Channel 9 - Discussions by numedia

Coffeehouse - win7 rc1 candidate 7057

numedia — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:22:02 GMT

I've also noticed in 7057 a strange problem with multiple monitors. This didn't seem to happen in previous builds. One of my three monitors refuses to allow interaction with the desktop. That means I cannot drop files or folders on it. If I try to, they show up on the first monitor instead. Anyone else seeing this happen?

Another one I have seen on multiple machines is Outlook 2007 prompting for credentials several times (usually 3) in a row before it will let me view the inbox on a Hotmail account. The Outlook Connector works with the prompting, but I like it much better not having to use an add-on to access my Hotmail. Just started doing this on Windows 7, but never did it on Vista.

Coffeehouse - win7 rc1 candidate 7057

numedia — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:16:00 GMT

jamie said:

jamie said:

*snip*

ps - all my drives look like this now.. not sure why..

and last - i think there is a bug in the desktop in general.
I have my center monitor selected as "This is my main display"
but everytime i save something to desktop - or arrange icons - they all fly to the left monitor

Those locking icons have to do with private files and folders per your HomeGroup configuration, right? I see them poping up all over on my system as well. Maybe they'll make more sense when and if I ever use HomeGroups.

Tech Off - VS 2008 build time increased by factor of 50 over VS2005

numedia — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:37:47 GMT

bozito wrote:

Since we were only talking about VB projects, it didn't seem to fit into the discussion.

Because according to the documentation, the option you said you set only applies to Visual C++ projects. You were thinking it applied to VB projects and I was calling your attention to the fact that it does not. I was only trying to help you out there. See the above posts for more info.

bozito wrote:

By the way, don't you think that you owe me an apology for implying that I was lying about developing one of the first IDEs? And for being a condescending little jerk while you were at it? I don't really expect you to, but I do think I have it coming.

No insult was meant regarding your comment of having written one of the first IDEs. I'm sure you were proud of your work back then. But since your description doesn't entirely fit the definition of an IDE, that's the reason some were not taking your statement as gospel. Evildictator was right; it's hard to think of tools 20 years back as IDEs when compared to the huge set of tools in something modern like VS 2008. And I for one am grateful for the platform verification since I deploy applications to any WinMo device. But I see where you would be irritated since you only deploy to one or a limited number of devices.

Tech Off - VS 2008 build time increased by factor of 50 over VS2005

numedia — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:09:33 GMT

When you tell VS to build a project, it will always build a project. Perhaps you are thinking of "re-building" a project? And did you see my last message about the building when out of date feature only applying to Visual C++ projects? I'm a little confused as to what you are concerned about in the build process. Can you elaborate?

Tech Off - VS 2008 build time increased by factor of 50 over VS2005

numedia — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:05:13 GMT

bozito wrote:

Do you feel somehow justified in attempting to ridicule a new user because they did not figure everything out the first time? Is that what this forum is for? It was my impression that this forum was to help people. And a lot of people did help me with this problem, yourself included. But you were the only one who saw fit to try to embarass me and make me feel humiliated for not getting it all right on the first pass. I don't understand why you felt that was necessary.

Frankly you set yourself up for it when you claimed to write the first IDE 22 years ago. You can't come in saying that you used to write IDE's and that VS 2008 is immature when you had these rather basic problems. I mean how id you write an IDE if you are indicating trouble navigating through VS? Honest question.

bozito wrote:

As to always building even when the project is not out of date, I took your advice and deployed the app twice in a row without doing a single thing in between, getting a full diagnostic log both times. Both times it completely rebuilt the entire application. The log file is 1279 lines long in both cases. Every single VB module was recompiled both times. And for what it is worth, I changed the Build and Run setting to Build Never before running this test.

I'm glad you were able to find a solution to your problem as referred to in your nxt post. But what in the diagnostics log indicated that it was rebuilding everything? I tried tracing your steps and there is no indication in my diagnostics log that it does so. My came out to be almost 3,000 lines, which indicates to me the size of your project. For what its worth, if you read the documentation on that feature it only applies to Visual C++ projects.

bozito wrote:

So please tell me again why I should stop saying that it always completely rebuilds projects, even when they are not out of date.

See above.

Tech Off - VS 2008 build time increased by factor of 50 over VS2005

numedia — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:30:10 GMT

vesuvius wrote:

Hotfix available for this problem http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2008/03/23/hotfix-available-for-vb-performance-issue-in-vs2008-dj-park.aspx

This is what I referred to earlier, but he indicated that he wasn't generating XML documentation, which is what this Hotfix addresses.

Tech Off - VS 2008 build time increased by factor of 50 over VS2005

numedia — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:28:01 GMT

bozito wrote:

Thank you for your help but I don't think your insut was justified. I can't even find the options in Visual Studio because they aren't there, at least not on my system. I suspect that it is because my project is a VB project, and yours is VC++. Did you attempt to see if there might be a reason for what I stated rather than flaming me?

