So here is what I want from the perfect laptop.

• 15 inch widescreen capable of 1600x1000 - good for coding.
• Weigh no more than 2Kg
• All the standard bits like WiFi, a Windows key & better support for Suspend than my aging Inspiron 1100.  I wanna be like a mac guy and just shut the lid of the machine and not worry about it.  With my Inspiron that would cause a fire.
  
• 100Gb SATA HDD, 2Gb RAM, Dual Core, Vista Ready
  
• Definately less than AUD$3000, closer to $2000 the better

Here's the kicker:  Convertable tablet form factor and it kicks the res down to 1125x864, or 1024x768 when flipped for tablet-like note taking and ad-hoc jotting.

One day I'm gonna be looking back on this post on such a machine and grin :)

Its been a little while since my last Language Nerd post, so...

Rory Blyth has had a seriously cool and often unhinged blog for quite some time now.  He's tapping into the wealth of his best blog posts for his new podcast, The Smartest Man In the World. 

He really is an imaginative and original writer.  Go check it out ;)

Virtualization, platform management and standard document formats.  Novell and Microsoft, are you guys feeling alright?  There was a time when this would not have happened! 

I love it when things come together:
CodeRush and Refactor! - I'm a fan
I love a good keyboard too.

Here's a nice little plugin for Refactor! that can show available refactorings or metrics on the display of a Logitech G15.  Too cool!

I thought it was about time I refreshed my rules for what good error messages are:

• Consistant.  This could be visually consistant in the case of message boxes, or if they are being logged to a file or database table then being consistant helps them also to be machine readable.
• Informative.  Consider ADO & ADO.Net's old "General Network Error" as the best example of how not to do errors.  The key point here is the message should first say:

1. what did not work correctly, and
2. what you should do next to fix it

Stack traces etc should come later.

• Appropriate.  Consider the audience of your application.  They are the audience for your erorrs too!  The level of detail I expect in an error from SQL Server is completely different to the kind error I expect from iTunes. 
  
• Respect my attention span.  750 Event Log messages a day means I won't look at them.  Once a quater means I won't look at them.  The latter case should be emailed.  The former case probabbly should be replaced with one critical failure message
  
• Respect my privacy.  Passwords, maybe even user names, or anything that is sensative in the context of the application should not apear in an error message.  I don't have a convienient example of one with a password in it (maybe check a more complete source) but this would probabbly also extend to stack traces.

This is a growing list.  It gets revised when I see something done well, or something done poorly (or when I do something well, or when I do something poorly.  Now I've blogged it.

It started out with just the Informative rule, motivated by the cost of the support desk having to get involved in a support issue vs. the user working it out for themselves.

More formally, we could look at an error with the following criteria:

• What does this message do for the user experience?
• What does this message do to avoid the user having to call someone?
  

One thing I have to say I am excited about in the .NET future is Windows Presentation Framework. 

So, on top of Vista RC1 (build 5600) and Visual Studio 2005, what do you need:

Microsoft Pre-Release Software Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 - Release Candidate 

Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview – Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0 

Microsoft® Windows® Software Development Kit (Web) for RC 1 of Windows Vista and .NET Framework 3.0 Runtime Components (you only need the .NET 3.0 doco, grab the rest later if the download is too long)

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer September 2006 CTP 

 

So I've just worked it out...

If you want to edit a list in Datasheet View - an insanely useful feature - you must not have Office Basic or Office Small Business versions.

You have to have the Pro version of Office and make sure the "Microsoft Office List Datasheet Component" is installed in the "Office Tools\Windows SharePoint Services Support" option in selected as Installed under Office setup.

To the end of making my unit tests as easy to write as possible, I thought the default CodeRush template for adding a new NUNit Test Fixture to my projects could do with some tweeking, or at least customization.  Here's how I like mine:

<TestFixture> _
Public Class «Caret»«Field(ClassTests)»«BlockAnchor»
    <Test> _
    Public Sub «Field(MethodTest)»()
        «Marker»
    End Sub
End Class

My next question is, how can I make the ClassTests field default to the name of the file?

After blog mint [?]:  There are extra fields that you can insert into the template expansion, these are Text Commands and String Providers.  You get to these by right-clicking the Expansion area and choosing Text Commands or String Providers and selecting from the list.  The FileName string provider might be just what I need.

I was sitting on the train this morning with my mate Robbie, we both had laptops out, both hacking a little bit of early-morning-commute-code.  Must have looked like a right pair of nerds

Anyway, he was coding in IDL (no, not the IDL VC++ guys are use to...), no doubt doing some high science with DICOM data, and I was coding in VB.Net, so naturally the conversation drifted to languages!

I remarked that the bit I was working on was not an elegant example of VB.Net, but rather some hackage that works and will be cleaned up in a future rev.  I apologised for its lack if readability.

Rob remarked that, it was readable... but more like readable in the same way a novel is! 

I am so sorry about the title.  I am a child of a certain generation.

I deal a bit with XML in my day-to-day and "getting" XSLT was a pretty significant step forward in this for me.

Doug Tidwell's book XSLT was the key.

What prompted this revolation was seeing that XSLT was more than just a way of rendering XML to HTML in a browser, but that XML to XML translations can be exceedingly powerful.  Right now I am dealing with a data source that has been flattened from a normalized relational structure, and now it needs to be put back together into a third, different structure.  All this is do-able.

FWIW, my tool of choice currently for XSLT development is Architag's XRay... but I still prefer WMHelp's XML Pad for general day-to-day XML editing.