October 2006 - Posts

• 'Undocumented' Features

  So I get this question from an un-named source via MSN: Lets call her Amy for so we can keep track of it...: The undisclosed party involved wanted me to point out that this was a reasonable reason for this questions around the QA process which to give her, I mean the undisclosed party credit is true. Amy says: what's it called where you have an app accept only the first command sent to it and ignore any others for a set period of time? the intent is that you can't make it blow up by "button mashing" David Kelley (Microsoft Robotics.NET) says: ? David Kelley (Microsoft Robotics.NET) says: bad programming Amy says: LMAO David Kelley (Microsoft Robotics.NET) says: or David Kelley (Microsoft Robotics.NET) says: an undocumented 'feature' David Kelley (Microsoft Robotics.NET) says: it depends on who wrote the program sooo... the conversation kind of went on to talk about why we wouldn't want a feature. I mean really would we 'WANT' to write the code to slow down an application even more when reading the keyboard input buffer??? We have enough performance problems for building apps then to make them slow on purpose and just because our TV is slow doesn't mean we should make our computer slow... In any case, unless something like this is really, Really, REALLY, R E A L L Y important I would not go there... and if our app blows up then we should just deal with it... new concept here... 'Error Handling' [gasp]. Posted Oct 27 2006, 03:34 PM by david.kelley with no comments Filed under: david kelley

• Cool Client Side Developer Tool

  So I downloaded this tool that some one sent out that is a plug in tool bar for IE for developers from Microsoft. and my reaction is thus: Hxly macril[sic]. This is cool. I played around with this on a number of sites I did in the past that did 'creative' things with DOM manipulation and this thing is really, really cool. So one thing I noticed is that it shows you the IE implementation of the DOM at that current instant and not necessarily what is first loaded (very cool feature) so for example as of the HTML 3 implementation you could do write operations client side that was not DHTML to build data driven menus even in the older 3v browsers that for the most part are neglected now days and then using the HTML 4 or DHTML object model you can then use addressable ranges to write out html construct’s client side and this thing shows you what is currently implemented... did I say this is cool... 3 thumbs up. :) I did notice that it assumes the default HTML 4 standard for HTML even if the source is xHTML compliant which I think is the fault of IE not this tool which is the one thing about IE that bugs me but at least with this I can see it. :) Anyway this is cooler then the old JS debugger that went away with the 4.0 browser standard. Again very, very cool. :) don’t leave home without this tool. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en Posted Oct 26 2006, 09:17 AM by david.kelley with no comments Filed under: david kelley

• Cool Visual Studio Short Cuts

  So we have this winfx alias around here and a couple of people sent out some of their favorite short cut in visual studio. Here they are: Alt + Shift + F10: So according to Josh says that when you have a bit of code that won't compile such as if you have something that is missing a include or something like that and visual studio knows how to fix it you get this little red box at the tail end of the code and you can click it but the easy way is to use this short cut to make this drop down open that shows you the options that VS knows how to do to fix your code. I tried this and it seemed to work great. I tend to be a bit of a mouse guy but still it is cool. Ctrl + k + x: This cool little one was from Nathan and it opens a code snippet tool that is a quick way to grab conde snippets. Of course there is the standards Ctrl + x (cut), Ctrl + c (copy), Ctrl + v (paste), Ctrl + z (undo last action) and Ctrl + y (redo last undo) Posted Oct 16 2006, 08:17 AM by david.kelley with no comments Filed under: david kelley

• What Makes Technology Cool (WCF, Workflow, Service Broker and MSMQ)

  A lot of the geeks, I mean people, I know are into technology for the sake of technology and as a member of that clique I'm just as guilty of it as any one else. But one thing that I really enjoy is when new wiz bang technology is used to address real business problems. So in our shop my box tends to be alot of backend stuff, from architecture to workflow or data base work. I went to a deep dive conference at Microsoft with one of our clients and the client had come up with this brillant design to address business problems for their next product. The most intresting thing really is the enter solution to the problem. The problem is a 20 year old application that lives in C++/MFC and has been moved from DOS forward. The application has hundredes of specific windows that preform specific business functionality that hundreds of customers and clients are using with millions of dollars are dependent on the system so it is important not to break. The application works great and has been ported to C++.NET 2005 as is without issue and the only really issue with the application is that it is not thread safe. It basically can only do one thing at a time. Oh and the client only has a small development team and can't afford to redo the application after 20 years of work. So now the vision with app is to reuse the current bits that have been worked on in a way that is multi threaded so more then one thing can be done at the same time. And include more effecient ways of getting to what needs to be done and allow customers to easy add to the application around there own model for how they need to accomplish there business in the most effective manner possible. Now lets talk about the cool part albeit some might think messed up design but you really can't argue with the business case in my mind for this solution. So on the backend we make the MFC app take arguements so hide the main window so I can call it and tell it to open a single specific window and I wrap this in a WCF service that I can talk to and then I have another WCF service that runs my workflows all of this on the same machine so that the first service spins up as many of the MFC apps as need to open whatever windows needed making it effectively multi threaded from the users stand point. Then on the front end of this is a WFP application where the UI basically just launchs workflows to open windows or series of windows say that do task 'A' and then run a report or whatever we need and workflows can be customized around a business model for a given client. Then also this app is able to talk to a central server to deal with access and get the workflows the apply for a given user. Add a little event servicing on the backend somewhere for insturmentation and poof we have a cool wiz bang WPF application which not only solves all the business problems but also provides a clear upgrade path for the company moving forward. Technology at its best in my opinion. :) Posted Oct 05 2006, 02:19 PM by david.kelley with no comments Filed under: david kelley