I've had the good fortune begin working with SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.  I didn't rush right out and write stored procs in C#, but I have jumped into generics and anonymous delegates.  I'm using the February 2005 CTP and am impressed.

I haven't done a whole lot with new Yukon features, but I have been using the management tools / VS integration for a few weeks.  The first and most glaring issue is the lack of database diagrams in SQL Server Management Studio.  It seems that these will return before RTM, which is a very good thing.  I am very surprised that they were ever cut.  I can understand adding them to the VS integration piece, but I cannot understand removing them from SMS.  There are a hefty number of people that will use SMS and never touch VS...those folks deserve diagrams too.

Visual Studio is much quicker and stable than I expected.  So far the C# compiler has crashed three times on me and the VB compiler has crashed 15 or so time.  Despite that, however, the IDE didn't falter.  The standard send a crash report dialog came up, told me which compiler died, etc., but the IDE kept on chugging.  Kudos on the resilience.

One of my favorite new features is the code definition window...even for native framework types.  For those unfamiliar with it (View | Code Definition Window), it shows the prototypes (or full code if you've got the source) of the types, functions, etc. that you are currently mousing over.  It works like dynamic help does, but instead of showing help topics is shows code.  I've got that window full screen on my second monitor.  It's far easier to glance at that than it is to "Go to definition" then jump back.  It's also easier than firing up Reflector then alt+tabbing back to VS.

A close second to code definition is the added debugging support.  Debugger visualizers have gotten their fare share of press and with good reason.  They are quite nice.  What impresses me more is that enhanced immediate window features and the overall more helpful exceptions (including the exception window popup).  It's now far easier to see exactly where a problem occurred, what the current state of affairs is, and how that state was created...the needed info for problem solving.

I don't want to give the impression that this build is polished, because it isn't.  There is odd behavior now and then that is hard to repro (things just refusing to compile, coding executing and failing but then not failing a little later (same bits)), etc.).  The keyboard shortcuts are a little rough around the edges (right click, g (Generate stub OR Go to definition comes to mind)).  Refactoring / code snippets require an extra [enter] keystroke now and then.  All in all, though, I expect that RTM in a few months will address these issues.

I've been playing with Money for a few days.  Overall, I'm happy with it, but there are some annoying items.

• A good deal of text is not selectable.  I should be able to select any text (especially account info, amounts, payee names, etc.) and copy it elsewhere.
• If you select "Online Registration" from the About dialog, you can't close it without registering.  There's no "x" to close it.  There's no cancel button.  Not even alt+F4 works.
• It includes items that a common person wouldn't consider as income as income items.  I'd guess that if I make a credit card payment, that most people wouldn't consider the credit of that payment to my account as income.  I realize that it is from an accounting perspective, but I'm not interested in GAAP here.  I just want to know how much money I have coming in from work (e.g. what regular people consider income).

On the upside, they fixed a huge bug that previous version had (the last version I used was 2002).  If you have more than one account with a financial institution, Money is OK with that now.  In the past, I had to play games to make Money happy because I had two cards from one lender.

So, intraVnews lost my state.  Losing state was the same reason that I dropped SharpReader several months ago.  To be honest, I've got other gripes against intraVnews.  It often can't seem to read feeds.  After a few tries on a feed, it permanently ignores it (you have to explicitly re-enable the feed by reseting feed history or something similar).  It doesn't tell you when it's ignoring feeds.  It doesn't have an easy to find and explicit means to update a feed right this second!

So, I've switched.  I've been a faithful reader (other than when intraVnews was ignoring the feed) of Dare's for about a year now.  I've read all about the great RSS Bandit and have decided to give it a second chance.  (I tried it a while back and was less than happy about it for some reason.)  Here's to hoping it maintains my state!

Over the past few days, I've seen the outlook.exe process eating up 300 MB + RAM.  A few times, I'd get dialogs complaining of OOM exceptions.  I've got 1 GB RAM on this box, why the heck does Outlook need more?!

I've got Microsoft Outlook 2003 SP 1, intraVnews 1.0.1468.32636, and Lookout 1.2.0.1924 installed.  I know intraVnews is written in a .NET language.  Perhaps Lookout is too.  As it turns out, I installed Whidbey beta 1 this week.  My Outlook addins now bind to it rather than 1.1, which they were compiled against.  I'm guessing a combination of Whidbey being a beta product and differences between 1.1 and 2.0 caused my problem.  After uninstalling Whidbey, all was well again.  OK, mostly well, intraVnews lost all the state info for my feeds, but that's another story.

