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.
Monday, Aug 16, 2004, 10:50 AM in Tools
MSDN TOC Right From The IA's Mouth
Have you got opinions about how information is arranged on MSDN? Do you have issues with the Table of Contents? Are you just looking for some way to fight back against the machine? If so, check out Paula Land's blog.
Paula is MSDN's Chief Information Architect and she's provided a sneak peak at MSDN's new TOC. If you've got comments, now's the time.
Friday, Jul 23, 2004, 6:22 PM in Tools
Tim and His Angle Brackets
Tim Ewald, one of my closest friends and the guy I think deserves to be much more famous (the first chapter of his criminally under-selling Transactional COM+ is worth the price of a Hawaiian honeymoon and is just as fulfilling) is blogging.
In fact, he's been blogging for a few weeks now, but he's teased me before, so I didn't want to point people his way if he was just going to break my heart again. Still, he seems to be on a roll. My most favorite post is XmlSerializer sans XSD, but his recent post on why he cares about the angle brackets on the wire pushed me over the edge.
Don't disappoint us by going away again, Tim!
BTW, Roger Searjeant built some tools to support Tim's ideas.
Wednesday, Jul 21, 2004, 8:08 AM in Tools
Tim Sneath On The What's New in WinForms 2.0
Tim Sneath has a nice, concise list of what's new in Windows Forms 2.0. By far and away, ClickOnce deployment as an order of magnitude improvement over No-Touch Deployment is my favorite advance, but the new controls are cool (you can drop the standard buttons on the menu and toolstrips from the context menu), the BackgroundWorker is very cool (and eliminates about 2/3rds of the code in my threading chapter) and the designer layout assistance for helping with the layout and spacing of controls sounds like it'll reduce a bunch of monkey work in the designer.
Tuesday, Jul 13, 2004, 3:20 PM in Tools
Refactoring C# Code Using Visual Studio 2005
Cool piece by Andrew Troelsen on the new refactoring features in Visual Studio 2005 for C#. Now I just have to train myself to think to use the refactoring operations instead of letting my fingers do it as they've been forced to for lo these many years...
Sunday, Jul 11, 2004, 2:05 PM in Tools
Looking for Genghis Co-Khan
Right now, I'm holding the shared source Genghis library back. I'm acting as sole arbiter of what makes it into Genghis and how and I'm not able to keep up with the flow. I'm looking for someone who's interested in sharing this duty with me. Only proven contributors to the Windows development community need apply.
Tuesday, Jun 29, 2004, 1:39 AM in Tools
Lots of Fun Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Stuff
MSDN shipped their part of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 at about 12:30am on Tuesday morning. Sara has a nice summary of the new MSDN Product Feedback Center that I think folks will find particularly satisfying:
"At the MSDN Product Feedback Center, you can submit bugs and suggestions. You can search through other people’s submitted bugs and suggestions. You can vote for your favorites. You can share workarounds. And, you can see feedback and details directly from folks on our product teams. Oh, and you can get notified when the status of an issue you’re interested in changes."
In other words, developer feedback to the product teams for the supported products is no longer just an email or a post, but an entry in a database that the product team and you can track. I can't wait to get this for Longhorn.
Also, Kent has announced the new Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center, complete with next-gen personalization features that we're testing on this content before we push them out site-wide. My favorite part of the site is the bit where the product teams that contribute to .NET 2.0 point out what's new (and the Windows Forms team even tell you how they're progressing on the features they're implementing).
Kent also points out the site for the new Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition, the beta of a slim and trim VS05 for students, hobbyists, etc. that you can download immediately. There's even a contest for Express users where the prizes include an XBox and a copy of Halo 2.
Duncan also has a post where he addresses our current philosophy on coverage of shipping vs. future content on MSDN and why TechEd is going to throw it "out of whack" for a while (except me, of course, who's going to be out of whack for a good long time : ).
NOTE: Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 will not install on Longhorn. Hopefully the next community drop of Longhorn will include a matching drop of VS05, but as of today, they remain incompatible.
Saturday, Jun 26, 2004, 3:01 AM in Tools
The Good Bits of STL in .NET 2.0
I look at Krzysztof Cwalina's post on delegated-based APIs in combination with generics and I think of the best parts of STL-like template-based programming without all the STL or templates causing the blinding pain just behind your eyes.
Sunday, Jun 20, 2004, 10:05 PM in Tools
More On The VC# 2005 Key Bindings
Joe Nalewabau has one very important addition point to make about the new key bindings in Visual C# 2005: while the VC# team will be providing a bunch of key bindings based on how things are arranged, e.g. Ctrl+W, S to show the Solution Explorer from the Window menu, 90+% of the old key bindings will continue to work, e.g. Ctrl+Alt+L to show the Solution Explorer. I worry that the 90% coverage won't be like uptime, where 90% is generally just fine, but more like speech recognition, where anything less than 99.9% just bugs people. I'm keeping my key bound fingers crossed...
