Josh Ledgard - Cool community sites that the Visual Studio team likes

Caught the new article on an RSS feed in that other foxy browser...this definitely makes sense.  PInvoke.net is a great idea - having played with wikis recently, this is an awesome development and probably not all that difficult to make into a web service either.  Great little video....

Great idea! Although, the font in Mozilla Firefox is wee tiny, and I can hardly read it. Still, what a grand idea!

There are a few usability issues with Trident-based browsers, a simple change of W3C DOM in the JavaScript and CSS changes would make it great

Other than that... looks like a promising resource

Happy Christmas Eve everyone!  I hope you guys enjoyed that. The tour is going to be cool, and I've got a few other things that I'll probably demo at some point soon.  If you have any requests let us know.  Anyway, here are a couple of the URLs referenced in the video.

http://www.pinvoke.net/

http://www.regexlib.com/

Regulator Home Page
http://royo.is-a-geek.com/iserializable/regulator/

Merry Christmas everyone!

Josh:::

I wanted to commend you and your staff for developing such extraordinary community tools for developers.

However, I would like to contribute an idea to the mix. I think it would be additionally helpful if a distinction on the pinvoke website could be made between API's that do and don't have managed code counterparts for later versions of Visual Studio.

As you know, eventually Microsoft will convert all unmanaged code to managed code which will obviate the need for incorporated APIs. Given the fact that many companies will not upgrade their VS development tools as quickly as new ones come to market, a website that could provide a comparison of sorts between VS that has a managed code counterpart against earlier versions that don't would be not only helpful but signifcantly educational in reducing the learning curve in knowledge transition from unmanaged to manage code development skills.

For example, to play sound wavs in VS 2003, one needs to incorporate an API. In VS 2005, that code has been converted to managed code, thus obviating the need for an API.

The "My" namespace in VS 2005 also converts many of the APIs in previous versions making them obsolete. I'm not suggesting that API incorporated code should be eliminated from the PinVoke website, but that it would be nice to have some kind of web interface that could quickly identify and define:
      1) Managed vs unmanaged code capabilities between Visual Studio versions,
      2) Upcoming anticipated managed code solutions for the next version of Visual Studio,
      3) an obsolete listing of unmanaged code solutions based on particular versions of Visual Studio

I acknowledge that this idea is forward thinking, but it serves to reduce the confusion that will inevitably ensue over time during VS version transitions and upgrades between unmanaged and manage code.

If these ideas sound nebulous, please respond and I will elaborate.

I believe that .Net framework namespaces will continue to grow exponentially over the coming years so moving to proactively accommodate version distinctions now relative to unmanaged/managed code solutions will serve the world developer community quite well.

Brice Richard
Washington, DC

Title of this one is a bit misleading.  No real demos from the VS team but some nice external apps/sites.

Good point on the title. I didn't mean this as a demo of stuff that we've built. Though I have some of those lined up as well.  I really just wanted to show a couple of cool customer built apps that I've made use of lately. 

As far as a resource for API migration... I think that's a good idea that I'll pass on to the MSDN team. You should also file this as a suggestion on the Product Feedback center. 
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/

What's the address for the blog mentioned in the video?

Much better title. Thanks.

The powertoys blog? 
http://blogs.msdn.com/powertoys 
I post dev tools there all the time written by non-MS people. This was sort of a test video post.

Its meat!  Awesome video.  Awesome demo.

More please.

As in... yesterday.


Regards,


Shade

Josh,

Regulator is indeed cool, but you might want to be careful about touting tools that require that a user be running with admin privileges. Roy is aware of the problem, so hopefully the next version will fix the problem.

Of course, since you were able to demo it, it means you are running with admin privileges. Doing demos like this sends the message that Microsoft condones running as admin, something that is quite insecure.

Tsk, tsk!

Don

Thanks for the feedback about the video!
josh

Ouch, you caught me. I was and am currently running as admin.  I'll post on my blog when I've made progress against that.