Channel 9 - Discussions by ElucidWeb

Coffeehouse - What do you want to see in Windows Seven?

ElucidWeb — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:33:51 GMT

Cybermagellan wrote:
I figure for all the complaining I do I might as well give myself a platform for it.

Since Microsoft really isn't talking about Windows Seven at all...but we're doing plenty of it...I figure maybe we can post what we want to see out of the next version of Windows. In the event someone listens then great, if not at least we gave our voice....

Worse comes to worse the C9 team deletes this thread.

My Hope:
1. Theme Management like Linux has...
2. "Expose" view like OSX has...
3. Sandbox/Virtualization (Think VMWare Fusion Unity Mode) for OSX and Linux apps.

*sticky? Maybe we can contain speculation here...

+1 on all of those!

Coffeehouse - WPF 2.0

ElucidWeb — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 03:29:29 GMT

The sheer fact that he had to look up where the registry APIs were located (advapi32.dll). I would say he definitely is a fake, I knew this when I was in highschool working with Visual Basic 4. Seriously are you kidding me, in fact Visual Studio came with a tool, the name escaping me at the moment that would let you browse commonly used API methods by library name and advapi32.dll was one of them, if he is a Microsoft employee he is a complete moron and should be terminated!

In fact I would even wonder if he knows who Dan Appleman even is, or if he even owns the book "A guide to Win32 API" every programmer that has ever messed with the Win32 API owns that book it is like a bible, and not even for VB programming but for Win32 programming in general... Hell I was strictly against MFC when I was doing VC++ programming and this book was almost constantly open and I can't comprehend how a Windows developer would not know this by heart!

Man crap like this really irritates me, I hate stupid programmers but I hate fakers even worse!!

Coffeehouse - Tell us about what you do for a living

ElucidWeb — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 01:28:27 GMT

Read digg.com comments to make me feel like I am the smartest person in existence, or second none read youtube comments!

On a serious note I am a .NET Developer Consultant for a company called Avanade, its quit fun actually!

Coffeehouse - DX10 is do-able on Windows XP

ElucidWeb — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 16:01:56 GMT

When corona turns old enough to get a job I would love to see how he tell's his boss he only uses Linux and his boss tell's him tough #### since no one uses Linux in the corporate world. Why? Well because it needs about another 4-5 years of maturing to become usable in that kind of environment and the only companies you will see doing this are companies that take risk, there is very little value in doing a conversion in the first place.

Have fun in your life, and stop harassing us on Channel9, I don't goto the Ubuntu forums and harass you Linux lovers? Why are you so insecure about your choice? We don't care if you like Linux and hate Windows, we really don't just live your life happy and be done with it!

Coffeehouse - 6 Months On, Vista Security Still Besting Linux

ElucidWeb — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 01:28:14 GMT

corona_coder wrote:

Nice report by a Microsoft sponsored party to be testing outdated software such as Ubuntu 6.06. The fact is Microsoft has not and cannot fix Windows. i dont care how many people claim Windows is more secure. What OS gets hacked 98% of the time? Windows, What OS will get malware more than likely? Windows. Microsofts days with Windows is done. Microsofts server product and HPC offering, a joke. Not even a funny one.

I used to drink diet pepsi, but I switched to diet coke because it taste different. It's nearly the same thing, heck you can't really tell the difference unless you design coke or you work in the soft drink world. But I am fine, I will stick with my diet pepsi, da heck with them naysayers, its the bomb!

Coffeehouse - V4 Beta - Its live !!

ElucidWeb — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 03:36:26 GMT

Background is very Ubuntuish, no like, make it more red like C9 currently is, PLEASE!!

Coffeehouse - Visual Studio 2008: Impressions.

ElucidWeb — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 02:23:03 GMT

Wow not to sound bad but your inexpperience really shows with your post. Tons of applications use progress bar, are you crazy?

They don't do automatic checking for thread invocation in winforms because it would drastically decrease performance, while WPF has implemented this a bit where it checks periodically if you are on the correct thread and throws an exception if you arent it does not do it for every single event call for the same reasons, see documentation for method called CheckAccess, VerifyAccess...

