You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Wednesday, Sep 11, 2002, 3:35 PM
Comfort, One Year Later
Here. A year ago, thousands of people lost their lives at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon. I'm working from home, so I can't put on my headlights, but I've been doing a lot of thinking about that day today and my "virtual" headlights are most definitely on. I'm sure today is very difficult for the survivors and I'd like to extend whatever comfort I can. May God bless you all.
Wednesday, Sep 11, 2002, 2:17 PM in Conference
Dev. Tool Wins Free Pass to Web Services DevCon
Here. Stoyan Damov, the Grand Prize winner in the "Spend A Day With .NET" Coding Contest, won a free trip to the Web Services DevCon [1], Oct. 10-11 in greater Boston. His Microsoft Knowledge Base Viewer application provides "what's new" functionality for KB articles in the technology areas of your choice, along with caching and plain-text/HTML viewing. And he built it in a single day with .NET! [1] http://www.sellsbrothers.com/conference
Wednesday, Sep 11, 2002, 1:34 AM
Happy Breakpoints for Testing
Here. From Razvan Caciula: John Robbins shows how to set breakpoints on all the functions in a particular source file in Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET.
Tuesday, Sep 10, 2002, 5:36 PM
Stream based access to HTML
Here. From Harry Pierson: Implemenation of an XmlReader-like class but for HTML. Most sites (like this one) that accept anonymous user input (like this entry) don't allow HTML tags because of the possiblity of scripting attacks. With the HtmlReader class, you could easily scan the HTML stream to ensure only specified and safe tags are used.
Tuesday, Sep 10, 2002, 2:01 AM in .NET
Standard Conformance Features in Visual C++.NET
Here. From Razvan Caciula: "Bobby Schmidt wraps up his three-part review of standard-conformance features missing from Microsoft Visual C++ .NET."
Tuesday, Sep 10, 2002, 12:00 AM in Tools
TAPI Explorer
I built the TAPI Explorer (tExplorer) to allow me to understand the various capabilities of the telephony devices installed on my system when I was developing TAPI applications and writing my TAPI book. It grew into a utility for showing all line, address and phone capabilities as well as other TAPI settings, e.g. country codes, telephony locations, service providers, etc. If you're running into TAPI errors that you don't understand, TAPI Explorer will help you work through them.
This version has been run and tested on Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP and supports TAPI versions 1.4 through 3.1.
VS.NET Source | VC6 Source (previous version)
Monday, Sep 9, 2002, 7:14 AM
Flash MX and the bigger picture
Here. From Kim Gräsman: "As the Internet continues to evolve into an "Internet operating system"--programmable interfaces, ubiquitous access, and distributed computing resources--the document-centric browser is an awkward solution to a growing number of emerging needs. The browser is not dying by any means; it just needs a mate."
Friday, Sep 6, 2002, 2:58 PM
Larry Wall On Perl, Religion, and...
Here. "The philosophy of TMTOWTDI (There's more than one way to do it) is a direct result of observing that the Author of the universe is humble, and chooses to exercise control in subtle rather than in heavy-handed ways. The universe doesn't come with enforced style guidelines. Creative people will develop style on their own. Those are the sort of people that will make heaven a nice place." This doesn't have anything to do with Windows programming directly, although I know a lot of Windows programmers use Perl, but I find Larry interesting and this in my news and so I'll post what I like. : ) This article is a Slashdot interview where dotters post questions and the interviewee answers them. In this interview, Larry compares Perl to Perl (5 vs. 6), Perl to Java, Perl to Python, Perl to .NET and, my favorite, Perl to the universe as a whole, where he sees himself as applying the same principles in the creation of Perl as God used in creating the universe (which explains why Perl is so messy : ). [slashdot.org]
Thursday, Sep 5, 2002, 11:52 PM
Transparent Prevalence
Here. From Jesse Ezell: What happens when you mix Prevalence with ContextBoundObjects? Something like this... I followed the link over to the FAQ on Prevalence and it was interesting enough for me to take a closer look at. However, what really turned me off though was that you had to create all this ICommand and IQuery junk to make it work, so you really weren't working with the same objects anymore (kind of defeats the purpose if you ask me). So, I took a few spare hours after work and hacked a "TransparentPrevalence" framework that extends the concept using MessageSinks, ContextBoundObjects, etc. to provide automatic support for persistant objects without all the clumsy command and query objects. It is just a proof of concept, but if someone wants to build on it, feel free to download the source and let me know what you come up with. Too bad I had to work last Friday, this would have been a great "Spend a Day With .Net" project.
Thursday, Sep 5, 2002, 6:32 PM in .NET
A Second Look at Windows Forms Multithreading
Here. "[O]ne thing doesn't make users happy—not having full control of any processing that their applications are performing. Even though the UI is responsive while pi is being calculated, the user would still like the option to cancel the calculation if they've decided they need 1,000,001 digits and they mistakenly asked for only 1,000,000." In this article, I add canceling to my asynchronous pi calculating WinForms app.
Thursday, Sep 5, 2002, 2:27 AM
Go To Statement Considered Harmful
Here. I believe that this 1968 article by the recently deceased Edsger Dijkstra, the inventor of the modern operating system and the stack model of computing, is the very first "considered harmful" article from which all others were inspired.
Thursday, Sep 5, 2002, 2:15 AM in .NET
Bamboo.Prevalence: a .NET object prevalence engine
Here. Bamboo.Prevalence is a "prevalence engine" for .NET. If you don't know what that means (I didn't), you can check out [1], which gives a good intro and then provides a FAQ for the skeptical. In a nutshell: "For many systems it is already feasible to keep all business objects in RAM. ... To avoid losing data, every night your system server saves a snapshot of all business objects to a file using plain object serialization." I admit to still being skeptical after reading the FAQ, but it's mostly a "this feels wrong, I'll think of a reason later" kind of a skepticism. : ) [1] http://www.prevayler.org/wiki.jsp?topic=ObjectPrevalenceSkepticalFAQ
Thursday, Sep 5, 2002, 12:30 AM
Attracting and Keeping Good Folks
Here. .NET Dan [1] asked me for my opinions on attracting and keeping good folks and here is my reply. [1] http://www.dotnetdan.com
Wednesday, Sep 4, 2002, 8:10 PM
Gyro! Gyro!
Here. From John Bristowe: Gyro is a set of files that convert an existing installation of the Microsoft Shared Source CLI to support generic type definitions and generic methods. Gyro extends the CLI, ILAsm assembler, and C# compiler. It also includes several samples, documentation (in the form of specifications) and some new tests. It does not support generics in the JScript® compiler.
Wednesday, Sep 4, 2002, 6:54 PM in .NET
Updated VS.NET Fun Facts
Here. I know I don't organize things well for finding what's new in my list of VS.NET Fun Facts, but if you haven't checked back in a while, I add new tips and tricks all the time. Today I added Nick Hodapp's tip on reducing the amount of time VC7 spends checking included header files for changes and another on Shawn Van Ness's "grokking" of the VS.NET clipboard ring. If you have a fun fact, send it along!