Thomas Williams : April 2005

April 2005 - Posts

Code Camp Oz 2005

Last weekend (April 23rd and 24th) was the first Code Camp Oz. The event was fantastic, great and excellent, and well worth attending. Well done to all the organisers and speakers.

I have started writing my thoughts on the weekend in my “Code Camp Oz 2005 Diaries“ articles section. Of course I'm not the only one blogging this - Frank Arrigo has collated some of the blog entries on Code Camp.

Once again, it was a great weekend.

posted Thursday, April 28, 2005 10:56 AM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments

Customised Template in Visual Studio "Add New Item" Dialog

This is more a mental note for me...I finally decided to take the time to add a new template (based on an Inherited User Control) to the Visual Studio “Add New Item” dialog. Here's what I wanted, and eventually got (note: I work in VB.NET, so what you see may vary):

Customised Add New Item VS2003

First off I got the new item, icon, and positioning in the list (2nd, next to Windows Form) working by fiddling around in the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Vb7\VBProjectItems“ and “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Vb7\VBWizards“ folders, copying and amending the existing “WinForm” items. This is pretty straightforward to do as items in this dialog are read from a combination of text files and folders to tell the dialog how to dislpay (and to eventually add a new template to your project).

I also needed to add a line to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Vb7\VBProjectItems\Local Project Items\LocalProjectItems.vsdir“ to point to my newly-added files.

The last thing I was stuck on was the customised descriptions, but thankfully this article at CodeProject helped by pointing out where I needed to put the description in the “LocalProjectItems.vsdir“ file. Don't try looking for where Visual Studio pulls the in-built items descriptions from as it uses resource strings starting with “#“ in this file. After I put in the descriptions I actually had to restart Visual Studio - apart from this last point, it was very good at picking up changes I made on-the-fly.

This was a good exercise because up till now I have been too lazy to look into customising Visual Studio, although I have those sort of things on my long term TO-DO list to concentrate on after I'm using VS2005.

posted Wednesday, April 20, 2005 1:18 PM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments

My thoughts on Blogs delivering business value

I thought perhaps a better title for this post was “You'd have to be an idiot not to read blogs“, but realised that's probably offensive (even though anyone who read it would not be an idiot, because they'd be reading a blog anyway). I had a thought today that blogs are becoming integral to my world as a developer, and I'm wondering if the same sort of content can even be found through other “channels“.

There's a couple of good ways of spreading information that I've been part of:

conferences or other events (might include hand-outs or sample ware)
personal websites (here I mean like an enthusiast web site, like vbAccelerator)
articles on websites (like CodeProject, MSDN)
newsgroups
direct e-mailing
mailing list
forums
chat rooms (OK, I don't actually use any of these)
books (but we'll leave these out of the argument)
blogs

As a developer I can use any or all of these to stay up to date and to make sure I have access to the most up-to-date, applicable knowledge.

I have always thought that the electronic channels I've mentioned above were nearly interchangeable. I have never been a big newsgroup or mailing list user, and only use forums when I've been directed there in a Google search. Of course I use articles and have bookmarked some personal websites: but it's hard to keep up article reading and there's a lot of sites to search through (some paid as well, which I don't check on). I'm only really talking about content delivery here and not the content itself, so it's true that some sites deliver content via RSS, and I suppose that makes it easier to keep track of new content, nearly like a blog.

(I'm a pretty bad mailing list user, I'm more a lurker than a user and very rarely reply. Often someone smarter or with more time or both has made a far better reply before me...sorry, aus-dotnet!)

But for me blogs as a delivery channel have very good business value. I read about people who are solving or have solved problems I'm likely to face. I can get a pretty broad reach from junior developers to the big guns, and both local and international perspectives. And I think that blogs are starting to deliver things that the other channels can't in terms of quick bites of information and almost no overhead to get something to the web (no publishing process, no editors, etc.). Blogs also scale well - as mentioned, I'm on a pretty good mailing list (aus-dotnet), but I doubt that could take lots more users (say, another 200) and still maintain the same quality/signal-to-noise ratio. Ditto newsgroups.

Ken Getz (who I've read for years) has just started a blog and has posted a follow up to a workshop he recently did, with some fixes. If you didn't read his blog you may not have that information. And it would take far more time to (a) mail out the update to all attendees, or (b) put it on a personal website, if you have one (only slightly longer in the second case, but maybe your personal website is also a blog).

So I'm starting to actually rely on blogs. I could argue that they deliver business value to me that other forms of delivery don't. They're not interchangeable with articles, newsgroups or forums (at least not for me). They do form one part of the overall information I receive, one that's becoming a big part. And that's why I think it's important that we deal with issues like identity theft and comment spam (but that's a topic for another day).

posted Monday, April 18, 2005 2:34 PM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments

Hardware vs. Software, and a new PC case

I'm a software guy, no question about it. I just don't “get” hardware. I struggled at Uni with the classes on computer architecture and still can only barely tell my ROM from my RAM.

So when our new-ish 2nd-hand home computer began playing up, I went through various emotional & mental phases. I reasoned that I got such a good deal on the PC (a private sale), that I didn't want to take it back (this is a mistake; you should always get what you pay for, and not be emotionally attached!). I also believed that somehow I'd caused the problem so I wouldn't be able to take it back (this could be true, but as I didn't change one piece of hardware, I doubt it). Lastly, perhaps through pride, I felt that I could have a go and fix the problem (and maybe it would be a good family project?)

Whatever the reason, I decided to stick it out and have a go at repairing it myself. This would take (a) money and (b) time, so it had to wait until our budget allowed and I had a spare afternoon.

The issue was that every so often, when worked particularly hard (like in games), the PC would blue screen. A bit of newsgroup trolling turned up the possibility of an over-heating problem - which I was able to sort of confirm - so I went and bought two fans which eased the frequency of crashing but did not eliminate it completely. After buying the fans (a Vantech PCI fan and an 80mm case fan), I decided I'd add more cooling, when I found out the case didn't have any more spaces to accept fans. At that stage I was considering cutting my own fan openings into the case (which would have maybe helped, but would have been an interesting job in itself). Thankfully, sanity prevailed and I began looking around for a new case which would also have a bigger power supply to replace the 300W one.

Any new case I bought couldn't be shipped (because the case size and weight hikes up the price), so I looked locally and found a pretty good case; however, when I e-mailed the retailer regarding picking it up they didn't get back to me (a bad sign), so I kept looking.

Then I spotted a case that was above my price range (I had been looking up to around $150, this one was $180) which had 2x120mm fans (larger than the standard 80mm) and 1x90mm fan on the side just above the processor, and a 400W quiet power supply. The 120mm fans caught my attention as they spin slower than smaller fans and are a bit quieter. The case (a big black Thermaltake Soprano) also had tool-less hard drive/floppy drive/CD-ROM/PCI card slots and a side window (cool) and thumb-screws at the back. My wife too appreciated the snazzy appearance of the case and we bought it last weekend.

I had an interesting time moving everything over to this new case, and after a few problems (computer wouldn't start) and some internal re-arrangement (I can't believe how many wires are inside a computer), the PC is up and running at 5 or 6 degrees cooler, and I've only crashed it once (on a 30+ degree day). <pats self on the back>

I reckon it's been worth the price and effort that it's taken to get the new case going. Even though I remain firmly a software guy, I'm starting to also get more interested in the hardware (hopefully more knowledgeable too). Perhaps eventually we'll upgrade the current Athlon XP 2500+ and motherboard - another great project...

posted Friday, April 15, 2005 2:49 PM by thomasswilliams with 0 Comments