In addition they have greatly simplified invocation in WPF all you have to do is use the Dispatcher.BeginInvoke method...

Unit Testing are reusable tests, they are designed so you can rerun them if for example you do a bunch of refactoring. If I still green light than chances are good I didnt break anything but there is no gaurantee obviously, they are better than before however...The type of unit testing you are talking about is not really useful in most situations due to the complexity of most applications, I cant think of many methods that I create on a daily basis that take only simple types as parameters for instance.

It makes sense to spread LINQ out like that to me personally, not sure what your main complaint about that is really focusing on with only a brief glance at the framework are you really sure its that bad or are you just complaining?

I do agree with a couple of your points, the multiple solutions in one IDE is a good one however I realize why they dont do it. I have been on projects that have over 100 projects in their solution and it takes forever to load visual studio. With the ability for multiple solutions I could just see that escalating out of control.

Things I want to see?

C# Background Compiling is #1 on my list personally Ctrl+Shift+B keys are used so often the letters are coming off, well until I started using Resharper which does this kinda sorta...

For god sake fix the crappy TFS Unit Testing window, there is no reason I want to see all 400 unit tests uncategorized, please I want a drop down to select the class I put them in not an entire list that takes forever to load in the first place and sometimes freezes up while loading!! its just horrible!! I hate it!!!

Also while I am at it, RIGHT CLICK UNIT TEST ABILITY.. HELLOOOO

Anyways now that I got that out of the way...

Some other smaller changes I want to see:

If I compile a solution and then run it, and then stop it and dont change anything at all, why in gods name does visual studio go through the projects again, just freaking run it again...

Can we please get taggable bookmarks? Who the heck uses bookmarks in 2005? No one!! They are useless, unless you can tag them they are a waste of space!

Please give me the ability to disable auto event wiring when I double click a forms element, I do this by mistake more often than not. If some people like it thats great, I hate it and so does everyone I work with. I want to be able to disable it!

I could go on but im tired of typing...

Coffeehouse - String.IsNullOrEmpty

ElucidWeb — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:07:19 GMT

wkempf wrote:

ElucidWeb wrote:
It will throw a compiler error if you dont give the variable a value during declaration. But the compiler may miss this depending on how you pass it into the method.

In any case you should always declare your variables as null when using them, why wouldnt you?

string s = null;
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(s))
Console.WriteLine("String is null or empty.");

Console.ReadLine();

How do you "throw a compiler error"?

And AFAIK, there's no way the compiler can miss an error here, at least in C#. Pass it normally, or as a ref, and it will result in a compilation error. Pass it as an out, and it will result in a compiler error if the called function references the variable prior to assigning to it. There are no scenarios where you can reference an undefined variable in C#.

And I'm not certain how any of this is relevant to the original post mistakenly thinking IsNullOrEmpty() would throw an exception?

Ok it will generate a compile time error? Is that better wording for you? Are we on slashdot? oh were not..hmm

Aslo here is how you would get around the compiler not generating an error at compile time:

class Program
    {
        public static void Main()
        {
            Test test = new Test();
            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(test.myString))
                Console.WriteLine("String is null or empty.");

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

    class Test
    {
        public string myString;

        public void Run()
        {
            myString = "test";
        }
    }

How is what I posted not relevant to the initial poster, he was saying this little gem (String.IsNullOrEmpty) throws an exception and was wondering why it does that, well it doesnt if you use it correctly as I was demonstrating!!

BTW notice how I never actually use Run? Well I do that to fool the compiler... lol

Coffeehouse - String.IsNullOrEmpty

ElucidWeb — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 18:22:30 GMT

It will throw a compiler error if you dont give the variable a value during declaration. But the compiler may miss this depending on how you pass it into the method.