Back in the day, I used home+home+down to get to the bottom of a document.  That was in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.  I should probably go to the trouble of finding out if Word supports a “go to the last line of the last page” feature.  For the time being, I use the time honored control+g.  For those that don't know, this brings up a dialog asking you which line you'd like to go to (this works in notepad, notepad2, Word, and probably many other applications).  Word (at least in version 2003) also allows you to navigate a certain number of pages from the current page using the control+g (aka Find, Replace, Goto) dialog box.  So, +1000 was all I needed to quickly get to the end of my 4574 page document.  Cool, huh?

In no particular order

• Access to the only search engine I use
• Their results return very quickly
• Their results are pretty accurate
• Filters like site: are very easy to use
• Page caching...you can get your results even if the site itself no longer has the page
• Memory of my last 20 searches
• Drag and drop searching - just drop a word or phrase into the search box...you don't even have to hit enter or click Go
• Display of a page's Google PageRank
• One click to see who links to this page (Info Button | Backward links)
• Toggle-able highlighter for all search terms

There are others, but these are the biggest for me.

Norton Internet Security 2004 has a great many components - Anti-Virus, Ad blocking, firewall, anti-spam, etc.  Why does the custom installer not give the user the option of only installing the components he wants?

Second question - why is it that when LiveUpdate fails to update a component, about the only fix available is to uninstall NIS and reinstall it?  (If that doesn't work, I suppose it means you wasted a fair amount of money.)

If I could ever manage to convince NIS to install and get fully updated, I'd see how much I like to compared to McAfee.  For the time being, it seems I'm out of luck.

Ever wonder why IE remembers all the invalid URLs you type in?  Me too.  I typed in http://www.lpark.com/blog (which gives the equivalent of a 404) yesterday, and for some annoying reason, IE remembers it.  What's up with that?

I've been using the RTW of Windows Media Player 10 for a few days now.  Generally speaking, I'm happy with it.  The “I'll keep appearing when you mouse near me“ menu bar bug (or was that a feature?) is now dead.  You can now open an AV file from the Internet and still resume what you were listening to before (big kudos on this!).  Here are a few gripes..

At last count, I had 1460 wma files and 1621 mp3 files.  The files were ripped from CDs I legally own or were legally downloaded (mostly audio books in mp3).  So, all my stuff is legal, yet WMP10 prompts me at every available opportunity to buy the CD of the currently playing song.  Is there any reason I should buy something I already own?  Does WMP10 think that I have illegal songs?  I'm all for helping people to be legal and I'm all for letting people know they can buy music directly via WMP10, but I'm not for the implication (or waste of screen real estate) that my stuff is not legit.

I don't really like the embedded IE in WMP.  OK, I don't know for sure that it's IE, but I'm pretty dang sure.  IE or not, I'm annoyed that I have to use WMP's menus to navigate stuff.  No forward/back via my mouse (IntelliMouse Explorer 4.0).  No alt+right arrow/alt+left arrow.  No right clicking.  Grr.  You know it's a browser.  I know it's a browser.  Let's stop playing games and let me use it as a browser.

I wonder why Play Count is still not in the standard set of displayed columns.  I care far more about it than I do about genre or whether it is DRM'ed.  What I'd like is a “make all views look like this one” so I can set the columns I want to see in the order I want to see them.

I like the new color schemes, but I think they need a bit of polishing.  First, altering colors still requires too much menu navigation (View | Enhancements | Color Chooser).  What happened to that paint brush icon in the lower right corner that WMP9 had?  Second, the colors are a bit too, well, I'm not a graphic design guy, so I don't know what to call it.  I know, though, that white text on a shiny gold-ish background is really hard to read though.  I know that the mini player looks a bit too much like over zealous use of lens flairs.  Third, why is there no option for the player's color to match that of the currently selected Windows XP visual style?  Fourth, in mini player mode, why does the volume control background color not reflect the color of the rest of the player?  My color is currently gold-ish (I'm trying to match the Olive visual style), but the volume control is light blue.

