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Link Interface 9.

I noticed that James Avery has started listing down the bunch of useful links, articles and other information that we keep bumping onto while surfing. Really cool ! That's what i've been trying to achieve here... The links that are present here might not be as fresh and juicy as Larkware news but this is definitely good stuff that helps me everyday to learn and achieve more.

• Roy, Steve and Scoble are all talking about aggregated, centralised main feed for all the GotDotNet Blogs. And Steve has cooked up the code to do this ! The unofficial GotDotNet main feed is here. RSS subscribed :)  aaarghhh... I was planning to write a code to do this... hmm anyway will continue and add more functionality.
• Mike has posted the 3rd Part of the Advice for writers series.
• MSDN TV: 64-bit Common Language Runtime and the .NET framework
• The discussion on 'Bug in 1.0 and 1.1 compiler' has become one of the hot and most discussed topics of recent days in develop.com.
• A very informative article on 'Strings in CLR' ! Thanks to kevin for that.
• Daniel gives a great way to create an unexpiring licensed control. A good read. He also gives a good deal of info about serving binary resource request from a database.
• There is one story about Sun's Rise and Fall. Very descriptive and good comments too.
• Quote of the day : “Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture“.

Learning through Community projects.

WOW ! I am now part of the Learning Xml/Xslt Community site at GotDotNet. I am really excited about working with some real technically motivated people who desire to contribute to the community on the XML front ! Wonderful. Jeff thanks for pulling me in !

Also i will be working on improving the set of Collection classes in the framework along with Joe Castro, an intern at Microsoft ! A small chunk of work including the base design for the Collection classes has been done by Joe already. I am not into it completely yet but this is another good work i'm looking forward to ! The set of CollectionClasses are called as SharperCollections ! Kewl huh !!

FileSplitter Update.

It just struck me that for combining the files that have already been split using my FileSplitter program, you could either use the program's functionality which reads each file and then joins them or you could use inbuilt DOS's copy command to do a binary add ! Voila ! Why didn't it occur to me before ?!

Here the snippet, just in case you didn't know such a thing already existed.

<code>

copy /b Original.zip_Split1+Original.zip_Split2+Original.zip_Split3+Original.zip_Split4+Original.zip_Split5 Original_cmdNew.zip

The Original_cmdNew.zip is as good as Original.zip file.

</code>

aaargh .. All that coding for nothing.

Bug in 1.0 and 1.1 compiler.

Here's the message.

The code below executes both the if and the else in release build with optimization turned on

    class DisposableClass : IDisposable
    {
        public void Dispose()
        {
        }
    }

    class Class1
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                using ( new DisposableClass() )
                {
                    try
                    {
                        if ( args.Length == 0 )
                        {
                            Console.WriteLine("IN THE IF");
                            using ( new DisposableClass() )
                            {
                            }
                        }
                        else
                        {
                            Console.WriteLine("IN THE ELSE");
                            using ( new DisposableClass() )
                            {
                            }
                        }
                    }
                    catch ( Exception )
                    {
                    }
                }
            }
            catch ( Exception )
            {
            }
            Console.WriteLine("ending called");
        }
    }

commenting out the using block in the if block or putting code after the using block in the if resolves the problem.

Link Interface 8.

1. Jesse Ezell talks about Dialog hell and gives a set of classes to solve it ! hmm let me see .. Simple ?!
2. A good article on protecting .NET code and using a digital watermark with copyrights. A real cool one.
3. In case you haven't noticed, Jason Clark talks about Generics in CLR !
4. Dino esposito Rocks ! I hadn't noticed this article on Multi-Table datagrid in ASP.NET until recently where he explains how to achieve the similar kind of flexibility provided by WinForms Datagrid control.
5. Victor Garcia enlightens about AltSerialization, an optimised internal serialization technique used in ASP.NET ! Also Daniel Cazzulino gives some supporting code for it .. Both of them Rock !
6. Don speaks about Indian Restaurants around microsoft campus. Weehee .. Gimme Food.
7. The article on Codeproject : Adding XP Themes to Custom .NET Controls gives good insights on theme fundas with less work. Also has some links to other codeproject articles to achieve the same.
8. As many bloggers have pointed out : Another good C# Source code Generator in .NET
9. Scoble points out at a digital clock. But here's one of my favorite clocks. The pure VML animated watch ! Cool Job !
10. Quote: “Fear not -- this is not a new incarnation of Clippy the paperclip, Microsoft's much maligned "helper application." “. Machine Thinks Therefore it is.
11. Quote of the day : Murphy's law of computing - “When you get to the point where you really understand your computer, it's probably obsolete.”

Another .TEXT Bug.

I have used .TEXT from systems that do not have .NET framework installed and i should say that the engine behaves really weird during those sessions. It occurred to me today that the only thing that was common to the system from which i made a post today and the one from which i had made a post earlier was that both of them did not have .NET installed on them. And both of them showed the same weird characteristics in the EditPosts.aspx page from where we post to the engine. The FreeTextBox control on the page seems to behave differently depending on whether the client machine has .NET installed or not. If the client machine has .NET then no problems whatsoever. If not, then the FTB shows a textbox without all the helper toolbar containing Font, size, alignment, bulleting and other stuffs. Also the Design and HTML buttons at the bottom of the textbox dissapears. I realised that the Textbox shown during such situations expects the HTML to be typed directly onto the textbox and if no tags are given then it renders the post unformatted !

My question is that 'Why would such a control be developed which would in anyway be dependent on the software installed on the remote client machine and then act differently according to the software installed ?'. I can perfectly accept if the software dependency is on the browser which is going to render but other than that it does'nt make sense at all. The whole idea of creating such blogging tools was to create a common application which will enable the end users to have the same experience with minimum effort and allow them to blog from anywhere eventually ! It in turn makes the experience not dependent on the machine because of non-availability of software which needs to be installed for blogging such as bloggar and other similar ones, but instead centralises the experience and makes them comfortable. Now if the blogging tools in the net are going to behave differently based on the client machine at various times, then where is the customisation and having the at-home feeling necessary for good blogging ?

I haven't had time to look at the .TEXT source yet and so havent been able to figure out the reason for the dependencies of the FreeTextBox on the machine. But if someone is already deep down into it, then you could upload a new