In any case you should always declare your variables as null when using them, why wouldnt you?

string s = null;
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(s))
Console.WriteLine("String is null or empty.");

Console.ReadLine();

Coffeehouse - 'Why I don't believe Steve Jobs'

ElucidWeb — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 21:38:55 GMT

odujosh wrote:

I don't believe in the villanazation of Microsoft. Microsoft primary concern with DRM is creating a market that the music industry and the fans could see as fair. We can argue till the cow comes home about execution. I think the fact that there is an industry built up around both platforms (DRM and Apple) both sides can easily say they were successful and the market has benifited.

For the first time we have all you can eat subscription formats that would not exist without IPODs and DRM. For that I think we should be thankful. Really it is just a break even game: Do you spend more than X on music per year? If so _fill in subscription service here_ makes sense. The something for nothing all you can eat uncontrolled model will never work. The big question this article raises thats the lynch pin of trust is how do we flexibly tell if consumer x has bought rights to listen to x.

But ITunes is the leader of the pack when it comes to DRM, talk about defective by design! Fair Play is one of the most restrictive ones, especially compared to the Microsoft one...

Coffeehouse - Vista Feedback

ElucidWeb — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 01:56:45 GMT

So if you would read up Vista has a feature called SuperFetch where it takes your most often used applications and stores them in your unused memory, therefore next time you launch that application it will launch in half the time. Why do you want free memory laying around when it can be used, if an application needs to use that memory Vista lets it, the memory is not marked as used its marked as free to other applications but the memory manager keeps real free memory at a higher priority.

Free memory gets used first, Cache memory second, and Paging third.

Thats the jist of this very complex feature that does an astounding job of increasing startup times of your most common applications.

Coffeehouse - Vista Audio Stack "Feature"

ElucidWeb — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 01:22:50 GMT

daytrip00 wrote:

I was playing a c9 video today and tripped over my headphone cable as i was picking something up off the ground...

WMP gets an error and says it can't play back the sound anymore.

I had to close it and start it up again... good thing i had downloaded the wmv file so i could skip forward when i watched it again.

I'm not sure what great positive features this awareness of wether my headphones are plugged in or not allows... Any ideas?

I have to adit I was looking forward to this feature but it doesnt work half the time at all! A loud video will be playing i will click on audio -> mixer and lower the volume of Windows Media Player and nothing happens??? The volume does not lower, I take it all the way down and it still will not lower, I am thinking this is a codec issue or something? But it just doesnt work how its suppose to all the time...I have this issue consistently and not just with Windows Media Player but with IE also, sometimes I cant control the volume of the application with Mixer, anyone else have this wierdness?

Coffeehouse - Vista fails again

ElucidWeb — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 08:29:24 GMT

corona_coder wrote:

I bought the upgrade to to my Tablet PC. So far blue screen 6 times, no compatible software and I got 2 viruses because there is no compatible anti-virus programs. Have had to reinstall tablet pc edition and try to get things back. Unlike Linux which is a smooth upgrade every time. Vista choked. I returned the software after fighting with the salesman and I cant wait for a decent Linux Tablet OS to be released. Until then Im going back to ol' reliable and superior Linux and Mac OS X.

You have more problems than anyone I have ever seen, perhaps these problems are isolated to you Linux people or something (lack of hardware knowledge?) I mean seriously you post more smelly piles of bile on this forum than anyone else, but what suprising to me is that you claim you know how to use a computer. Yet you still have an outrageous amount of problems. What the heck is wrong with you? Are you seriously that computer inept?

Anyways I have had no issues really with installing Vista at all, nor having it run or work how its supposed to run and I am using Beta drivers still since Nvidia cant seem to do anything right these days and missed their deadline for WHQL driver certification.

Oh and since you post about how superior linux is in almost every single post you make I would like to point out that out of every computer I own Linux only installed on two of them? Wow now thats progress. I have 3 laptops, and 2 desktops and it installed on 1 desktop and 1 laptop. The others wont even load the Live CD, they hang when launching X Server or whatever that pos is called, even in VGA mode they hang. Quit the superiority you have there, I guess it is more secure if you cant even run/install it! Not to mention Audio and Wireless dont work on the laptio I got it to install on, so its pretty much worthless.

