About code. Mostly on C++
Last year I posted a small MFC application on my blog, called Colors Game, about covering with a single color a grid initially colored in six colors. It wasn’t a big deal of an application, but it was fun and recently I decided to write a WPF version of that MFC game. This is the … Read more
I said it before, the Visual Studio installer gets me mad. All is fine until you want to install the Service Pack. After that you cannot install additional components until you uninstall the SP. Because of that, you should make sure you installed the entire Visual Studio package before installing SP1. So I did, but … Read more
Alchemy 2.0 brings a modified layout, a set of 44 new elements (to a total of 444), hints, and translation to Hebrew. The most reported bug for Alchemy so far has been the layout mess on small resolution systems, such as netbooks. It wasn’t a bug actually, but a feature. The application required a higher … Read more
Text templates (aka T4) is a great feature in Visual Studio, that proves helpful in many scenarios. I use it for instance in developing Alchemy. However, it has a significant drawback: it does not generate code automatically when you build your solution. To build the files and generate their output you have to manually run … Read more
Finding applications installed on a machine (the ones that you see in Control Panel Add/Remove programs) could be a little bit tricky, because there isn’t a bulletproof API or method. Each of the available methods has its own weak points. WMI is slow and can actually be disabled on a machine. MSI API only shows … Read more
This Wednesday Google released version 11 of the Chrome Browser. One of the most important addition was the support for speech recognition for English. One can enable speech recognition in an input field by adding the x-webkit-speech proprietary attribute, like in this example: <input type=”text” x-webkit-speech /> The result should look like this (of course, … Read more
Productivity Power Tools is a Visual Studio 2010 add-in, developed by the Microsoft Visual Studio Platform Team and available in Visual Studio Gallery. Of course, you can also download it using Visual Studio Extension Manager, from the Tools menu in Visual Studio 2010. Its list of features is detailed on the add-in page and I … Read more
The MVP Global Summit 2011 took place in Redmond and Bellevue at the beginning of March. This year I attended for the fifth time, and as usual it was a great time. Fellow MVPs, discussions with the Microsoft product groups, parties, everything made it worth it. And this year it was also a little bit … Read more
Channel9 recently posted a video with the Parallel Computing Concurrency Runtime team talking, mainly, about tasks and continuations, new features to the Parallel Patterns Library. These are already available through the ConcRT Extra’s Sample Pack. You can watch the half hour interview with the team here. Besides the new stuff they shown, I particularly liked … Read more
Today I decided to give a try to Internet Explorer 9, currently in the Release Candidate phase, and available to download at http://www.beautyoftheweb.com. These are the impressions after the first day. I used it for my usual browsing activity, such as email, search, facebook, etc. No benchmarking or things like that. Unfortunatelly, I can’t say … Read more