I was sure I had blogged about this before, but apparently I haven’t. Anyway, I’m certainly not the first… I just love the way this thing talks to me. I’m talking about “Encarta Instant Answers”, which is a contact you can add to your Messenger using the email address encarta@conversagent.com. Just add the contact and start talking to the machine…
It’s really supposed to answer questions about god, the world and everything, and it does that really nicely, but even more it reminds me of ELI… …
Yesterday I did a session on Refactor! at the London .NET User Group, the same talk I submitted for DDD day 3. Everything went well and I think people really liked the product. I’d like to thank the group for having me as a speaker, even though my presentation was mostly focused on a specific product. Ian asked me to definitely come back and do another talk sometime, so I guess it’s going to happen. Were you there? Did you like it? Did you think it was horrible? Please feel free to leave comme …
I have recently published a few more XPO related posts on the new Developer Express community site. Previously I have sometimes posted XPO stuff on this blog, and these posts are now all eaten up by the DX site — so I thought I’d let you know if you’re watching this space and not the DX community site. Here are the posts I wrote:
This must be one of the stupidest messages in Visual Studio — how glad I am they kept it on board for 2005!
Let’s see: VS knows the file type I just dropped on it, because it can inform me about it. I have no solution open at this point — the internal state is just perfect for me to open a project if I want. I just have to do it in a specific way, and I believe this is the only file type I can open in VS where this ridiculous r …
This has been announced today: There’s a Developer Express site now for blogs written by people working for the company. This is it: community.devexpress.com I have published two posts there so far, related to the newest major release of XPO (6.1): “Session Management and Caching” and “My persistent classes are real classes — or not?”. …
I just spent half an hour with a very interesting task: I created a new user account on a computer of mine and configured Outlook. Why did that take me so long? Very simple: because apparently all Outlook add-in developers are completely crazy.
Outlook has several methods of registering add-ins. I’m not an expert, but I have found that at least there’s one method to register an add-in system-wide, another that registers the add-in only for a given user. So guess which approach every single add …
I didn’t know this: http://www.viemu.com/index.html I believe some people think I’m a pervert because I sometimes use VIM on Windows and I actually know how to edit stuff with that thing. Even worse, I think it’s a great little editor. But… well, it looks as if there are a lot of people crazier than me — they are using VI embedded in Visual Studio, and they pay $49.95 (excl. VAT, and only as an introductory offer) for the privilege. Count me out there… I think a little evolution every now …
One of the fantastic new features in WPF is the way many controls can use other controls (and a lot of other things apart from what would usually be regarded as controls) as content. I wanted to try this out, and I created a little sample program. I started with a small WPF application that has a window with a ListBox control in it. Then I created the following class:
public class WowContent: StackPanel {
public WowContent(params string[] entries) {
Orientation = Orientation.Ho ...