Friday, Jun 18, 2004, 11:59 AM in Tools
The VS Keybinding Randomizer Is An Actual Person
Joe Nalewabau, a Lead PM on the Visual C# team, admitted today that he was responsible for the VC# keyboard randomization process for Visual Studio 2005 and describes the thought process that he went through to get there. I admit that Joe makes a good case for changing the key bindings, but I hate the idea of learning a whole new set (especially since, because I'm a keyboard boy, I'll be crippled until I learn the new bindings). If Joe would swear on a stack of user manuals that the key bindings would never, ever change again, I'd be happier about it. (Rocky: "Again? That trick never works!" Bullwinkle: "This time fur shure!")
Of course, what I think doesn't matter (it stopped mattering when I signed that damned employment contract : ). It's what you think that matters and you should feel free to let him know what you think about the new VC# 2005 key bindings.
Saturday, Jun 5, 2004, 11:35 AM in Tools
Leaked Image of VB.net Context Menu
The great thing about multiple language teams in .NET is that each team can provide tools specific for their audience, like this leaked image of the Visual Basic 2005 context menu.
Sunday, May 30, 2004, 12:09 PM in Tools
Replicator v0.1
I'm not sure what I would make if I had one of these, but that doesn't stop me from wanting one.
Friday, May 28, 2004, 5:40 PM in Tools
On Threat Modeling
Lately, when the subject about how to actually secure a .NET app or component comes up, a magic phrase is uttered: "threat modeling." Apparently, this is the thing that tells you how folks could use your well-intentioned code to do bad things. And on a mailing list with a fairly select membership (although not too select -- I'm on it : ), the Swiderski, Snyder book Threat Modeling was recommended. And the free threat modeling tool that goes along with the book is hosted right on microsoft.com, which I take as a sign of quality. Model those threats towards a happier, healthier you!
[via Pierre Nallet]
Tuesday, May 25, 2004, 12:03 AM in Tools
.NET Framework 2.0: BindingList<T>
After spending a bunch of time with various partial IBindingList implementations, I just stumbled onto a brand new one in the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview: BindingList<T>. It's not done yet, e.g. sorting doesn't work, but the model is certainly what you'd want, e.g. you create a BindingList<Person>, bind it to something smart, like a DataGrid or a DataGridView, and you're able to edit instances of your custom type or add or remove instances, as well as search or sort instances, just like you'd need a custom implementation of IBindingList for today. Very nice.
Monday, May 24, 2004, 2:08 PM in Tools
A Gathering of VS05 Team System Info
I find that in the process of learning about something, I often dig through a lot of places before I come up with what I'm looking for.
In the case of Visual Studio 2005 Team System (aka "Burton"), I wanted to know a lot more about the features that MS was building into VS for teams, including much more flexible source code control integration, web site functionality and stress testing, static code analysis like FxCop and perf. analysis built right into the build system and stats recording as part of the normal workflow for project management reporting.
In the process of gathering these details, here are the places I went:
- Official Visual Studio 2005 Team System home page
- VSTS screenshots from the MS Developer Tools Roadmap
- VSTS demonstration videos
- VSTS FAQ, including the ever favorite "Where do I get it?"
- Korby Parnell's announcement as a member of the VSTS team
- Official Visual ActiveKent Sharkey .NET SE 3.11 VSTS Announcement
Here are some things that tickled my fancy:
- Data binding to drive web site testing. I want the same thing for stand-along client testing
- The real-time stats and drill-down for ongoing web site stress testing
- Building static code analysis right into the build process so that I can fix those issues along with my compiler issues
- The idea of collecting project stats as part of what the developer is doing in VS and using those to roll-up conprehensive stats for the whole team
- Seeing our own internal tools, like PREfast, made available to our customers and integrated so nicely into VS
Friday, May 14, 2004, 10:53 PM in Tools
Chad on the Visual Studio Team Wants To Meet You
"You are important to me! You spend your money and time on VS, and you expect VS to help you make more money and time. You will be using Whidbey to make your living, paying for braces and college and retirement, buying coffee and beer and cigarettes, contributing to political and social causes, paying income taxes and mortgage interest, ordering pizza and books and flowers."
Chad wants you to send him your picture and some info so that he can show his VS team that their customers are real folks. I sent him mine; I may be an MS employee, but I've been using Visual Studio non-stop since it was called QuickC and I care what those guys do with my development environment of choice!