Moving to WordPress

Recently, I’ve seen two people move to WordPress and so decided to try it.  For some reason, I had some problems getting the activation email but now that I have an account, have to say I’m liking it.  The interface feels cleaner than Blogger’s.  It also doesn’t have to re-publish, which was kind of annoying.  I really like this theme Hemmingway except that it chops off the front-page stories and strips links from them too.  So, maybe not esp. functional but its really stylish.  Wish I could change more in its options though but I guess will have to wait till WordPress.com gets more customizable.

The Urge to Generalize

So I’m sitting through this talk on Friday by Laurie Williams – it was pretty interesting stuff – good in making a case for Extreme Programming. Someone mentioned in the talk how software developers like to generalize – they don’t solve the problem they’re given – they start right away at how to solve the general case. And in doing that, they don’t get done with the specific problem at hand. Ah, so true. Working on a compiler for Oberon, thats exactly my problem. I can’t help myself from thinking about creating a compiler construction kit – ala Yacc/lex, and so many others. I sort of have to supress the urge.

Quarter done

Today, I realized I was probably about a quarter done and what do I have to show for it?

Blogging is a Chore

Ok, so classes taking up my time is really not the reason for the lack of updates to this thing (really, just been sleeping, eating, watching tv and surfing the net a lot).

The truth is, its just so damn tough to keep writing to this and even more so, to come up with something to write about. It’s like when my english teachers used to make us keep a journal and write an entry at the start of each class. Even back then, I used to not update it and spend the night before it was due making up 20+ entries of meaningless crap.

I must admit that for some reason (all the popular kids are doing it), I really would like to keep this going. But it’s like taking out the garbage – you know its waiting to be done but just keep putting it off because you are watching TV at the moment (but really, you are just waiting for one of your apartment mates to take care of it). It’s another damn chore.

I really thought sticking to writing about the current programming project would give me material but really a lot of coding for hours can be summed up in a line or two and so that idea dies quickly. I suppose it is best just waiting for some material but that leads to unbelievable laziness at getting back to it – you only end up doing it again like after a couple of months.

So, being realistic, I can now only say that I will hopefully keep this up.

Ugh. Classes.

Ugh. Classes sucking up any free time.

Argh

So, I know its still Beta and it is pretty good feature wise but argh!!!

I did something … have no idea what but now with every single action the IDE crashes. No errors, no messages, nothing. Just closes period.

Damn it.

More Features

Wow, I’m impressed with all the new features (in VS 2005).

The code editor itself is so much better. Intellisense has gotten really really intelligent and it knows a lot more context (I think – it’s been a while since I used VS 2003) … it will go to the most likely thing you want even before typing the first letter for some things. All the refactoring features! You’ll feel like… wow, I used to do this all by hand before? Basics like renaming, extracting methods, etc – so very nice. And of course, being SmartTags makes them just in your way when needed and out of your way when not needed. One small but really sweet feature is auto insertion of delegate signatures and handlers.

An excellent job with the WebBrowser as well. Most of the things most people will need are here. Can make a very decent IE interface clone (one that isn’t crappy) really fast. All really needed events and properties are here. I was able to add autodiscovery of RSS feeds with about 5 lines of code an in about 5 min.

Again, slightly disappointed at lack of power in particular controls like TabControl. Also, one thing that really should have been there is in IDE support for auto-generating code from XSDs and vice-versa. Not that big of a deal though.

Really wish I had more time to mess around with this but got to work on some school work and some stuff for ITS.

Back

Back from the week and back in school for summer. Project in Software Systems sounds like its going to be fun – get to work with a company for one of their projects. Meanwhile, Technical Writing sounds tedious and what I’d imagine it to be.

Meanwhile, finally going to get the chance to play around with VS 2005. Decided to make a quick News Aggregator to go through its features. So far, its been really nice. The VS team has done an excellent job I think with this new one. Started by building XSDs for OPML and RSS (prob. won’t use them but I think it was a nice exercise). The visual schema editor is a really nice addition. The text XML editor is itself very nice. All the debugging features offered for XML itself are very useful and quickly becoming invaluable.

The Windows Forms Designer is awesome too. Smart-tags are pretty nice and quite useful. The new toolstrips and the better layout controls are really awesome. However, I really wish they’d given the tab control an update as well. Something that resembles the VS ones would have definitely been nice. Also, the dockable windows and layout offered in VS itself also would have been nice. But, I must say what is included is pretty nice.

The Office Look and Feel sample doesn’t seem to work with the beta 2 but probably requires a few minor changes only. Decided to do a few custom controls including tabs and the Outlook style message list.

“Vacation”

Going on a roadtrip from CA to CT in the span of a week starting day after tomorrow. No computer for a week. Gasp. Hopefully, the PSP will keep me company. And also, there will be some wireless access points where I can steal my brother’s laptop for a while.

Visual Studio 2005 Compatibility Mode

So, I recently got my Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 CDs in the mail and hadn’t opened them for about a week (projects, classes, etc.). Now, only being finals week, and everything drawing to a close, I started working with it. I have to say all the new stuff is really nice. I’ll probably write about that later. Right now, I wondered whether I could continue working on my v1.1 applications with the beta – that is, if VS 2005 could be made to run such that it only worked with 1.1 and emitted code for 1.1. Turns out, it can. Jomo Fisher has shown how it can be done in his blog here. Thanks to Yggdrasil over at Channel9 for answering my question with a reference to that.