Ever since VS.NET came out almost 8 years ago, you have been able to go to Tools > Import and Export Settings to make these changes. Your issue with the IDE has to do with the development settings you chose at startup and not so much about the kind of project you have.

bozito wrote:

But as to IDEs, if you think that VS is the best thing out there, I suggest you take a look at Eclipse. At least it doesn't do 8 minute builds unnecessarily. And besides being of the very highest quality, it has the added advantage of being free and open source.

You should gather from this thread that the people are trying to help you with your setup and that this is not normal for VS. And by the way, you should be able to see from the info coming out of MS Build that VS is NOT completely rebuilding your application every time, so you need to quit saying that it is.

Did he just say Eclipse?

bozito wrote:

I will be happy to contact the proper people at MS about the performance problem. Do you happen to know how to contact them?

Contact Microsoft support or via your MSDN subscription and they will be happy to assist.

Tech Off - VS 2008 build time increased by factor of 50 over VS2005

numedia — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 03:37:24 GMT

bozito wrote:

Ok, well if you were referring to me, I know quite well what a dll is and what a compilation is and how it works. I have been doing software development professionally for 40 years now. I just haven't been using Visual Studio and, as I said, I needed to do some research to figure out how to separate code out of the forms and create a class library.

You seem to be one of a few who have this kind of problem. Persons here have tried to offer direction and you can't even find these options in Visual Studio. Today it's important to know to find answers to these questions quickly, such as contacting Microsoft directly or using Google. I'm not sure to which IDE you are referring to, but I can assure you that VS is the best out there today. Perhaps there is just a setting you have wrong?

Tech Off - VS 2008 build time increased by factor of 50 over VS2005

numedia — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:16:32 GMT

Figures... scary that you need to offer such an explanation here, but that may be what's needed. It amazes me of how many devs use VS and have no idea of how compilation even works.

That being said, there are a few known bugs with the way VS2008 builds mobile projects, one of which is that build times will steadily increase every time per windows session. Restart you machine and you will see the builds go faster.

You might also try submitting your question to the VB performance team. This is their job.

Tech Off - Methods of protecting .net exe's from decompilation?

numedia — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:11:26 GMT

CodeGuru123 wrote:

By protecting our product the way we do, the amount of time it would take to crack is similar to the amount of time it would take to develop the new products the hard way.. the way we currently do.

If we released our application in unprotected .net form, it would be only a matter of time before our market share was decreased substantially due to the fact that we'd lose our edge of being first to market. We might still be first, but the second to market companies would follow very shortly after us, unlike now where we have a year or so or more...

There seems to be this arrogance that code written in an application is the only way the job could have been accomplished. So if a competitor wanted to duplicate your application, he would need to write it exactly like you did.

A couple years ago a huge portion of the Windows 2000 source was released. Did that instantly spawn new OSes and allow the competition to take over Windows? It's easier in most all cases to duplicate the functionality of an application by writing it yourself rather than trying to decompile and understand someone else's source code.

So the questions asked earlier of who and why people would want your source code is very relavent.

And yes, there are many many major applications written in .NET.

Tech Off - Some people don't like TFS

numedia — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:02:03 GMT

tgraupmann wrote:

We've been using VS 2005 with TFS Explorer, which has been extremely buggy. We've recently upgraded to VS 2008, which TFS client is the best?

What's wrong with the one that comes with TFS? Why would you use anything else?

Tech Off - VS 2008 build time increased by factor of 50 over VS2005

numedia — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:56:09 GMT

There is a known issue in VS 2008 that will affect build performance. Try going into your project properties under the Compile tab and turn off Generate XML documentation file. This was an issue i ran across and that was the solution. This may or may not also be your problem.

Tech Off - Some people don't like TFS

numedia — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:56:44 GMT

I've been using TFS for several years now and it's working like a champ. Granted, the initial release was rough around the edges, but after the first service pack it's been great. The 2008 release offers some great enhancements around working on and off line, which was always sketchy in the 2005 release.

Tech Off - System.Guid not showing properly when debugging Visual Basic

numedia — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 06:11:44 GMT

I bet if you call .ToString, you will see the GUID in all its glory.

Coffeehouse - A More Active Networking Icon?

numedia — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 08:15:40 GMT

Cyonix wrote:
Right click Network Icon --> Turn on activity animation

I understand that option is there. That's why I said that the Vista network icon "blinks slowly in a very predictable fashion to indicate activity".

Coffeehouse - A More Active Networking Icon?

numedia — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:33:50 GMT

One of the many things I miss from Windows XP is it's lack of a more active networking icon in the system tray. It's nice to have the little globe on the networking icon to show you that you're connected to the internet. Not that it always shows up-to-date results and not that you couldn't figure that out yourself.

But XP used to have a network icon that actively showed if there was traffic going out or coming in. And more important, the little lights stayed lit if there was solid traffic. That used to be extremely useful in knowing what your machine was doing and what you were waiting on. It was even more helpful as a web developer to see if your waiting was because of a large payload, a stuck recursive call, or the server just not responding in a timely fashion. Instead we have this dinky status icon in Vista which blinks slowly in a very predictable fashion to indicate activity. It's useless.

