Discussions

Sorry, I can't keep myself from asking this one:-

 Halo 3 for PC: When, if ever, and if never, why?

Or at least: Will we ever see it?

It's nice that it's out, but some actual documentation would be nice, especially for the widget platform (since there are at least code samples for gestures).

One short online example of deploying completely static content as a widget does not qualify as documentation.

Typhoon87 said:

JKelley said:

*snip*

That site is slow very often it seems to me. JKelly thank you for the update and hope to see the site get better soon.

littleguru said:

wikipedia said:

*snip*

That's when the earth will die and that's why...

magicalclick said:

I really think good teacher and bad teacher cannot be measured. I believe everyone has a role to this world, whether it is a gardener or a scientiest. Our economy requires a healthy mix of edcucation levels and job opprotunities. What's happening is that it is no longer balanced after everything is "recommended" to out source with tax cut.

Good teacher and bad teacher? I would say the ones that I respect the most is not the one who offers better knowledge about the subject, but some casual suggestions that show me the right diection where I should be heading. I don't care if someone failed at the subject. I care if the teacher can motivate students to have a dream or purpose. This is something no one can measure.

Better education mostly provides smarter zombies, not dreamers. Without American Dreams, US will lose its edge.

Larry Osterman said:

FWIW, I believe that Windows 7 contains the .Net framework 3.5 SP1 (not 100% sure though).

I remember the heady days of 2003 when we were being promised that in the very near future .NET would be the default way to program Windows for everything other than device drivers and such. WinFX had a very definite meaning - it was the idea of .NET being a managed API for Windows.
While Longhorn ran like a dog and something clearly had to be done, I still think that was the right idea: let's face it, the native Windows API is very much showing its age - much of what I used to think I didn't like about C++ actually turned out to be things I don't like about the way it's used to program for Windows. The native API is simply not a useful level of abstraction - and don't get me started on all those people who say it's write to use COM for this and that because "it's very powerful" - they're just cruising for a slapping.
Oh, and all those shouty structs give me a headache. And do there really have to be 10000 different kinds of strings, none of which are sanely interoperable?
But I digress. I was worried when WinFX was rebranded, and when Vista was released I saw my fears were well-founded: yet more essential features only accessible via native code - and we got Vista Bridge as a half-hearted squib thrown in our direction.
But with Windows 7, despite its admitted wonderfulness, things appear to be much worse. Not only are there yet more native-only APIs, but while features that were previously released in managed-only form have now been provided in native versions, the converse has not been done. That looks like a conscious rejection of .NET as something to be taken seriously for Windows development...the final victory of the bearded elitists. Yes boys and girls, we have been relegated to that ghetto that some of you may recall with something less than affection from the old VB days, while rampant Real Programmerism stalks the streets.
This is not only sad, disappointing and annoying, it is also unnecessary. Ironically, I truly believe that with .NET 3.5 SP1 we finally have a version of .NET that nobody should hesitate to use to write shrink-wrapped applications. Start-up speeds are now truly impressive - and unlike the Windows API the .NET Framework is actually well-designed (that said, for a simple comand line utility I'd still recommend just using C, but that has more to do with my heretical belief that not all problems demand or benefit from object orientation than a native vs. managed issue)

I was pretty impressed - I've found Bill's keynotes to be a bit well, um, boring in the past, even when he was talking about things I was interested in.This was much better.
It shows what a difference it makes to talk about something you really care about.
It was also quite subversive. I like that

PS. Malaria is a good reason to worry now about global warming: the nasty little carriers are increasing their range as the climate warms. Dengue fever is already getting close to us here.

OK, no interest but that's fair.
Anyway, the Twitter guys have finally fixed the API, so the Twitula functionality that was previously not working is now working again.

This is the Twitter client I wrote earlier in the year for Windows Mobile (specifically, Windows Mobile Classic and Professional, to use the new official names that convey no useful information whatsoever). That is, Windows Mobile for touch screen devices, or what we used to call Pocket PC. Unfortunately the "People I follow" option has not worked since the Twitter developers did something back in I think August that caused the https://twitter.com/statuses/friends.xml call to handle authentication incorrectly, with the effect that it now always returns a "not found" error. This bug has been notified on the Twitter forum and commented on by numerous people, but they haven't done anything about it. Consequently I decided not to do any further work with what is obviously an unstable and unsupported API.
Other people may have more patience than me and feel inclined to implement a work around to deal with this issue and whichever others arise subsequently - those people might find this code of some use.
Anyone who sees that I render every word in a tweet separately will no doubt conclude that I'm insane, stupid or both: it was my solution to the problem of rendering links correctly along with ordinary text for any arbitrary input string, while positioning everything (more or less) correctly. I never liked it, but it did the trick and wasn't as slow as I'd feared ("Good enough for free", was my thought, to be honest).
  I do sincerely apologise for the lack of comments: I was writing the code for myself and yes, I confess, largely making it up as I went along (see again under "Good enough for free"). I do feel guilty however about the lack of explanatory comments.
Despite all that there may be bits and pieces here that provide some people with useful ideas. I'm pretty pleased with the overall look (not so much with having to use interop code to achieve it), and I think the "finger-swipey stuff" is at least a good start. Speaking of fingers, I made a conscious effort to be "finger-friendly" (and the swipey bit was part of that, as were the admittedly somewhat garish buttons on the dialogs), although my main objective with this program was to break away from the Godawful VB4-ish look that the Compact Framework tends to impose on us (I'd like to do something similar for Diarist, but since the input controls occupy almost the entire display area I haven't worked out how as yet).

PS. If you've actually used Twitula and had never noticed that there was integrated help, don't spend too much time slapping your forehead. Anyone could make that mistake.