I’m not sure what happened, but Michael only just entered the Borland-buildings when he blogged his revolutionairy ideas about new Delphi2005 SKU’s. The discussion (in the comments) soon was removed, and all that was left was a “thanks, it was a contributing discussion”. I’m not sure contributing to what, since his blog is empty now….
I sure hope he’s not fired or something?!
Update (11-05-2005): it’s almost 2 weeks later, and no sign of Michael yet. No blogentry, no nothing.
One of the findings in this post is “Micro ISVs are not on the cutting edge of technologies”. Didn’t these people hear ALL Micro ISV’s cry when the new pricing of VS.NET 2005 (especially Team Studio) became public? How can a Micro ISV support cutting edge technology, if buying into it means such a big risk? How can we test solutions for IIS 6 if we have to buy a new OS first? Why does Office change with EVERY version? Perhaps you (John) should not be asking “where are the Micro ISV’s”, but instead you should count the increase in development in the oh-so dangerous Open Source scene. Look at the number of one-man-bands that provide paid support for some kind of Open Source CMS. It pays good money, you don’t have to write or maintain the software yourself, and webapplications, hey, that’s the new hype so lot’s of companies are willing to hire you. John? You there?
When you need to create some temporary files, you can create them in %TEMP%. If you don’t delete them yourself, some other program or the user will, since the directory defined in %TEMP% is meant to store TEMPORARY files.
Now read this post about the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server beta 2 setup. Tell me they are not seriously blaming the anti-virus software for deleting files from %TEMP%? Guys, this is Microsoft not knowing where %TEMP% is for. How f*cked up is that? Any decent installation program that needs a reboot creates a folder somewhere on C:, and deletes this folder after the reboot is done and the installation has completed. Not Microsoft: please disable your Antivirus software if you’re going to install TFS. This is seriously wrong. I sure hope they will have their act together before the “release”.
Perhaps this category will have obvious solutions or tips, but I’ll share them anyway: C# code snippets. This first one is about logging on to Outlook, which I needed for E-Sync. All samples give you the code with the name of the profile to logon to, or “leave the values for profile and password blank to use the default profile”. The first one means hard-coding a profile, the second one I did not get working on 2 different machines, so I guess it used to be like that but not anymore.
Here’s how to lookup the default profile in the registry, and logon to the MAPI-store.
RegistryKey myKey = Registry.CurrentUser;
myKey = myKey.OpenSubKey("SoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWindows Messaging SubsystemProfiles");
String myProfile = myKey.GetValue("DefaultProfile").ToString();
myMAPISession.Logon(myProfile,"",true,myMV,myMV,myMV,myMV);
Don’t forget to include “using Microsoft.Win32;”.
The appointments from the ERP-application come in two flavours. A “real” appointment, with attendees and a real date and time that it occurs. And a “structure” appointment. Only very basicly defined occuring on a certain weekday (Friday, from 9:40 – 10:00 am). The “structure” appointments are filled in later, but they are used by the planning department to see what the employees have designated their timeblocks to.
E-Sync now differentiates between real and structure appointments, also marking the structure appointments as “free”, instead of busy.
What I need to do before the first release is:
– Read attendee information from the database. Their unique number is not informative enough
– Save the entered values for next time E-Sync starts (and don’t show the defaults anymore)
– Make the colors per appointmenttype configurable
The first release is planned for May, 2nd (that’s a Monday). Very exciting.
The PIA’s (Primary Interop Assemblies) for Office 2003 are now available as seperate download, so if you’re a developer, and don’t have Office 2003 (that includes the PIA’s), you can now download them and target your application at Office 2003. You can find them here. They are Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1 assemblies.
Just wanted to let you know: nice jobofferings are welcome. Things look like I’m available per July 1st, 2005. Mail me for my resume. The function needs to be consultancy (give me a car, I’ll drive), or a non-consultancy job but in area of Enschede (Ov, NL).
Things to expect:
– Project Management (Prince2)
– Oracle DBA (6 -> 10g)
– HP-UX expertise
– Delphi or C# development
Contact me for details on either jobs (you hire me), or employment (you employ me).
Perry blogs about choices developers make. In this case, the choice between Delphi2005 and VS.NET 2003/2005. Is it me, or is he asking the wrong questions to have the arguments come out in favor of Delphi2005?
My take on this at the moment is that I spend a lot of time looking how the .NET framework works, whereas using Delphi2005 would give me VCL.NET, that I know since it’s similar to good old VCL. But choosing a non-VCL.NET project in Delphi2005 would give me the same problem: I’m not too familiair yet with the .NET Framework.
Other than that, I’ve found VS.NET a very mature and stable IDE, so it’s getting me things done.
Why not choose VCL.NET, you might ask? Well, I think a big feature of .NET is the freedom the developer has to choose its tools. Using VCL.NET would restrict me and others to Borland. When I use standard Windows.Forms, it does not matter whether I use VS.NET, Delphi2005, perl.NET or whatever: the code can be compiled, or with minimal effort translated. Depending on proprietary libraries/assemblies ties your hands, as most of us will have experienced to some degree in the past. Giving you a new version (VCL.NET) of a well-known trick (VCL) seems like a good idea for a developer, since you can “port” your code with no or minimal effort. But basically it’s just another way of saying: I’m bound to one tool, and one tool only.
I have Office 2003, but at work we have Office XP, so my ERP->Outlook project would not run, since it would not find the proper DLL (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.dll). Now I downloaded the Office XP PIA‘s, and I’ve rebuild the application with these assemblies. The application still works with Office 2003, so I will find out tomorrow if it solved the problem for Office XP.
Update: it works! So the Office 11 .DLL can not be used with Office 10, but the other way around works fine. I would have guessed that backwards compatibility would have taken care of things, but not with MS Office…
Yesterday, I corrected a little bug I discovered. When an appointment had several attendees, my program would create multiple entries in Outlook, each with one attendee. I moved a line of code and now things work like they should.
What I want to achieve, is marking the appointments in a non-default color, which you can do in Outlook manually in the New->Appointment dialog. By default Outlook chooses None, but you have Important, Personal, Holiday, etc. The odd thing is, that the “label” (as it is called in the dialog) is not an exposed property of the AppointmentItem you can set.
You need to access Outlook via de MAPI-interface, look for the Calendar-folder, find the item in the Calendar folder, and then change some properties. Very odd, and not very well documented. I spend a great deal of the evening looking for samples how to do it, but so far I have no working code.