Jelle Druyts

I've finally started working on the new Whidbey build. Some marketing-friendly people called it CTP (Community Tech Preview), people who like uniformly-rising integers might call it PD4 (Partner Drop 4) but real coders refer to it as "2.0.40301" of course. I've already had it added it to my list of friendly runtimes (don't worry, I still have enough tattoo-space left for years to come).

The first big thing I noticed was that Whitehorse still isn't there. The goodness of having a round-trip engineering class designer, a uml modeller, a network layout modeller, ... all within your IDE (emphasis on the 'I' here) will have to wait a little longer I guess. This means I have to go back to Visio to model my use cases and database diagrams for my current project. It's not that Visio is a bad product or anything, it just sucks that's all. It's not integrated, it doesn't look as good, it feels old and clumsy, and I hate the way it does some of its layouting (especially connectors are terrible, and too hard to correct yourself).

A nice little improvement on the Error Reporting dialog (aka crash-o-spam-a-thon, I always send error reports you know ) caught my attention (actually, it's not a good thing that I noticed this, since I was hoping not to encounter the dialog altogether but well, it's still alpha software of course ): there's now an option that makes the dialog close itself after the error report has been sent. Thanks, it's the little things that annoy you the most you know. They should really put this in the general Windows error reporting dialog as well (I would have figured it was actually the same component but apparently that's not the case).

I got an interesting exception when trying to view a project's properties (officially I'm pretty puzzled how I'm going to manage without project properties but still): "The type serialized in the .resources file was not the same type that the .resources file said it contained. Expected 'System.Drawing.Size' but read 'System.Drawing.Size'". Normally when I get this kind of warning, I'd expect some kind of versioning problem here. But within Visual Studio? Uh-oh...

Update: the Project Properties are working again... There seemed to be a problem with the keyfile causing the build to fail which apparently also prevented the project properties page from loading. I removed the keyfile tag in the .csproj file (xml and msbuild rule) and all is well again.

Now I'm in even more trouble: the new Pocket PC 2003 emulator doesn't seem to do a lot. I doesn't power up and freezes my Visual Studio... Deploying it to the "legacy" emulator does seem to work though, and what's pretty cool is that it gives you these confirmation dialogs to replace "mscoree.dll" so I'm really patching the emulator to the Whidbey build of the .NET CF 2.0. Ah wait a second, fortunately already an update on this: the new emulator does work! You just have to wait a long while when powering it on. It takes a minute before the Windows Mobile splash screen pops up, then you have to wait even longer for the .NET CF 2.0 to be installed, the application itself launches slow, but it works fine and I still think the whole concept rocks

The Object Browser window doesn't seem to have the new view yet where you can see a class definition as an emtpy code file, too bad because I kind of like the idea: it's more natural as a programmer to view a type contract as an actual code block. You can however get a glimpse of how it will look using the (buggy) Windows Forms Class Viewer tool (WinCV.exe in the SDK 2.0 dir).

Update: It's not in the Object Browser window but it's there: View - Other Windows - Code Definition View. This gives you a window that shows a code block for whatever class happens to be under your caret. Cool!

Oh one more thing before I actually get back to work: wear sunglasses when coding. The component tray (you know, the region where your non-visual components like tooltips and extenders are shown in the designer) is in eye-bashing purple. So are the gridlines in the task list. Damn, they must have fired all the people with a working set of eyes over there...