Don’t forget: as of January 1st, 2005, Microsoft will no longer support Windows NT 4.0. No more pay-per-incident, Premier or online support. NOTHING. See this page.
Dec 272004
Dec 272004
I got LotR: The Return of the King for Christmas. Now I have all three episodes in the special 4-DVD edition. Mind you: RotK runs for about 3 hours in the cinema, at home you will have to have beverages and crips for about 4 hours!
Dec 232004
If you download and register Omea Reader before January 1st, you can get a license for free. Omea Reader is an RSS reader, and I guess this release falls in the category “abandonware” or “orphanware”: software houses releasing old software for free or as open source. To get into the picture, since they are supporting the Open Source / Free Software initiative(s). Or to get rid of things they don’t need/want anymore. As a sort of self-endorsed Escrow.
Anyway, Jetbrains has a new product Omea Reader Pro, so their non-pro version is now to be had for free.
Dec 222004
If you are a serious developer, you are testing your products against different environments. But that’s difficult. You can’t have IE 4, IE 5 and IE 6 on one system, or you have to choose between Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Or between Windows 2000 server and Windows 2003 server. And why does that stupid client still wants NT4 support?
It sounds like a commercial, but if you have VMWare Workstation, these problems are solved. I bought it in the 3.x days, when VMWare started to be a REAL alternative to a multi-OS-boot. I skipped version 4, because I didn’t need the new features. But there is a beta for version 5 now. It supports all the latest OS-es out there and a few more 😉 The beta is public, but if you’re not a VMWare customer yet, you need to sign up. Go to this page for instructions.
Dec 222004
Commercial products Visual Studio and Borland Delphi/JBuilder, and free Sharpdevelop have a strong competitor in the IDE-market: X-Develop. Currently only available as preview download, X-Develop promises to be a very strong competitor. Already supported languages are Java, J# (up to 2.0 including generics), C# (up to 2.0 including generics), VB.NET, but it’s language plug-in API opens the door for others as well.
One very interesting (Java) feature is the back-in-time debugger, that allows to step through the code up to the point where things went bonkers.
Developers taking their work back home might be glad to hear that X-Develop is fully compatible with VS.NET SLN-files, including VS.NET 2005.
X-Develop is created by the same people that bring us CodeGuide, an IDE for Java and JSP.
Dec 212004
My goodness. I am in a process of comparing Delphi2005 to VS.NET 2003. Just create a simple form with connect/disconnect/exit menu-items/buttons. Connect/disconnect is against an Oracle 10g database. A datagrid on the form to show “Select * from DBA_USERS”. Both in C# (since I can’t get the Oracle ODP.NET drivers to connect in Delphi).
The way you need to define a typed dataset in VS.NET is really something from the past. You need to connect to the database using the Server Explorer, drag an object onto the canvas and save that file as an XSD-file. That file can than be used when dropping a new Dataset onto your form whilst choosing “Typed Dataset”. If you don’t want all that hassle, you are bound to using “Untyped Datasets”. Translate to normal English: you need to programmatically change Dataset/Datagrid-properties. Wow. Talking about state-of-the-art. Why let the IDE do all the work, when you can do it all by hand with the aid of the keyboard?
In Delphi you have runtime-design-time data. Forget about generating “DataMappings”. Just select a table or enter a query and it’s shown in your grid. Period.
Since I do a lot of database-programming (I’m an Oracle guy, did I tell you that?), this is a major con for VS.NET. Or a pro for Delphi2005, depends how you look at it.
Dec 202004
If you are presented with an error message, you can press CTRL-C to copy the text of the message to the clipboard. Thanks Joel!
Dec 202004
If you have one of the following digital camera’s:
- Canon EOS 20D
- Canon PowerShot S70
- Canon PowerShot G6
- Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II
- Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200
- Konica Minolta MAXXUM 7D
- Nikon D2X
and you are using Adobe Photoshop CS, then Adobe has a beta version of the Camera RAW plugin for download. Other than support for the aforementioned camera’s, the site lists no changes.
Dec 172004
Perhaps I missed the announcement, but the DirectX 9 SDK is updated and released. Find all relevant links on this page.
Dec 162004
With 10g Release 2 supporting .NET CLR from within the database, Oracle tries to take a piece of the .NET pie. With their announcement to release a Visual Studio .NET plugin, they show they’re eager to get that piece of the pie!
Oracle Developer Tools will be an add-in for Visual Studio .NET. It consists of an explorer to browse Oracle-schema’s, designers and wizards to create/alter schema’s, a PL/SQL editor, and the ability to drag-n-drop schema-objects onto your form and the code is automagically generated.
A beta version of the Developer Tools will be released at the end of this month. Watch this space.