Does anyone know of a way to get more of the XP network icon in Vista? And yes, I know that the sidebar could be used, but that isn't an ideal solution.

Coffeehouse - No DreamScene for me

numedia — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 06:16:02 GMT

I have the same problem. This kind of stuff urks me that we are told to get high end systems to support features like this and when we do, it still does no good. Why did the preview allow DS to work on multiple GPU's but this "release" version does not? Must everything in Vista be scaled back?

Coffeehouse - Vista search loses files

numedia — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:53:00 GMT

Same problem here, too. Mainly in Outlook, loosing emails in there. I have had to rebuild my index 3 times within the last year. You would think with all the disk thrashing Vista does that it would be putting that to good use and actually maintaining something like the index. Very frustrating.

Coffeehouse - Are MSDN Subscriber Downloads doiwn?

numedia — Sat, 05 May 2007 08:54:32 GMT

Yes, MSDN is having some difficulties now. I talked to them earlier this evening and they mentioned "emergency maintenance". They said stability should be reached by Monday, but I see that it pops on and off every once in a while.

Coffeehouse - What makes good code

numedia — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:51:19 GMT

glebd wrote:

I'm by no means an expert in VB (nor do I want to be), but from what I've seen, VB is a hack.

I'm sorry that you have such a problem with VB. It really is a first class language and is quickly becoming a standard for coding the backend of a lot of Microsoft server products such as Reporting Services. I agree that learning a variety of languages is a great idea and will help you form better coding practices simply from the process of learning what these languages have in common. But suggesting that a language like VB is not stable enough to handle large systems processing is absurde. If anything the managed platform is going to give you the ability to keep a handle on the more important business logic and workflow.

This is an old debate that goes back to the argument that assembly is much better over C++ because it gives you far more control over the system. What bearing does that have in the real world of business? Try to convince your boss using that argument next time and you'll get laughed out of the room. It all comes down to the right platform for the job and for many system integration projects today, .NET is the choice.

Coffeehouse - What makes good code

numedia — Tue, 01 May 2007 00:08:26 GMT

glebd wrote:

Let me repeat loudly: DO NOT STICK TO VB.

What in VB.NET would you suggest leads to inherent bad coding practices? I understand the reservations with VB6 and before, but how about now that VB is a first class language?

Coffeehouse - OneCare Antivirus/Antispyware severely slows down a machine

numedia — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 00:25:27 GMT

I've used OneCare and have generally been impressed, even though I'm not a fan of programs that slow down the computer. I'm running Vista now and feel very confident running without OneCare, since Defender somes integrated and does a good job of warding off the spyware.

That being said, when I was using OneCare I thought performance was pretty good compared to other suites. But then when I would run it on another machine I would notice a drastic slowdown. It really does have to do with your system configuration and what programs are installed. But if I did use a suite, OneCare would be my vote.

Coffeehouse - Has somebody here ever tried the microsoft wireless laser desktop 6000?

numedia — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 07:16:24 GMT

cescotto wrote:

Oh well if it's hard to switch between a normal layout and the curved layout then I'd better avoid it: I already had problems adapting with the F-block key (the wireless desktop elite doesn't remember the f-block state when the computer is shut down and also some keys like print and pause work require f-block combinations) and because of the ins/home/del/pgup/pgdown/pgup keys in weird positions, if I had problems with all the rest of they keys then I'd be doomed, dooooomed!

That is the one thing i really like about this setup: the F Lock is persistent across reboots. I forgot to mention that battery life seems great so far. I think they advertise 6 months and I think that's a little on the conservative side. I'm sure I'll see well over 6 months.

Coffeehouse - Has somebody here ever tried the microsoft wireless laser desktop 6000?

numedia — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 01:29:27 GMT

I have the set and I like it quite a bit. The feel if the keys are great and you find yourself not so sore after hours of programming. The slight curve of the keybord takes a little getting used to but after a while you get used to it and it's comfortable. The problem is going between it and other keyboards that are straight. You tend to make mistakes when going back and forth between the two.

My only issue is that the mouse sometimes misses a click, so clicking on something dosen't always get registered as such. I'm not sure where the problem lies in that, it might just be IntelliType on Vista. Oh and one other thing... someone decided it was a good idea to put the Insert key right above the Delete key, which unless you pay attention, you'll be finding yourself in insert mode now and then.

Coffeehouse - Yet Another Half-Baked Product - Expression Web

numedia — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 06:55:25 GMT

DarthVista wrote:

Dudes! What the heck is going on here? We don't come here to bash Microsoft products. We have to be constructive about this. Stop being so negative.

LOL, Darth have you used SharePoint Designer or Expression Web? All we're saying is that its frustrating when tools you depend on go downhill radically in terms of stability and usability when they are supposed to be an upgrade. My suspiscion is that something had to be sacraficed to make the same components and modules work in Orcas, Expression Web, and SharePoint designer.

I am not happy that Expression Web is less reliable that FrontPage and that I can't go back to FrontPage because Vista casues it to be equally unstable. Don't confuse venting utter frustration with bashing.