I really don't like the popup “This is what's playing“ that happens when you mouse near the player in mini mode.  I'd like to disable that.  I don't need to know what's playing (I can hear it), and I don't need to see a mini visualization window.

All in all, I prefer it to WMP9 (and all other players I've used).  Still, there are some issues that I hope are resolved in the next release.

Take a look at this HTML document.

<html>
 <head>
  <script type="text/javascript">
   function process(isIE)
   {
    var element = null;
    if(isIE)
    {
     element = document.getElementById("txtStuff");
    }
    else
    {
     element = document.bob.txtStuff;
    }
    alert(element.value);
   }
  </script>
 </head>
 <body>
  <form name="bob" onsubmit="process()">
   <input type="text" name="txtStuff">
   <input type="button" value="Submit IE" onclick="process(true)">
   <input type="button" value="Submit Firefox" onclick="process(false)">
  </form>
 </body>
</html>

Why is it that if an <input> is in a form, Firefox (0.9.2 / Win) can't use getElementById to find it?  Either method works just fine in IE.

Operating System: Windows XP Service Pack 2 (RTM)

Default browser: Mozilla Fire fox 0.9.2.

Application in use: MSN Messenger 6.2.0137

Problem: When I click a hyperlink in a messenger conversation, the link opens in IE not in Firefox.

Problem with attitude: I'd think that after the whole hoo-haa Microsoft had to deal with over bundling IE in Windows, that it would reign in its applications and make them obey the settings in Set Program Access and Defaults.  MSN Messenger, Outlook 2003 SP 1, and Outlook Express 6 Service Pack 2 all quite often ignore my default browser setting.  I'm not amused, Microsoft.

I've been playing (no pun intended) with the Windows Media Player 10 beta for a while now.  I just had a happy moment that needs sharing.  One of my biggest beefs with WMP in the past is that you can't have two instances of it going at the same time.  This becomes a problem when you're in the midst of listening to some audio book (one track is more than an hour long), and you click on a link to hear a 30 second music clip...suddenly you've lost your place in the book.  Ugh.

WMP 10 now has a “Previous” feature to solve this.  At any time, you can click Previous (if you're in standard mode (non skin, non task bar tool bar mode), it's the same as the back button you'd hit for going back one track in a playlist) to return to your previous track.  It'll begin playing as if you had just hit Pause then Play.

One other really annoying bug from WMP 7 - 9 is the “hide my form title bar, unless you mouse over me, in which case I'll reappear even though you told me you didn't want to see me” bug.  In WMP 10, when you tell the title bar (which includes the form border) to disappear, it does.  Period.  You can get it back if you want it, but it won't come back until you tell it to.  Thanks WMP 10, for finally obeying the user.

Generally, it has more fit and finish than previous versions.  Kudos to the Windows Media team for the enhancements and for releasing a pretty stable beta.  I think this is the only beta of a WMP version (other than perhaps the refreshes of 9) that has been stable.

I'm writing this from Windows Longhorn build 4074.  I finally downloaded and installed it.  So far it's worked out much better for me than the PDC build did last fall.  It definitely needs a lot of work, but it looks good considering it's pre beta.

One less than happy thing is that FreeTextBox (the default input method for dasBlog) doesn't seem to like me typing in it.  Not sure if it's a Longhorn issue or a Longhorn via Virtual PC issue.  Either way, it's very annoying.

While I'm being annoyed at things, here's something else.  I'm annoyed at DVD players that require remote controls to work.  I've got buttons on my player, shouldn't I be able to use them to navigate a menu if I lose my remote?  I think so.  Toshiba didn't.  I was talking to my brother about this issue last night.  Tonight, ugh, I lost my remote.  Fortunately, it only took me about 10 minutes to find it, but...I'd still prefer to not need the remote to play a disk.

I'm also hot and bothered by my sunburn.  One advantage of living in the desert is that I can get a sunburn in about 15 minutes.  Yesterday, the sun had me for several hours, so my arms, face, and neck are quite red.

Grr.  Why doesn't Add / Remove Programs have rich sorting ability (sort by install date would be nice).  Why can't I start typing the name of the application and navigate to that entry like I can in Windows Explorer?  (I think I know the technical reason, but I'm sure some smart guy at Microsoft can overcome it.)  Why is the last used date almost always inaccurate?  When you click on the usage terms (Rarely, Occasionally, etc.), why does the definition window pop up centered on the screen rather than centered to the Add or Remove Programs window?

