Patrick Bes Blog

My personal experiences with Windows Vista

2007-02-12T01:02:00Z

Now after Windows Vista is released to the public I felt it was time to share my own personal experiences. After the release of vista on MSDN back in November I was very eager to try I out. So I installed it on my main machine. After I was done installing I directly had a two huge of problems:

First of all my network card was not recognized and I had to install XP drivers. These drivers seemed to working but I did not get a IP address from my DHCP server. So I had to use an static IP address, but after each reboot I had to ping my router before I got an active connection. I got so frustrated with this that I bought a new standard intel network card which was recognized directly and worked just fine.

Secondly I’m having trouble with the nvidia videocard. Every time I press this button which renders all open windows in 3D, I get distortion on my screen, which will eventually result in a reboot. But I figured out a work around.. I never press this button.. :-S

But the problems I described before are not issues which are entirely Microsoft’s fault.

Besides these two major problems Vista is stabile and everything seems to be working ok. But the thing which bothers me the most about Vista is the fact I cannot find out the added value. A lot of people are talking about the improved user experience..

Ok I’m working with Vista now for 3 months and I have not found this improved user experience.. I did found some overhyped functions and some personal frustrations..

Let me give some examples:

- The sidebar.. I cannot find any added value in this.. thing.. It just sits on the side of your screen and shows a clock.. or other stuff.. wow.. I never missed it in WindowsXP and I never look at in Vista..

- Aero interface.. Wow.. it look nice.. but the XP look is not so bad either..

- Outlook webaccess doesn’t work.. And this sucks!

- Citrix doesn’t work.. this also sucks..

- Virtual PC 2004 doesn’t work..

- I you use readyboost to boost your performance, your machine is going to swap files the first 15 minutes after each reboot.

- I just get the overall feeling that Microsoft tried to design to UI of Vista for inexperienced users (and they could have done it better) and the left the experienced users out in the cold.

- I see some similarities with Apple software like the (totally crappy) iTunes in e.g. the idea to store all media files in library. I you use multiple hard disks you have to change al sorts of settings in order to add your media files to a library. Maybe I’m getting old but a normal folder structure works better for me.

- When windows XP was released, every thing was just better.. with Vista I feel I had made a step backwards.

Anyway I hope that a lot of problems are going to be solved soon. Lets hope all the problems I experience are just startup problems and that time will heal all wounds..

I've also been tagged

2007-01-04T04:06:00Z

I see Pascal has tagged me.. So here are five things you probably don't know about me..

Just like Dennis and like Erwyn my first computer also was an MSX (a canon) with a datarecorder. Of course you had your small screwdriver present at all times to adjust the heads. After a couple of years i bought a MSX2 (8235) with a 3,5 inch floppy drive. I then thought "if you can't beat them, join them" and i bought my Commodore Amiga 500 together with a friend from school (dave). My first PC was a 486 DX-33 with a whopping 130Mb harddisk which was more then i ever needed.. :)
I knew Dennis before he joined us at LogicaCMG. His friend is my brother in law.
As a student i worked parttime for a computer store named Vobis. I have great stories from the period i worked there, which i still tell a lot. Most co-workers are really anoyed with my Vobis stories by the time i leave a project. One great story is one of a guy who bought "Red Alert" and claimed it crashed in level 10. Because some people thought he might have copied the game he had to prove it. So this guy sat in the store all day playing Red Alert until level 10. Then it still crashed and he got a new copy, and actualy he was happy with it.. :)
Me and my girlfriend are almost together for 12 years. Last oktober our first child was born. You can see his progress at his site.
My favourite movie of all times is Pulp Fiction. (although it has been Empire Stikes Back for a long time)

I tag the following persons: Ruurd Boeke, Mark Izendoorn , Rutger de Vries, Mike Blaak, Ernst Wolthaus

Personal issues

2006-10-25T00:31:00Z

Last week on 18th of october 2 great things happend. The first thing is that a letter I sent to DotNetRocks was read on the show. My 3 minutes of fame start on minute 5.25 of this show. You must hear it, people seem to find it really funny :). Actually you always should listen to Carl and Richard who create really good shows..

The second thing even better thing is that I became a dad. My son Marcus was born on the 18^th of october. You can see his website on babybes (all dutch). It didn’t create this site myself but it was done by a good friend of ours. She also designed the birth announcement card. I’m really pleased with the result. Although the site is best viewed in firefox and created in PHP, which is hard for a Microsofty as myself. :)

dotTrace 2.0 beta

2006-10-03T21:29:00Z

The current project I’m working on had some performance issues I wanted to look at. So I downloaded the dotTrace 2.0 beta. I’ve used dotTrace 1.1 before but I always had problems with stability, so I was a bit preoccupied. But I must say that the dotTrace 2.0 beta is much better than its predecessor. It now offers the ability to do a memory profile and it is much more stabile.

