Plastic Logic E Readers

I found this Plastic Logic e reader a while back. I hope its development is not affected by the global economic slump we are in, this seems such a cool product and much better than the kindle or its ilk. The original release date was Spring 2009 which i assume means March-May. Hopefully its not delayed or even put off.

I was originally tempted by the Illad by iRex as it wold allow me to develop stuff for it too. Well here's hoping the Plastic Logic will be a developers platform too.

Dream PC's

Asus and Intel have a new site up for you to suggets your dream PC. I found this one a laptop with 3 screens and I have been wanting one of these for ages. When not plugged in you use one screen to save power, but other times as a developer I really appreciate 3 screens, so it would be a true mobile workstation for me.



Whats your dream PC? Why not suggest it, it can't hurt.

My stack overflows

Haven't posted for a while, I've been using the new stack overflow website of late.

I'm not sure its working yet. The aim of the site is to become the one source of useful answers for code and computer related questions and it is getting a huge number of questions and answers. I've steadily been answering and voting on questions to up my reputation points.

The biggest issue I have with the site is almost no questions end up as wiki style entries. There ends up a long list of answers, some better than others but a combined and detailed answer may be the most useful. I suspect the initial steam to gather reputation and badges will slow down after a while and the site might struggle to maintain the desired wikipedia like feel.

Maybe wiki answers are irrelevant for the long term survival of the site. It remains to be seen.

Check it out anyway its a new resource.

Apply Computer Settings slow

I have had a login problem for a while. Whenever I booted up and logged in I would get to the "Apply Computer settings" message and it would sit for ages.

Well I found a solution last week, refresh your DHCP lease using

ipconfig /registerdns

in a command prompt. This worked for me and now my boot up time is minutes shorter.

Transparent TrackBar Windows Forms

I discovered today that trackbars in windows forms .net don't support transparency, now why would i want transparency, so that when you put it on a tab control it looks the same as all the other controls. I could have set the tabPage UseVisualStyleBackColor to false but then i get the same old grey controls.

so I searched around today for a transparent trackbar and I found 2.

The first is just a dll from Mick Doherty, with no code, so im a little hesitant to use it in case it breaks

The second was originally on Matt Bird's web site but has now been moved to codeplex TransparentTrackBar as the original link was taken down.

Thanks to Matt Bird for allowing this code to be open sourced.

I hope people find them useful.

Microsoft Stylecop

I ran into Microsoft StyleCop the other day. While I disagree with some of its style conventions, I agree with most of them. I can forsee see the day when it will be the default for nearly all C# applications.

To this end I hope JetBrains update ReSharper to be able to auto format to the Microsoft standard. Much of it is boilerplate but it would be really good.

There is a JetBrains enhancement request for this so feel free to add your vote if you are a ReSharper user. (Search for (RSRP-71904) StyleCop / Source Analysis reformatting if the link doesn't work)

StyleCop itself will be adding the ability to auto format code to their coding conventions (http://blogs.msdn.com/sourceanalysis/) and Jason Allor responded to me via email that they will be publishing their style rules in a document soon.

Tip on adding many content files to a .net setup project

We have had this problem at work for ages now where we have added 300-400 database scripts to our .net installer project. This included tables, stored procedures, functions, indexes, triggers, the lot. It was a constant pain in the arse adding the files to the correct output directory.

When all we really wanted was a "grab all the files in these directories and copy them in the exact same layout to the install directory when the installer runs" method.

This would be a nice function to have in the native .net installer but it isn't there.

When we move to a better installer maybe they will have a function like that but if your still stuck using the native .net installer projects then we came up with a bit of an easier way to do it, its not a perfect fix but its a bit quicker.

Add all the files to an empty project as content.

This will retain the directory structure of the files as they are on your disk.

Then add this project to your Merge Module or MSI installer project. In the correct directory of the Files view window just add the content files of your newly created empty project.

It has saved me a heck of a lot of time maintaining the directory structure in the installer project. Now I just maintain the file structure on the disk and in our source control.

Now to check out installawhere.