Archive for November, 2003

“xcopy deployment”

Friday, November 28th, 2003

This was supposed to be one of the features of writing .NET apps – the ability to deploy your apps easily, by simply copying the files onto the computer.  From Microsoft’s site:  ?New XCOPY deployment enables developers to install a Windows-based application simply by copying files to a directory?. That’s true if you have awfully […]

Painting funky window backgrounds

Thursday, November 27th, 2003

I wanted a smooth gradient window background in the app I just posted, and it pretty much comes down to two lines of code with Windows.Forms:     LinearGradientBrush br = new LinearGradientBrush(ClientRectangle,         Colors.Lavender, Colors.LightBlue, 15, true);    e.Graphics.FillRectangle(br, 0, 0, Width, Height); I’d like to try to base the gradient colours on variations of the colour the […]

ZIM SMS Chat Beta

Thursday, November 27th, 2003

Finally I can release a beta version of the app I’ve been working on.  This is really just a front end to a whole lot of work that’s been done by Zim to enable SMS messages to be sent and received by applications, but it’s a pretty nifty front end I think.     http://download.zimsms.com/zimchat/zim/ZimSMSChat.exe That’s the URL.  […]

Note to Unix developers working on Win32 for the first time

Wednesday, November 26th, 2003

Windows does not suck.  Windows is not horribly broken.  Windows is not a big stinking pile of dog poo. I don’t want to sound like some sort of Microsoft apologist here, but really it’s been my experience that if you go into Windows development with the assumption that Windows is some sort of horribly flawed OS that […]

WebRequest Connection Limit

Tuesday, November 25th, 2003

This took me a while to track down – I was having a problem where I could have two WebRequets objects open and reading data, but when I’d try to open the third one, it would just time out. Searching Usenet I found quite a few people with the same problem, but no solutions.  After […]

Piano for sale.

Sunday, November 23rd, 2003

Looking to buy a piano?  It kinda came with the house, and I wanted to learn to play, but I just haven’t had the time.  It’s hard to believe that something that’s 93 years old and as cool looking as this is only worth $800 (if that).  

ZIM SMS Chat – a .NET Windows Forms App

Friday, November 21st, 2003

In the next couple of days I’m going to post a beta of the app I’ve been working on.  It’s a ?chat? application that works through SMS text messaging.  I can send a message to your phone, and you can reply to it and we can chat back and forth.  If I walk away from my […]

MSH and NDA’s

Sunday, November 16th, 2003

Here’s an interesting question.  I wrote some code to that takes RSS feeds and items and exposes them as objects in Microsoft’s new shell environment (msh).  I posted it on a beta newsgroup, and someone else posted a link to it to their weblog.  Assuming this was covered by an NDA (and I don’t think […]

XBox DVD player intentionally crippled

Sunday, November 16th, 2003

Okay so I’m a few years too late with this but the XBox Music Mixer, which I’m writing something else about, reminded me how much this bugs me. The XBox is 100% capable of playing back DVD movies in 480p mode, making it a progressive scan DVD player.  Microsoft made it not do that. I […]

VMWare and Free Applications

Saturday, November 8th, 2003

Many Linux supporters say that one of the main reasons for switching to Linux is because it’s more stable.  Personally I don’t find that to be the case, since my Windows boxes generally don’t crash, and I think that the ?Windows is unstable? mentality comes from Win9x days when Windows really was unstable thanks to […]