In the past I’ve also used the DevPartner toolkit from compuware. This toolkit works great and has more functionality but it looked like overkill for a smaller project like my current project. And besides the license costs are pretty steep compared dotTrace 2.0.

So if you need to do a performance profile you could consider dotTrace 2.0. It worked fine for me.

XNA framework Beta release

2006-08-30T22:20:00Z

The XNA framework beta is now publicly available. You can read the download procedure here. I’ll give it a try as soon as possible but first I have to install my new monitor. Too bad that there is no integration with VS2005, but it uses VS 2005 C# express edition. And it will only work on Win XP with SP2, Vista is not yet supported.

Dell 2407FPW

2006-08-30T22:12:00Z

I got a new monitor a couple of weeks ago. It is the 2407 FPW from Dell. It is a 24’ widescreen monitor. At first I was really happy with it. The screen quality was great and I got no trouble with the supposed banding problem.

But after a while I got al sorts of distortion on the screen when I’m using my DVI-D input (The VGA input worked fine b.t.w). Dell told me it probably was electrostatic distortion, and I could get rid of it by pressing the Off button for 30sec and removing the power cable at the same time, or I could try a new DVI-D cable. This didn’t help so they changed my monitor for a new one yesterday. I haven’t tried this one yet but I really hope my troubles are gone now. Maybe I should have gone for the Samsung

XNA framework

2006-08-27T22:23:00Z

I see that the XNA team released an item on their blog with some more information on the XNA framework. As I’m the proud owner of a xbox360 I’m very enthusiastic about this upcoming framework. Not that I’m now going to develop some games but it does give an extra feature to the console that I’ve never seen. I’m hoping that someone ports a MSX emulator to the 360 J.

Anyway it seems that the XNA framework beta is released within a few days now.

I agree Jan..

2006-08-16T23:47:00Z

I just read the blog of Jan Schreuder and I totally agree with him. Actually I also have to get something of my chest. Let me start by dropping the following statement:

Developing software is not about showing to your colleagues or superiors how much extremely complex code you can put in one class. But it is more about in how much scalability, flexibility and maintainability your can put in as little code as possible.

I had the luxury position where I’ve done two projects on a row where the standards were pretty high. This will gave the feeling that overall software development was taken to a higher level. But boy was I wrong… L

The last year or so I descended back in the dark dungeons of software development..

This gave me the feeling that some developers in some parts of the world (no naming or shaming here) are getting paid by the lines of code they produce.

Last year I’ve see thing like:

- A 500 line method to check a date format.. copied to every page it was needed.. but it was already coded in a framework with regular expressions in a couple of lines of code..

- A method with a cyclomatic complexity of 180 (yes Jan it can be worse)..

- A return of the magic number.. What happened to the usage of enumerables ?

- A complete lack of architecture.. I’ve seen display logic in a database and data logic in a UI. I’m not saying everybody has to implement a SOA based architecture, but clear responsibilities would help… a lot ..

- What happened to naming conventions of methods? If I see a method AddObjectAToObjectB(ObjectA) I assume that it adds ObjectA to (a mystery apparently already present) ObjectB .. But if this methods checks if ObjectA exists in ObjectB and results a boolean I’m completely lost..

- I’ve seen people trying to fix problems which where never identified as problems. E.g. extremely complex logic to solve a minor performance issue which was never identified as an performance issue..

- An over enthusiastic usage of the OO concept.. If you don’t have to inherit from 5 layers deep class, don’t do it..

I’ve probably done my share of youthful sins a couple of years ago. But now a days I try to live by my statement..

Just my 2 cent..

Paint .NET beta release

2005-10-03T05:22:00Z

I see that the beta of one of my favorite tools Paint.NET is released. Check it out here (dutch)

Convert NUnit test to Team System

2005-06-29T12:37:00Z

James Newkirk (Creator of NUnit) released a early version of his tool to convert your NUnit test to visual studio team system. It only has C# support at the moment.

One of those days...

2005-06-01T09:39:00Z

Today i tried to implement an eventhandler on the UIPManager.NavigateEvent from the UIPAB. So i looked up some example code in MSDN. There i found the following:

[C#]
private void UIPManager_NavigateEvent(object sender, EventNavigateArgs e)
{
// Some logic that is performed on the navigate event
// You can obtain the state from the NavigateEventArgs: e.State
// You can change the navigate value like this:
// e.State.NavigateValue = someNewNavigateValue;
}
So i tried out this code but got an error that EventNavigateArgs is not found. So first i think it's me doing something wrong. So i start google-ing on EventNavigateArgs but no hits.. It appears to be an typo in MSDN, it is supposed to be NavigateEventArgs. It is just one of these days..

