ZarkBlog

Moonlight 1.0 is out. Not sure what Moonlight is? As described at http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight :

Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight (http://silverlight.net), primarily for Linux and other Unix/X11 based operating systems. In September of 2007, Microsoft and Novell announced a technical collaboration that includes access to Microsoft's test suites for Silverlight and the distribution of a Media Pack for Linux users that will contain licensed media codecs for video and audio.

No more excuses. Start coding!

Mark your calendars.

SharePoint Conference 2009

Please stop coding like this. It hurts my eyes.

Not really, but hopefully just as cool. Brian Harry has posted a teaser about the upcoming "Team Foundation Server Power Tools - October '08 Release", of which includes a Windows shell extension to TFS. If you’ve never been able to use TortoiseSVN during your development, you’re missing one of the greatest tools available to a Windows developer.

Sure, we’ve had SVNBridge for a while now, and it works well with CodePlex, but I never could get comfortable with it for a couple reasons; Checkin policies against WorkItems was clunky and Workspaces were usually out of sync with my local repository. This is certainly good news.

On a recent episode of .NET Rocks, I heard a quote along the lines of "Is it easier to write the code that writes the code or to write the code yourself?" If you want to generate some code with a tool, then this post is for you.

The T4 has to be the most popular tool that I hear so little about. Like CodeSmith, T4 is a template based code generation engine using ASP-like syntax. The best thing about T4 is that if you have Visual Studio 2008 installed, you already have it. I originally intended to write a brief overview here, but Oleg Sych has already written an *excellent* overview here. I could hardly top that.

Madhavrao has also complied a list of links to MSDN articles related to T4 here.

Thanks to Virtual PC's inability to utilize USB (insert the 'Old Bit' siren sound) and my need for USB support in my virtual machines, I'm in the process of moving some VPC images to VMWare Workstation 6. Recently, I've converted an existing Virtual PC based XP image to VMWare using the the VMWare 3.0.2 converter with no issues. No issues that is until it was time to install the VMWare tools on my recently converted XP machine. The install went fine, but after the required virtual machine reboot, I found that my mouse pointer was more or less stuck in the bottom right corner of the guest's screen. The mouse pointer itself moved around freely, but any clicks hit a target off screen. Not a very useful "enhancement".

Well, it turns out that this may be an issue between the Virtual PC Additions that were already installed on the VPC based image and the VMWare Tools. Specifically, the mouse driver. After some trial and error, I've found two workarounds to this:

1. Remove Virtual PC Additions from the virtual before conversion to VMWare.
2. Install VMWare Tools on the converted virtual without the VMWare Mouse driver. This means that you should install the VMWare Tools while logged into the existing virtual rather than silently via the VMWare menu.
   

If you haven't been living under a mushroom, you're most likely aware of Scott Guthrie's posts on Microsoft's new ASP.NET MVC Framework. If you are indeed living under a mushroom, then you can check out Part 3 right here.

So now the work has spread, and we get to see some more opinion on the move release source for the .NET Framework available under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL).

Frans Bouma, for one will NOT be looking at the source code, Phil Haack, summed up his opinion in one clever cartoon, Adi is going to risk being tainted, and Joel Ross is going to keep it in mind. J

So, my take? I'm not particularly worried about patent infringement at the moment, but I'm also not the type to cut and paste patented code into my product either. I'm looking.

Julie Lerman has enlightened me to some extremely exciting news for a .NET geek like myself:

Scott Guthrie's announcement that Microsoft is releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries!

While I myself am really looking forward to peeking under the hood, a former colleague of mine reacted a bit differently. He seemed to be happier not knowing what's going on inside the soon-to-be former black box. To quote:

<cynical>So now I get to step into the code and know exactly why it doesn't work and exactly why I can't fix it?</cynical>

I spit my coffee all over my keyboard this morning because of that statement.