I’ll start off this blog entry with a little background which is necessary for you to understand my situation. I moved from to the UK to Germany about three years ago and while I can converse in German, English is still very much my first language and the language I want my content delivered in. I happily purchased a HTC HD7 when WP7 was released here in Germany thinking foolishly that Microsoft really would get internationalization and localization as it’s at the heart of their business and developer products.
Overall I’m very happy with my WP7, the camera sucks but that’s more HTC’s fault that Microsoft, but other than that it’s a very promising platform. My problems started when I purchased my first app. Initially everything appeared to be fine and things were as smooth as things had been with my previous free applications, however about a month after I received an email from Zune informing me that the credit card that they had registered against my account had expired. No problem I foolishly thought; I’ll simply add a new one. I don’t want to bore you with the details of what I’ve been through other than to take the low-lights: trying numerous websites, posts on Microsoft Answers and a tweet to Microsoft Support all to no avail.
Today somebody suggested that I call the Xbox support line in the UK as they had solved their billing problems this way. So I called up the Xbox support line since I hadn’t resolved the problem using the Zune portal to resolve my problem with my WP7 (anybody else thinks Microsoft might need some consolidation here). After being on the phone with a very friendly representative in Ireland I was informed that because my British credit card has a billing address in Germany they are unable to accept it as a credit card. Because my Live ID and Zune Tag are registered in the UK they cannot take my card. Their solution is that I have to create a new Zune Tag that has its locale in Germany and then associate it with my phone. Now, first thing I go to register for a Zune Tag with a German locale it very kindly switches into German for me, nothing quite like reading a EULA in a language you’re not fluent in. I’ve no idea how this will affect the apps that are available to me in the app store, and I’m pretty sure it means that all my Xbox live achievements will become history. And what if I was to move to say France at some point do I have to go through all this again?
At the end of the day I’m trying to set something up so I can give them my money and they’re making it VERY difficult for me. Could you imagine walking into a book store when you were on holiday and being told by the clerk that they couldn’t take your credit card because you came from another country?
While the commands.vsct is an improvement over 2005's ctc files, it still leaves a lot to be desired; how about a simple designer or editor for it guys!!!!
My most recent struggle has been trying to get a sub-menu to appear, a very common thing to want to do so why is there a dearth of information on the topic?
Thanks to a some help from Wesley Yao on Visual Studio Extensibility Forum I found
the solution.
Here are the key elements from my Commands.vsct file to get the sub-menu working:
<Menu guid="guidConvertCommandsCmdSet" id="ConvertSubMenu" priority="0x100" type="Menu">
<Parent guid="guidCmdSet" id="grpidContextMain" />
<CommandFlag>AlwaysCreate</CommandFlag>
<Strings>
<CommandName>Convert To</CommandName>
<ButtonText>Convert To</ButtonText>
</Strings>
</Menu>
....
<!-- Buttons for sub-menu Convert Items -->
<Button guid="guidConvertCommandsCmdSet" id="ConvertToSimplePropertyCommand" priority="0x0201" type="Button">
<Parent guid="guidConvertCommandsCmdSet" id="ConvertToSubMenuGroup" />
<Strings>
<ButtonText>Simple</ButtonText>
<ToolTipText>Convert to a simple property.</ToolTipText>
</Strings>
</Button>
....
<!-- Logical group for holding the submenus of the top level menu -->
<Group guid="guidConvertCommandsCmdSet" id="TopLevelMenuGroup" priority="0x0000">
<Parent guid="guidCmdSet" id="grpidContextMain"/>
</Group>
<!-- Logical group for holding items in the "Convert To" submenus -->
<Group guid="guidConvertCommandsCmdSet" id="ConvertToSubMenuGroup" priority="0x0000">
<Parent guid="guidConvertCommandsCmdSet" id="ConvertSubMenu"/>
</Group>
....
<GuidSymbol name="guidConvertCommandsCmdSet" value="{Put you own GUID here}" >
<!--Menu-->
<IDSymbol name="ConvertSubMenu" value="0x1100"/>
<!--Groups-->
<IDSymbol name="TopLevelMenuGroup" value="0x1150"/>
<IDSymbol name="ConvertToSubMenuGroup" value="0x1151"/>
<!--Commands-->
<IDSymbol name="ConvertToSimplePropertyCommand" value="0x701"/>
</GuidSymbol>
I wanted to try out VMWare workstation today so I went over to the VMWare site and filled in all my details and created my new password, all the time happy in the knowlege that I had a nice secure (if you forget about possible man in the middle attacks) SLL connection. So what does VWWare then proceed to do? Why lets confirm that password by emailing it back to you over a nice insecure connection.
Nice!
At the recent PDC in LA I had the opportunity to speak to some of the C# team. I tried to make the most of this by voicing one of my biggest bugbears with the C# language: Why make numbers so overly difficult to use?
We have sbyte, byte, short, ushort, int, unit, long, ulong, float, double, decimal to represent the simple real world concept of a number. If we take the concept of a number into the software development paradigm what do we really want from it:
- Fidelity (How many decimal places to we need to be accurate to)
- Possible values (What is the range of numbers to be stored: Minimum & Maximum)
Pretty simple huh!
I do understand the reasons behind .NET’s numeric types:
- Give the C, C++ and Java developers something familiar
- Performance
- Hmmm, maybe they didn’t think about it so long.
Personally I think that performance is a non-issue. The .NET runtime is responsible for handling garbage collection as we’re too irresponsible to do this effectively ourselves, so why not handle numbers for us too. Maybe we might have to introduce some attributes to indicate what is most important to us:
- [Optimisation=Speed]
- [Optimisation=Space]
I certainly wouldn’t miss having to debug runtime errors where a DataReader returns an insignificantly different type from the attempted cast.
Create a windows users using Wix
Sharing some thoughts and experiences of using the pre-beta version of Windows 7.