Coffeehouse - What does Windows Vista Smell Like?

ElucidWeb — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 08:19:52 GMT

It smells like one of those frozen burritos you have had in yur freezer for like 3 years where it has a bit of freezer burn but not to bad and you warm it up in the microwave and it smells kinda like it should but with this lingering smell of old to it.

Yeah kinda like that!

Coffeehouse - Gorbachev urges Microsoft to stop piracy suit

ElucidWeb — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 04:06:29 GMT

pottymouth wrote:

Gorbachev isn't the leader anymore, so he can not use any funds from the budget. Putin does not want to get involved. The worst part of this is, some of the people on the MSFT board wipe their bum with more than 10k, and this teacher is supposed to go to jail for 5 years for unknowingly using pirated Microsoft software??I think it would be nice to simply pay the small amount of 10k, and give them access to purchase the OLPC solution instead in the future.I have not seen a fund set up to help this guy yet. Maybe that would be a good idea.He should probably seek help from EFF too, though I am not sure how that would work with his being in Russia.* It takes a big man like Steve Ballmer to prey on the less fortunate teachers of the world. When he looks at the new rims on his BMW and knows that somebody is rotting in a gulag because of it, let's hope he can keep from cracking a smile.

Thats life dude, if you cant take the rap than dont commit the crime. He lives in russia and its his duty as a russian citizen to know the laws abided by his government, just the same as its my duty to know the laws enforced by my governement. I have been wronged a couple times by my government but I know that its just part of life, and the system is as good as the people that make the system.He commited the crime, and if his country doesnt accept negligence as a statute in their legal system then he will due time as seen fit by the government which in this case seems overly ridiculous but thats the law where he lives. I am sure he will be the poster child of such laws to be less restrictive but history shows that someone must fall down the path of the unfortunate in order for harsh laws to become less harsh.Microsoft is in every right to charge him, you dont teach lessons by showing pitty. When your a child your parents dont show you pitty if you get caught smoking, they whip your (I need to watch my language) till its black and blue and while the punishment may not work you will sure as heck double think that decision next time.Who ever said life as fair anyways?

Coffeehouse - No site management features in Expression Web?

ElucidWeb — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:29:42 GMT

I actually thought that feature was useless in Dreamweaver, and I use a seperate FTP process with Dreamweaver to manage my site. The site management always felt kinda clumsy and for newbies anyways to me and it didnt do a very good job dealing with ASP.NET at all. Not to mention it left all those extra folders and files all over my site which irritated me to no end.

Coffeehouse - Vista nVidia drivers -- buggy ?

ElucidWeb — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 03:39:14 GMT

I have HUGE issues with the pre 100 drivers, but the 100 series are much more stable. XP is still substantially better with gaming howerver, Vista stutters and crashes alot with just about every game I have played. If you go through the known issues read me of the drivers there are a ton of things NVidia is aware of and are fixing, they are obviously behind schedule, also notice they are still in Beta and probably wont get WHQL Certified till mid this year or maybe Q3-4 this year so dont bet on getting solid performance.

My advice is a dual boot system until the drivers get certified.

This is a drag for me especially since I just bought a Nvidia Gerfoce 8800 GTX, at least my company reimbursed me for my bad habit of buying latest and greatest otherwise my buttocks would be broke!!

Coffeehouse - Vista sucks!

ElucidWeb — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 02:58:50 GMT

corona_coder wrote:

jamie wrote: hi threent
welcome to c9

Re vista sucks; some agree... some disagree.
(but over a year of use to most here..)

welcome to the vista club

If you used Ubuntu or SUSE Linux ED 10 you wouldnt even give Vi$ta a second look. You can even run your beloved Windows apps on Linux using Wine and some of them will run faster.

Corona,

I've tried Linux and unless I have a PC thats old as dirt Linux wont even run. I have NEVER been able to get any Linux distro to get past the boot screen on my desktop. I always have the latest and greatest hardware on my desktop machine and I am guessing thats why since Linux drivers are HORRIBLE, but I run Ubuntu on my laptop and its ok. The Laptop support kinda sucks, its wireless support is VERY lacking, and its Power Support is also very very lacking. The power, and wireless support in Vista has been Superiorly improved to a point of impressiveness. One thing I actually do like about Vista!