Test Driven Development

2005-05-27T08:13:00Z

I’d like to address an unpopular topic Test Driven Development. For some reason most developers don’t like Test Driven Development. One of the main pillars of TDD is the fact that a developer has to develop the test before he even begins to code. I see that many programmers still use a nice client form to test their code, because it is much easier. But you can image that fact that if you don’t have an automated unit test you are not going to test every scenario available every time you alter your code.

Another problem I sometimes encounter is the fact that there is no update of the unit test if a bug is found in the code. First thing you must do is reproduce the bug in a unit test and then fix the bug in the code, and not the other way around. This is because we programmers most of the time assume that our change in the in code fixed the bug. If we change code first and then try to write an unit test you might wrongfully assume that the bug is fixed.

I’m not saying I like developing unit tests, but I write this item as a reminder to at least myself to why I’m writing these boring test J.

Resource Class Generator

2005-05-27T07:59:00Z

Rene showed me the existence of the ResourceClassGenerator. This custom tool generates a typed class of your resources. That way you don't have to look in the Resource files to get the name of the resource, because you use intellisense from your code. Because of that there is no risk of looking up a non existing resource string.

You can download it from the code project. The code makes use of the BaseCodeGeneratorWithSite implementation, this implementation is no longer available in VS. 2003. But you can download a VS.2003 implementation here. You can now compile it and install redist. You must set the ResourceClassGenerator as custom tool in for the resource file.

Layout in UIPAB

2005-05-27T07:50:00Z

I lately looked into the User Interface Process Application Block. I read the documentation (as always :)) and discovered the possibility of the layout manager.

The layout manager lets you abstract the layout from your form to a separate class. This can be useful for project where the layout is not yet clear or when there are strict GUI guidelines. You can use your separate class to apply your guidelines to every form.

When I tried to implement the layout manager I got an error on the XSLT that the layout manager is not supported in config file. Apparently this is a know issue/feature of the UIPAB. I googled and found that you have to add the layout manager manually to the XSLT (UIPConfigSchema.xsd). You must add the following code in the objectTypes element:

<xs:element name="layoutManager" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded">

<xs:complexType>

<xs:sequence></xs:sequence>

<xs:attribute name="name" type="xs:string" use="required" />

<xs:attribute name="type" type="xs:string" use="required" />

</xs:complexType>

</xs:element>

You also need to add an attribute to the complex type View:

<xs:attribute name="layoutManager" type="xs:string" use="optional" />

After you done this you can add the layout manager to the (App.)config file:

Your views can now make use of your defined layout, by adding the layout attribute. Like this:

<view name="welcome" type="InsuranceClientManagement.UI.Welcome, InsuranceClientManagement.UI, Version=1.0.1.0,Culture=neutral,PublicKeyToken=null"

controller="InsuranceClientManagementController" layoutManager="MyTestLayout"/>

The layout class can now look something like this:

using System;

using System.Drawing;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using Microsoft.ApplicationBlocks.UIProcess;

namespace InsuranceClientManagement.UI

{

/// <summary>

/// Summary description for TestLayout.

/// </summary>

public class TestLayout : ILayoutManager

{

#region ILayoutManager Members

public void LayoutControls(System.Windows.Forms.Control parentControl)

{

// TODO: Add TestLayout.LayoutControls implementation

parentControl.BackColor = Color.DeepSkyBlue;

foreach (Control mycontrol in parentControl.Controls)

{

if (mycontrol.GetType() == typeof(Button))

{

mycontrol.BackColor = Color.GhostWhite;

}

#endregion

}

SQLServer2005 Express problem

2005-02-16T12:19:00Z

For a personal hobby project I wanted to try-out some new stuff and some O/R mappers. So I installed VS2005 and SQL2005 Express. I used VS2005 to create a database in SQL2005 this all worked fine. Then I wanted to tried LLBL Gen Pro and Entity Broker. But I could not connect to the database I created in SQL2005. I got an error the database could not be found or the connection was refused. I found it a bit strange because VS2005 had no problem in connecting and every other application had. After some intensive googeling I found the there are some problems with the shared memory protocol of SQL2005 Express. So if you enable TCP/IP and Named pipes and set TCP/IP as the default protocol everything seem to work fine.

More info can be found here.