Monthly Archives: September 2003

Frans Bouma writes about problems he has with Windows XP while the whole Microsoft community is overwhelmed with cool Longhorn stuff (Longhorn is the codename for the new Windows version, scheduled for 2005). Personally I never had any of the problem he has had with XP, but that’s not really his point either: “My pointContinue reading “Longhorn hype and Microsoft software updates”

There appears to be this new Google feature: Google Frequent Searchers: “ Do you search with Google a hundred times a day? Do you reach for Google before the phonebook, the dictionary or the newspaper? Do you think, just maybe, you’re a Google frequent searcher? Now you can know for sure. The Google search counterContinue reading “Google Frequent Searchers”

It seems like Alex Lowe is wondering about Eclipse too. What features does it have that VS.NET doesn’t have? I know about a couple and Jeff Key has his thoughts about this too.

Ok, I’ve played with Visual Studio 2003 a couple of hours now and it looks good, however I think Eclipse spoiled me. There are some features that Eclipse (for Java development) has and VS does not, but should IMO (especially considering you usually pay like $1300 for it and Eclipse is 100% free). Refactoring support,Continue reading “Visual Studio first experiences”

I always liked Larry Wall’s “Laziness is a programmer’s main virtue” (if I remember correctly), but recently I can add a new one to that, it’s about rewriting software from scratch: “We’ll try to make different mistakes this time” (thanks Arien). Both are so true ;D Larry Wall is the designer/programmer of Perl by the way.

A huge system like Google has it’s particular needs. One of them is to be quickly transfer files which usually are very large (several gigs), in order to do this fast and secure Google has developed the Google File System.

When looking for the XP version of TweakUI, I found some very cool other power toys for XP. My favourites: Tweak UI, This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.Version 2.10 requires Windows XP ServiceContinue reading “Windows PowerToys”

Scott Hanselman has published a very cool list of Windows and .NET tools. My favourites: QuickCode.NET for VS, NetPing and in particular CommandBar for Explorer which allows you to open a command prompt from within Explorer. Cool!

C# Pro compares C#Builder and VS .NET in this article. In short, VS.NET scores better on help and the code editor, C# scores better on code browsing, (UML) design, Model Driven Architecture and Application Lifecycle Management. This also article pointed me to some nice VS.NET intellisense features which I thought were missing: Easily override methods andContinue reading “Borland C#Builder vs Visual Studio .NET”

OpenOffice: “Dear OpenOffice.org community, We are pleased to provide a preview of the CLI-UNO language binding. Itgives developers the possibility to write client programs forOpenOffice.org, as well as stand-alone UNO applications, with CLIlanguages, such as C# and VB.NET. Information about the language binding can be found at http://udk.openoffice.org/cli/cli-uno.html There you will also find a downloadableContinue reading “.NET support in OpenOffice”