I just had one of those “ugh, I'd so much rather use Visual Studio” moments.  Unhappily, I'm writing Swing applications using Eclipse.  What took an hour or so to cobble together with the Java/Swing/Eclipse combo, I could have done in five minutes with the C#/WinForms/Visual Studio combo.  I suppose that my familiarity with the latter is one reason for such a drastic difference, but I don't think the difference should be as great as a factor of 12.  My first impression of Swing is far less than positive.

I've been using Outlook for a long time now.  In fact I've used every version (97, 98, 2000, 2002, and 2003).  Only a few minutes ago did I realize sometimes when Outlook displays a number after a folder (like the number of unread items in the inbox) it some times encloses the number in parentheses and other times in square brackets.  Also, the number is some times blue and other times green.  Why is this so?

In August '98, I signed up for my first personal email account.  Mine all mine.  In the years that followed a acquired several more.  Other than Keith sending me virii/worms, so I could check out their source, did I have receive evil email.  The tide has begun to change.

I'm not claiming causation here, but I will state circumstance.  Since I began attending University of Phoenix last June, I've begun receiving evil email.  More accurately, I've begun receiving evil email at the only two email addresses that UoP knows about.  More precisely than that, I've begun receiving evil email at two email addresses that are only used for corresponding with UoP - one, my account on UoP's domain for the purpose of posting to class newsgroups, the other, an inbound only account on my own domain that I created for UoP to send me mail.  Other than, perhaps, the federal government when I filled out FAFSA last year, the use of these two accounts has been limited to UoP or those attending UoP.  Very curious.  I'm not blaming UoP, but circumstantial evidence does point to some connection between them and my receiving evil email.

Smaller scale and, apparently, less interesting worms found me last summer at the aforementioned addresses.  Recently, several Bagles have come visiting.  Kudos to UoP for blocking the attachments from reaching me (using Network Associates' server AV software) and kudos to Dell for hooking me up with McAfee's AV software to protect my other accounts.  I'm glad the AV software knows that I prefer English Muffins when given the choice.  I'm hopeful that Win32.EnglishMuffin won't be a worm in the near future to visit my inbox.

I just installed the Macromedia Shockwave Player and was asked to register it.  Though registration is optional, it certainly isn't obvious that it is optional.  After installing, a dialog pops up and asks whether your age category (13 or older, younger than 13), followed by a dialog asking for your name, email, etc.  You can simply hit the close button to close the dialog, but there should be an explanation that registration is optional and a “skip registration” button.  Shame on you again, Macromedia.

To clarify - I'm annoyed at this for a few reasons.  Macromedia makes their client software (Flash Player, Shockwave Player, etc.) freely available.  The money is made by selling the authoring software.  What Macromedia is doing is getting free marketing.  Macromedia customers sell applications (typically web sites), and any users of those apps then have to go to Macromedia to get the player software.  I'm annoyed at Macromedia taking advantage of this relationship.  I'm also annoyed that they don't let the user know that registration is optional.  (If someone wants to chime in with “they need your email, so they can notify you of updates”, I'll respond with “if any content requires a higher version of the player than the one I have, I'll be directed to upgrade my player, so there's no need for Macromedia to ever have my email address”)

I just installed a junk email filter update for Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 and some other update for Microsoft Office Excel 2003.  Earlier today, I installed an update for Flash (v6 to v7).  Outlook and Excel didn't require a reboot.  The Flash update did.  Shame on you Macromedia!

I'm finally working on a site that lives on IIS 6.  So far it feels slightly more friendly to work with (better error messages).  I'm getting used to the caching and clearly need to read up on it and how to configure it.  I hope it is as good a product as I've heard.

Worried about getting PayPal spoofed?  Try the eBay Toolbar...on IE for Windows, it'll tell you if you are on the real PayPal.com or some phony.  It does other stuff too.  [Thanks Jonathan at AW for the reference]

By way of software review, I'll state that for some reason, I can't download this thing.  I get to the download page, I see the info about a security warning.  I don't, however, get the toolbar.  Hmm...perhaps eBay made this public a bit too soon?

Dell still hasn't updated my contract, processed that they've received my old laptop, and as a result sent me a new power supply and fixed my very noisy cooling fans.  It seems that they are going to get on the ball and make everything all better for this growing very disgruntled customer.