Coffeehouse - Vista sucks!

ElucidWeb — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 02:56:14 GMT

At first I thought this was another Vista bashing thread, well the typical ones we see but your points I have to agree with, the pieces I hate most about Vista are the File Dialogs. I cant stand the Save Dialog, or the Browse Dialog the little Drop down menu at the top always has URL's in it, why the HECK would I want a URL in a File Dialog menu?? Can you explain that to me? I have NEVER used that drop down in XP, its just horrible. I hate it, hate it, hate it!!! In fact I hate it so much and its used so often it angers me to a point where I wanna take Vista and kick it into the ground!!

Coffeehouse - Why Powershell Is a Threat to the Free World

ElucidWeb — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 02:53:10 GMT

Isnt competition usually what creates stronger or equal competitive competition? I would think this would force the Unix people to abandon their 50 year old command line Bash and develop something that can compete with Powershell, one would think!

Coffeehouse - Expression Studio

ElucidWeb — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 03:49:23 GMT

raymond wrote:

mstefan wrote: ... and I would once again like to publically snivel about the fact that they're not included with my MSDN subscription. They are development tools, no matter what some Microsoft marketroid proclaims them to be. And it's really not the money, it's the principal of the thing.

There, I got that off my chest. I feel better now.

I agree completely.

They need to market the Expression suite to both creative professionals and developers.

I agree! I think its total crap that they arent included in MSDN, in fact they leave us developers with no HTML tool at all except for the less than acceptable Visual Studio support. Does Microsoft really want .NET developers branded with crappy looking sites?

Coffeehouse - Why arent Expression Products Available on MSDN?

ElucidWeb — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:40:52 GMT

Nevermind I need to read more thoroughly before I post a question, I just noticed its a ecember CTP Trial you can download. My bad...

But whats confusing is you can purchase a copy and the amazon site says its available now?

Coffeehouse - Why arent Expression Products Available on MSDN?

ElucidWeb — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:34:14 GMT

So I was checking our Microsoft Expression Web and it looks finished based on the website and it even lets you download a free trial version. So I went to MSDN to download it and its not there, why are the expression products not available to MSDN? Thats just not logical, I was looking forward to using Microsoft Expression Web, with Visual Studio 2005 together much like how I use Dreamweaver and Visual Studio 2005 now but Dreamweaver kinda sucks, I beta tested with Expression and its much much better. Especially when it comes to handling .NET tags.

So has anyone noticed this?

Coffeehouse - KDE for Windows

ElucidWeb — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 05:28:09 GMT

Why does it strip my white spaces out..ANNOYING!

Coffeehouse - KDE for Windows

ElucidWeb — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 05:27:42 GMT

Come on guys dont you see it? Linux is cool so what yeah I get it, your crowd of your tiny little accomplishment. Its funny though every computer I have ever built will not run Linux, I cant even get the Live CD to run, and that was Ubuntu 6.10, so good luck trying to sway people into your graces. I dont even have a very new computer anymore, its hardware is about 2 years old, thats pretty frickin old in computer years (multiply by 7 same as dogs). So I installed it on one of my laptops, first thing I noticed? Its ugly, and not just ugly but VERY UGLY. It took me nearly 4 weeks of browsing the forums syncing up with the stupid portage thing or whatever its called I forget to get it to look decent with widgets on my desktop and all the niftyness. But I am rambling, so KDE is usable on windows I already knew they were doing this, but its not being ported to windows. They are using a portable library that has been usable across platforms for a while, I cant remember the name I think its GCC or something but who cares, KDE is being developed to be platform independent which they are hoping will get it on more platforms than before since GNOME kicked their (I need to watch my language) in the Linux world. We will see supposively Plasma or whatever its called is suppose to be a new Windowing System which I guess is sorta like Aero for windows.