Archive for August, 2004

Contact-first

Tuesday, August 31st, 2004

In answer to Contract-first: do you believe? here’s my two cents.    One of the reasons we’re tolerating all this change in the tools and methodologies is to improve developer productivity.  Another, of course, is to enable interop.  But if you don’t need interop (and most applications do not, or only need a small amount […]

Thinking about a 3D user interface

Monday, August 30th, 2004

One of the promises of a 3D user interface is visualization of large sets of data.  You couldn’t fit 10,000 items on a 2D display, but you could set up a 3D scene that showed the items in rows, stacked off into the distance.  If you could tell them apart by colour, say, from a […]

More gmail invites

Monday, August 30th, 2004

Wow, they’re giving gmail invitations away pretty freely these days; wonder if that means it’s getting close to general availability. I wonder if anyone who wants one won’t have one already… Meanwhile, if you’d like one, drop me an email.

Dave’s comment on Longhorn

Monday, August 30th, 2004

Dave says “When you ask a Microsoft person to say what Longhorn is supposed to do, you get rambly hand-wavy words that mean nothing. A product with a purpose has a two-sentence description that gets everyone so excited they can’t wait.”. Longhorn is improving the platform upon which we (developers) build applications. Longhorn isn’t going […]

Sweet!

Friday, August 27th, 2004

Microsoft announced that they’re dropping WinFS from Longhorn, and shippin it in 2006.  This is good news; hopefully they’ve designed it so they can add WinFS in an update. Better news is that the same announcement promises that a lot of the new Longhorn technologies will also be made available for Windows XP. This means […]

Gmail Invites all gone

Friday, August 27th, 2004

But it was cool getting email from some folks who read this.  Hi :)  

Flickr

Thursday, August 26th, 2004

I see lots of talk about Flickr which I don’t really understand – photo sharing websites are nothing new, and Flickr itself doesn’t seem that different than our own ZIMoBLOG (also a .NET app). I’ve got a SOAP API for ZIMoBLOG, a Windows Forms based bulk posting tool, even a screensaver that uses photos from […]

GMail Invites

Tuesday, August 24th, 2004

If you’re one of the handful of people who read this.. and you’d like a GMail invite, let me know.. I have a few to give out. I forward all my mail there now.  

Context menu handlers

Thursday, August 19th, 2004

One of the reason Windows systems seem to get slower over time is because Microsoft has provided so many places to ‘hook into’ Windows, and so many developers have done a bad job of doing this. My wife’s computer was taking a long time – over a minute – to bring up a context menu […]

Raw Sockets

Wednesday, August 18th, 2004

Steve Gibson predicted that Windows XP would basically destroy the Internet thanks to it’s inclusion of raw socket support. “The threat represented by Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows XP operating system, with its confirmed ability to easily generate malicious Internet traffic ? for NO good reason ? can not be overstated. The proper executives within Microsoft MUST […]