As a result of my fan issues, though, I've found out something nifty.  It seems if my laptop gets too hot and doesn't seem to be able to cool itself off, the processor drops its clock speed.  I think I knew this already, and I think its called Intel SpeedStep.  This is nifty in its own right, but what impressed me is that when viewing system information (Start | Control Panel | System | General tab), the section that tells me about my CPU (I think a custom Dell extension) actually changes the clock speed figure to the current clock speed.  I was guessing that his was a hard coded value based on the max speed of the CPU, but, no, it seems to be the current clock speed.  The Support Information button just below that, which gives the service tab, express service code, and support phone number are nifty too.

I like the customizability of Windows Media Player with respect to which columns are displayed (title, album, play count, rating, etc.) when viewing tracks.  However, I'm annoyed that there is no easy way to say, “I want play count to appear right before rating no matter how I view my tracks (by playlist, by genre, by album, etc.).”  Currently, it seems that I have to tell Play Count to be visible, move it from the right most column to sitting just before rating (almost all the way to the left), then repeat for each view of the tracks (by playlist, by genre, etc.).  That's very annoying.

I've recently begun reading ebooks using Microsoft Reader.  I love the "most recent page" feature.  The use of ClearType, annotations, and other stuff is cool too, but most recent page is a killer usability feature.  Kudos to the Microsoft Reader team!

Combing my referral logs revealed that someone found my blog by looking for “Kurt Cobain's height.”  Since I didn't remember mentioning his height (especially since I don't know it), in my post about him a few weeks ago, I investigated further.  It seems Yahoo! Search indexed my RSS feed (which includes embedded HTML) and associated the words “Kurt” and “Cobain” from my post text with “height” from an IMG tag.  It seems to me that Yahoo! needs to tweak its algorithm to learn what is content and what is not.

From that happiness that is Windows XP Service Pack 2, I find the unhappiness that is a crashing MSN 9 Premium.  I have it (MSN 9) installed on a new Windows XP box fully patched (no beta products installed), and it just loves to crash every few hours.  The sidebar is cool, but it's not worth the hassle.  Since MSN Explorer has a habit of pretending to be Internet Explorer (IE is my default browser), I'm not all too sad that I'm taking a break from MSN.

Today I was pleasantly surprised with an install of Windows XP SP2.  The install was smooth.  It recommended that I enable auto update (this was a clean install of XP).  After updates, anti virus software was recommended and several options were available.  From the very brief glance that I gave SP2 today, I'm impressed.

I was surprised this morning to discover I had sent myself a warning about the capacity of one of my email boxes.  At second glance, I discovered that Bagle.J (McAfee's name for it, Syamantec calls it Beagle) had sent it to me.  I saw a handy text attachment from McAfee letting me know that the .zip file had been infected with Bagel but was now clean.  Hmm, so my AV software did its job and killed the virus, but still delivered it to my inbox?  What's the point?  FYI, you were attacked, but I made you safe!

McAfee's parent company, Network Associates, seems to have the same digestion problem.  Its server based AV software began to eat two Bagel'ed emails on one of my IMAP accounts, but it only ate the attachment.  It left the email itself (plus message telling me I was now safe) in my inbox.  Again, what's the point?

It seems to me that a better thing to do, and one far less confusing to consumers, is to finish eating the Bagel.  Bagel, NetSky, MyDoom, etc. have no business in my inbox even if their attachments are now clean.  Don't just cleanse it.  Delete it.  If you want a pat on the back for a job well done, then, perhaps, send an email with the text “You were attacked, via email, by , but I made it all better.  (signed) The wonderful folks at ”  Even this notification should be optional.  Perhaps there already is such an option that I haven't found yet.

I've created a new category called “Software Review” and this is the maiden entry.  Since I talk about my experience with software quite often, I think I'll put all future entries that deal with quality or quirkiness into this category.

I wonder what should be the result of this formula...

Windows XP Pro Start Menu + Visual Studio .NET 2003 = ?

Apparently, it means the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Command Prompt jumps into my most recently used (MRU) apps list on the Start Menu even though I never use it.  Perhaps it was used during the install of VS so extensively that it demanded placement in the MRU list.  One of the oddest things, in my opinion, is that it gets a decent placement on the list (usually in the top 10 out of 20).