# Thursday, 01 July 2004

”For pure .NET, C++ typically 25% faster than C#” is the only English sentence (other than photos of slides) in a blog entry I just came across. The rest is Italian, but you know that one sentence certainly caught my eye.

The entry describes a June 30th (that would be yesterday!) Herb Sutter talk. I ran it through Babelfish, but automatic translation doesn't do well with technical terms:

Ago from landlady the "Deterministic finalization" where java and C # is under accusation in order not to have conserved the concept of annihilator in the language. The C#/CLI annihilator is the equivalent of the pattern arranged suit.

Er, OK. Still I think the slides say a lot, and 25% faster? 50% faster if there's heavy pinvoke? Wowza! The future of C++ is indeed a much rose-colored one.

Kate

Thursday, 01 July 2004 17:08:17 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    

Like this quote?

I may have to retreat from my stance of preferring C# and disliking MC++. With Whidbey, MC++ is a whole new language and nearly all of my current objections to it have disappeared.

It's from the last paragraph of an article by Brent Rector  :-) The article itself is worth a read, too.

Kate

 

Thursday, 01 July 2004 16:55:20 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Wednesday, 30 June 2004

In conjunction with the announcement of the Express products, Microsoft's Channel9 is running a coding contest. Each language has its own judge, and yes of course there's a C++ judge. “The Summer of Express contest is a worldwide skill contest where developers are challenged to create “non-business” applications using the newly announced Express products.” And yes, you can use the betas -- in fact that's the whole point.

 Why not?

Kate

Wednesday, 30 June 2004 09:56:54 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Tuesday, 29 June 2004

This is fun! If you want to get started using Visual C++ to write managed or unmanaged code, but you don't want to buy the full product, what can you do? You could use the free Visual C++ Toolkit, which I've told you about before, but that doesn't include the IDE though it does include some very nice samples and whitepapers: one blogger was nice enough to say “the samples alone are worth the download.” At Tech Ed Europe, Microsoft has announced the Express versions of the 2005 products, including Visual C++ 2005 Express (that means they're in beta now, whereas the toolkit is the current released version. You can't release products you create with a beta.) You can download now, so go ahead!

Kate

ps: if you know who the gentleman is at the top left of that Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta page, please drop me a note. I swear we've met and it's going to bug me until I get a name.

Tuesday, 29 June 2004 13:40:10 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Friday, 25 June 2004

Did you know that one person -- Bob Bemer -- pushed the development and adoption of ASCII? Or that he was also responsible for the backslash and escape keys? (There's more, too, like naming COBOL -- check his site.) Isn't it a shame we don't hear this stuff until the obituary? I love this quote: "He was a coder until he couldn't code any more. He lived it and breathed it." While I love dealing with customers, and doing “big picture” architecting, as well as training and mentoring, I too love to code, and I hope someone can say that about me someday -- 50 years from now would be fine.

Kate

Friday, 25 June 2004 12:39:22 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Monday, 14 June 2004

My latest codeguru column, C++ Language Changes for Visual Studio 2005, has been uploaded to the CodeGuru site.

Monday, 14 June 2004 19:53:47 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Thursday, 10 June 2004

Scott Bellware has to reschedule his appearance at the East of Toronto .NET User Group, much to our regret. We're looking forward to announcing the new date soon. The good news is that Marcie Robillard has stepped up to the plate and agreed to shuffle her “DataGrids and GridViews” talk forward a few months. Same time, same place, same URL. See you there!

Kate

Thursday, 10 June 2004 11:11:08 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Wednesday, 09 June 2004

On Tuesday, June 15th, Scott Bellware will be at the East of Toronto user group (meeting on the Durham Collage / UOIT campus at Simcoe and Conlin.) Scott will talk about Unit Testing and he's bringing his own prizes:

Unit testing is one of the few reliable ways to repeatably validate the quality of your code. Without unit testing, code is more brittle, less changeable, and simply fraught with higher defect rates. All of these issues lead directly to software project failure rates. Unit testing helps to bring a measure of cost-effectiveness to software development and enables developers to fearlessly incorporate new features and refinements into their products. Testing leads to better design, higher quality, and to the Holy Grail of software development - reuse. In this session, Scott Bellware will demonstrate test-first coding techniques, and unit testing tools for .NET.

Two licenses of HarnessIt, Unit Binary's unit testing tool will be given away.

On Thursday,  June 17th, Jason Beres will be at the Toronto user group (meeting in Mississauga at the Microsoft offices). Jason will talk about Windows-app-style functionality in a web app, and he's not coming empty handed either:

This discussion focuses on meeting today's IT challenges, using thin client or browser based delivery to maximize ROI while still delivering the rich client features users expect and demand. The discussion will look at the Infragistics Expense reference application as a real world example of some of the power and advanced features that are possible with ASP.NET and outside-of-the-box development tools. We will discuss the challenges of delivering a robust interface utilizing HTML and explore some working code to evaluate solutions.

You will not believe you are looking at a user interface in ASP.NET!!!

Infragistics will arrive at the User Group with NetAdvantage 2004 product give-a-ways, special discounts of 20% off of NetAdvantage for user group members, and a developer resource CD that has a full working trial version of NetAdvantage and both the Windows Forms eBook and reference application as well as the ASP.NET reference application mentioned above.

Remember, meetings are free, membership is free, all we ask is that you register for the meetings on the web site so we order enough pizza. The East of Toronto site has some recurring problems with the Register link disappearing so please, if you go to register and it's not there, email me about it and then try again the next day. An accurate attendance count is so important to us. 

Kate

 

Wednesday, 09 June 2004 07:08:14 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Tuesday, 08 June 2004

I have loved this trick since I saw it and I've just decided it's time to share it. Say you have some application or folder open, but it's minimized or has stuff on top of it, and you want to drag a file to it. Here's how I was taught to do that: grab the thing you're dragging, and drag it down to the taskbar, then wait patiently without letting go. If you let go, Windows will nag you:

So you wait, eventually the window opens up, and then you drag back up from the taskbar before dropping. If you're trying to drag another file into a product like FrontPage and a file is already open, you want to drag all the way to the top menu bar, otherwise the new file will just be inserted into the open document -- hardly ever what what you want.

Next time, try this instead. Get your drag started, and after moving the icon just a few pixels, and without letting go of the mouse button, use your other hand to ALT-TAB. Pop around to the target app and let go of the ALT-TAB, then let go of the mouse button to drop your icon onto the target. This is faster and less frustrating and now I do it all the time. I just checked, and you could do this even in NT 4, if not before. I just never knew, until I saw Scott Hanselman do it in a presentation. Very neat trick.

Kate

 

Tuesday, 08 June 2004 16:05:12 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    

Now people I haven't even met are blogging about donuts... not that the back door he describes could persuade me to scan my own groceries, until the UI improves dramatically. It's forever telling me to put the bag back on the scale or take things off the scale until I'm ready to abandon everything I've bought just to make the process stop.

Kate

Tuesday, 08 June 2004 12:46:06 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #