Button();
            button.Content = "Click!";
            Children.Add(button);
            listBox = new ListBox();
            data = new List<string>(entries);
            listBox.ItemsSource = data;
            Children.Add(listBox);
        }
	
        ListBox listBox;
        List<string> data;
    }

This class derives from a WPF StackPanel, which is one of the container classes. In this case, the controls inside the StackPanel are just “listed”, one behind the other. The extended StackPanel I created contains a button and a ListBox, which in turn is bound to a list of strings.

Now I wanted to initialize the main ListBox on the form with a list of WowContent instances. I created the following method for this:

        public void BindStuff() {
            List<WowContent> list = new List<WowContent>();
            list.Add(new WowContent("Hi", "there"));
            list.Add (new WowContent());
            list.Add (new WowContent("Another", "entry", "with", "more", "text"));
            listBox1.ItemsSource = list;
        }

My first try was to call this method in the window’s constructor, after the call to InitializeControl. But I found that this is not possible for some reason, it always results in an exception thrown from the Application.Run method: Error at element '' in markup file 'Window2.xaml' : Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. I guess this has something to do with the initialization process of XAML windows.

I created this method instead, which made things work:

        protected override void OnInitialized(EventArgs e) {
            base.OnInitialized(e);
	
            BindStuff();
        }

The result of all this, magically, looks like this:

Session proposals for Developer Developer Developer day 3 are closed and voting has been opened today. Be sure to put your check marks in the right places if you want to see any of the sessions I submitted!

By the looks of it there are loads of interesting things to see on the day, so I recommend everybody should definitely take the time to cast his/her vote and of course to be there!

This is really funny behaviour I’m seeing with Firefox on Vista… it doesn’t show me the correct background colors in web pages. The pictures on the right show how my blog page is supposed to look (I hope most of you see it that way, with the orange background) and how it looks in Firefox. I should add that of course Firefox works just fine on XP, only not on Vista, and that this problem is not specific to my blog page – I see the same effect in many other pages. The only browser I have found that shows my blog correctly on Vista is Opera… Internet Explorer stopped working for me after only a half day in Vista, but when it still worked it showed a similar effect to Firefox.

Obviously the fact that IE and Firefox show the same problem is really extremely curious, but as I can’t check things with IE at the moment, I decided to do some research on Firefox at least. Looking at the stylesheet settings in effect for my page (using the Firefox DOM inspector), I saw that in addition to the two “normal” stylesheets (one referenced by my page, the other a standard thing in Firefox, both shown on an XP system as well) there’s a third one referenced at the URL about:PreferenceStyleSheet. For some reason this is not in the list on the XP system, only on Vista. This stylesheet sets the background-color to “transparent” and the setting is marked “!important”, so I guess this is the source of my problem.

A search on the web and in the Mozilla source control shows that this is a stylesheet used to enforce the default preferences set in Firefox, like the option to use your own background color instead of the document provided one. But there’s no explanation I could find why this would only be done on Vista, or why this should be something that reflects an IE setting on Vista – of course, on my system (and also by default) document settings for backgrounds are allowed anyway, so either way the setting for the background-color shouldn’t be in there.

For the moment I don’t have time to look into this further – if somebody can provide some insight, please do so!

I hadn’t seen this yet: Windows XP boots on a Macbook Pro

Conclusion: Some people are able to reach unbelievable levels of boredom

I have just published this: Transactions and Units of Work

The next version of XPO (eXpress Persistent Objects) from Developer Express has finally been released. A list of new features is here. I’m currently working on a number of technical articles that will soon start to appear in the list on this page – look out for that if you’re into XPO. And if you’re not (yet), be sure to download a demo of the complete suite including XPO from here.

As I already reported, ATI has new drivers available for Vista build 5308. Now I’ve tried them and the result is, well, mixed.

Not sure yet if I regard this as an overall improvement… I’ll go with it for a while and see how I like it.

Amazing stuff. Look here.

Here it is! I certainly hope it’ll fix a number of the problems I was seeing, but I haven’t had time so far to try it out.

My i-mate SP5 has WLAN, Wi-Fi, whatever you want to call it. It still runs the smartphone edition of Windows Mobile 5, where things are a bit different from the Pocket PC stuff, apparently. I can’t figure out a way to set a static IP for that WLAN connection.

I guess I could probably go edit something in the registry, but so far I’m having a hard time believing there’s actually no way to do this via the normal user interface…

I’m having much less of a hard time believing that I haven’t found it yet, because I remember that this setting was always pretty hard to find (last time I looked was on my iPaq running Windows Mobile 2003). Some things are pretty well hidden in Windows Mobile… it took me quite a while to find out where I could lock the keyboard (hit On/Off, then 4) or how to adjust the ring volume (edit the profile, not possible where you configure the ring tone).

I’m glad I know Sarah Blow and she’s got better eyesight than me, apparently  – okay, and a lot more experience with Windows Mobile. She found the problem I had with ActiveSync immediately and pointed me to a setting in the Connection Settings dialog (File | Connection Settings), called This computer is connected to. This was set to “Automatic”, but there’s also an option “The Internet”. I’m not sure why, but changing this option made the whole problem go away at once… not only the part where the corresponding setting was overwritten on the phone, but also the fact that the proxy settings were reconfigured on every connection. Thanks, Sarah!

I have this nice new i-mate SP5 phone, which runs Windows Mobile 5. My desktop PC, to which that phone is usually connected with ActiveSync, has the ISA Server firewall client installed and the proxy settings in Internet Explorer come from that client automatically. So far, so good.

Now, as soon as I connect the phone to the computer, ActiveSync copies the settings for the proxies over to the phone and also resets the setting My desktop connects to (Start | Settings | Connections | Menu | Advanced | Menu | Options) to “Work”. This breaks my synchronisation, because the phone is supposed to synch to my Exchange server. If I delete the two proxy entries and set My desktop connects to to “The Internet”, everything is fine. But the next time I plug in the phone, the settings are overwritten again by ActiveSync.

How do I tell ActiveSync to stop fiddling with the settings on my phone? Any ideas?