I’ll be visiting my family over Christmas, so if you’re trying to contact me you’ll have to expect delays. So, a very merry Christmas to everybody out there, and let’s go for a happy new year as well, in case I don’t manage to post again before then. Thanks for reading!

There it is. If you want to create multi-platform (currently Windows Forms and ASP.NET) applications fast, be sure to have a look at beta 1 of the eXpressApp Framework.

Here’s the official announcement, which also has some information on pricing.

I have quite a few things lined up for 2007 so far. Of course I’m still – always – looking for other opportunities, so if you’d like me to to a session at your user group, conference or other event, please feel free to contact me!

Here’s what I have so far:

Maybe I’m not getting the joke, but it looks like the company New Standard Keyboards wants to sell us on keyboards that have a layout with keys in alphabetical order. As I have blogged before, I’m using a keyboard in Dvorak layout with my desktop PC, and I have configured my laptop keyboard to Dvorak as well (I also swapped the keys around physically, which isn’t described in that article – I find it useful when I’m doing presentations and need to hit a certain key without actually having both hands on the keyboard).

Now, I’m sure most of us tend to have an averse reaction to the idea of using a different keyboard/-layout, because we’ve just gotten used to what we’ve always been doing. But the idea of the alphabetical keyboard sounds especially strange to me, as that’s where it all started… look here, the paragraph titled “History and Purpose” explains how the QWERTY layout was invented nearly 140 years ago to overcome the shortcomings of the alphabetical system. I believe that the Dvorak layout does a far better job at organizing the letters in a way that’s useful for (western) language typing, but at least QWERTY also had kind of a scientific idea behind it… the whole idea about New Standard Keyboards seems to be “let’s do something new (or at least something that hasn’t been around for a while), maybe we can sell it to some people who don’t know better.”

I recently saw a post in an MS newsgroup and as I had an example that I wrote earlier, I just thought I’d make it available. What this does is simple: it implements custom handling of the non-client area of a window. The non-client area is, normally, the area of a window that is not part of the client area (duh!), like that used for adornments, window buttons, borders, that kind of thing.

While the user moves the mouse over a window’s area, Windows sends messages to figure out which part of the window is currently underneath the mouse cursor, and if it finds certain areas, it handles the corresponding functionality itself. By overriding the default behaviour and returning the right values for these messages, it’s therefore easy to have Windows activate the resize behaviour of the right border, for instance, although the mouse cursor is actually not over the right border at that moment (or even if there isn’t any right border at all).

My sample program draws some rects on its client area that “pose” as the borders of the window, as well as the title bar and the resize rect in the lower right hand corner. Looks like this:

Here’s the download, which includes source code as well as a compiled version of the application, in case you just want to try it quickly.

CustomNCHandling.zip (15 KB)

DDD 4 is over and as everybody has already blogged, it was a great success again (at least I haven’t seen anybody say anything else). The feedback form is up and if you were there, we’d really like you to fill it out – that way you can make sure it’s going to be even better next time!

Another thing worth mentioning is the aggregation of DDD 4 related blog articles here – go have a look if you’re interested what others have to say.

I talked to Daniel last weekend at DDD 4 and he asked me whether I’d ever posted to the MSDN forums. I think I’ve been there once or twice and possibly I also posted, but mainly I’ve always preferred my news reader and access to the MS newsgroups to the forums. Lots of general reasons for that and I’m not going to go into it here…

Now I thought I’d have another look at the forums and try to see how they might work for a similar purpose. I see that they have a lot of interesting functionality, like the ability to mark posts as helpful, subscribing to threads… nice. But I’m also missing some important things, and I really don’t quite see how forums are supposed to work for somebody who’s trying to follow a lot of the content that goes through and to reply to those posts that he knows the answer to.

For a start, how do I subscribe to a particular forum? Basically, I don’t want to see the full forums list all the time. I want to see a summary page of a number of forums that I’m interested in. This is the foundation of how the Usenet has been working for many years and it seems to be missing completely.

The only way to automate the process of following particular forums seems to be to use the RSS feeds that are provide for each forum. Not a very good way if you ask me, because I can’t quite imagine how RSS would let me follow a threaded discussion in a meaningful way, while also providing the opportunity to reply, and so on. I tried it anyway, and I found that the only application that the feeds work with seems to be Internet Explorer itself. What? I already have a blog reader, thank you very much. I use FeedDemon and NewsGator, and I really don’t want to change that. But it doesn’t work with the feeds for the MSDN forums – in fact I haven’t found any application other than IE that manages to download any content from one of the feed URLs.

So I don’t get it… I understand a number of the reasons why web forums appeal to users/readers, although I don’t really agree with them as a user/reader myself. But as long as important functionality is missing for me as a provider of answers/writer, I won’t be spending a huge amount of time there.