Discussions

I noticed how the Ribbon tabs were Bold Proper Case, not ALL CAPITALS and how they looked far more natural than the menu items in the proposed Visual Studio 11 Release Candidate.

I've been short-sighted with an astigmatism since I was about 8. About age 45 my eyes started changing rapidly. I have to have my sign tested every year as my prescription changes so much sometimes getting better, sometimes getting worse. I've been presribed varifocals but, working with a PC all day, I find they give me a crick in my neck as I have to hold my head back to bring the screen into sharp focus.

I find I get better results from contact lenses to give me good distance vision and add +1.25 diopter reading glasses when I need to read small or close up text.

Go visit a reputable optician, have a full sight test and tell them what you do for a living and how much of your life is in front of a computer screen.

Don't be shy about rearranging your desk & monitors, pull the monitor closer or push it away, to make life easier and zoom the display in IE, Outlook or Word if you need to. Ctrl+ScrollWheel is your friend. Ctrl+0 to go back to 100% zoom.

The RC is definitely an improvement over the Beta BUT there still isn't enough colour in the icons. You often can't tell what they represent without looking at the tooltip.Whoever decided that monochrome icons were a good idea was wrong. Making them three colours (grey, dark grey and a single highlight colour, on some icons, makes them only a little better.)

ALSO the ALL CAPS menus are very much harder to read. The blog posting made no attempt to justify the ALL CAPS menus. Please can someone on the VS design team tell us the reason - then perhaps we will understand.

To change from 32 to 64-bit operating systems you need to do a clean installation, booting from the installation media and wiping your current OS (or possibly abandoning it by installing the new one in a different folder).

Best to backup your data, wipe the partitions and start again

There are several code converters available, both free and paid-for.

How good a job they do varies and some of the free ones don't cope too well with recent syntax enhancements such as LINQ and lambda expressions.

Try starting here. http://www.developerfusion.com/tools/convert/vb-to-csharp/

Or you write an intermediate system (such as a SSIS package) which translates their mess into something that's actually useable.

I take it you've read this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee382822.aspx and this http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee382820.aspx.

I'd be inclined to scrap that database and do it properly. Having columns called "SomethingNumber" one of which is a Guid and the other nvarchar(6) is so seriously screwed up as to be virtually unworkable. It is certainly a huge barrier to understanding and so to the maintainability of code.

If it says its a "number" it should be a number, not a code or a GUID and leave you to guess which one.

VB.NET and T-SQL - occasionally VBA.

I've just checked Windows 8 CP running on my Samsung Series 7 Slate and the Magnifier over IE10 Desktop shows no colour fringing on text but full pixel font smoothing whether in landscape or portrait orientation.

There are thinly veiled hints that there will be a way of outputting an HTML front-end from LightSwitch very soon. (Possibly by RTM of VS 11 ~Sept/Oct 2012.) Given that it is built using MVVM this shouldn't be that difficult.

Whether this will give the level of sophistication needed in the UI remains to be seen. It may be even more restrictive than the current browser-based Silverlight implementation which is too restrictive for some applications which must target the Out Of Browser Silverlight experience because they need access to the PC file system (for Export to Excel, etc).