The other day I thought I was remembering things inaccurately, but now I know for sure: ASP.NET is repeating its articles WITHIN THE SAME WEEK! Get your act together, and create some new stuff, or change your motto:
I don’t get it. Just as a practice, and for personal use, I want to create a simple Syndicator (RSS-Reader). To keep it simple, I downloaded the sample RSS 2.0 file, and started XMLMapper. I selected all fields and created the toDp.xtr. Next I reversed the transformation and created toXML.xtr.
On an empty form, I put a TXMLTransformProvider, a TClientDataset, a TDataSource and a TDBGrid. All nicely linked together, and the TXMLTransformProvider gets the properties toDp.xtr, toXML.xtr and SampleRSS20.xml.
When I try to activate the CDS, Delphi (6) hangs. Only CTRL-ALT-DEL will get me out of Delphi.
When I create toDp and toXML based on clinics.xml, things work great. I can’t see what’s the difference, except that an RSS-2.0-file is a more complicated/nested XML-file.
I don’t know why, and I don’t know how long, but obviously there has been a power-outage here today, since some of the hardware here was off, and some clocks show incorrect time.
And I thought the Linksys was to blame 😉
What a week! I told it before, and I’m telling you now: what a week. I got a call from my sister this evening, in which she told me she and her boyfriend are splitting up. She wouldn’t reveal the real details, but in the end it boils down to “him not wanting her anymore”.
For the time being she lives with my (our) dad, but that’s only for so long. She could stay with me, I told her, but it’s a 200km drive from here to her work, so I guess that’s why she refused the offer 😉
If you’re still wondering what Linux distro to choose, I’d say: go for SuSE. I am a SuSE user since 6.0, and must say that it has become a smoother install every time. This 9.1 Pro does take a long time to install on my dual PPro-200 machines, so after the first CD (more than 2 hours installation) I just powered-down the system with the powerbutton (no shutdown!). That was yesterday. When I turned the system back on today, the installation just went on where it left of. Ain’t life great? Now try that with one of Bill’s products.
What I like about this new version (I hear that it is with more newer distro’s) is the automatic detection of devices, like we got used to with Windows. Not only are they detected, they’re configured properly as well. And reconfiguring just takes a little waiting for sysconfig (or whatever) to finish, no rebooting whatsoever.
If I find the time tomorrow, I’ll try to get Mono up and running to serve ASP.NET. Now where’s that Kylix CD I had lying around?
Movable Type is here. And so is the mandatory payment. The free edition will be limited, which for a lot of users is the understatement of the year. Read the comments to this post and decide if you want to stick with MT, or move along to something that remains free. Like b2evolution for example.
Yesterday I installed the trial version of WPTools for Delphi 6. Dudez, this thing rocks! By dropping 4 (yes, four) of their components on a frame, you more or less have a full-blown Wordprocessor (not only a text-editor). Fonts, alignments, rulers, images, tables, whatever, it’s there.
The native format of the edit-component is RTF, but by including WPWordConv in the uses-clause, the open-file-dialog lists all the file-formats that you have installed on your PC. So you cannot build a Word replacement if you don’t have Word installed (since it needs the Word DLL’s to convert to RTF).
Apart from this tiny drawback, this thing rocks! Oh, I already mentioned that.
I will be using this component in a tool I’m writing for a client that uses an application that generates RTF-reports/documents based on templates. But TRichView that I used, can’t handle the header and footer properly (the header contains a table and an image, which I think is not so special) and it does something to the gridlines of a table. In the application, they can view the generated RTF-file, but they requested that they could edit it as well, so they wouldn’t have to switch to the full-blown application everytime. Because of the quirks of TRichView, I created a button to start MS Word to edit the document. But if I give them the new version with the WPTools components, they will never have to use Word again. Great!
You can call it at least a little vain, Allen’s new blogtitle. But the restyling looks great. Keep it up, Allen.
After releasing WiX to the public (permalink), Microsoft has now released WTL, the Windows Template Library, to SourceForge as Open Source as well. Although it is a set of C++ libraries, the initiative should appeal to other developers as well.
Getting started with WTL
A comparison between WTL and MFC
“Old” 7.1 download from Microsoft
What a crazy week this turns out to be. My three months old nephew just got back from the hospital, where he was for an acute meningitis. He doesn’t seem to have any lasting damage (insert praise to your favorite god or god-like being here).
Yesterday we got a call from W’s younger sister: her second baby is born, but about 7 weeks to soon. He only weighs about 2100 grams. Being born in such an early stage, the baby’s lungs are not what they should be, so after a couple of hours the little guy was put on oxygen. He’s transferred to the Radboud in Nijmegen, one of the best hospitals for these kind of problems.
Let’s hope the grows up to be a strong and healthy boy, but for the next couple of days all we can do is wait.