I was horrible about blogging from PDC2008. I did twitter and facebook a lot though, so I think I'm not too bad. I just found out about Microsoft's BizSpark program though. It's a lot like their Empower program in that it provides startups free development tools and MSDN subscriptions, however it's free to enter ($100 to get out though). Information can be found here. There are limits as to how long you can be in the program and how much your company can make, but it's supposed to be very easy to...
This has been an action packed week. I promise that I will detail what I've been up to, but for now I'll simply list some cool things to Google. Windows Azure (Windows in "The Cloud") Boku .NET Services DSL and "Oslo" XNA Second Light (or Surface 2.0)
So, I'm writing a VSTO 3.0 Word application level add-in, and I want a custom task pane to show for some documents but not for others. Should be easy to do, right? Not so much. First, I create an extension method for the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Wo... class that examines the properties of the document that I'm using for the show/hide behavior. So far, real simple. Then, I add an event handler to the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Wo... event in which I call the exention...
Well, yesterday I learned of something new. Acropolis. It's Microsoft's newest "toolkit for creating modular, business-focused Windows client applications" and it "enables you to build reusable, connectable components and assemble them into working applications that are easy to change." At first glance, it's a replacement for CAB and some of SCSF, using WPF. The downloadable help file mentions WinForms, but also mentions that the current CTP only supports WPF. By the looks of it, it will never support...
Well, CAB really. Not taxi. We gave up on trying to debug the 3rd party control in C++. It's something deep down in the control, and we ran out of time. It'll keep though, that project is coming back around in a couple of months, and that bug will be reprioritized. Now I'm doing a POC (proof of concept) on the ability of CAB (composite UI application block) to meet our particular needs. So far, it's been a lot of fun, very cool. I had heard from many developers that it is too complicated. I find...