This blog post from Rory Blyth really had me biting the carpet. Although it’s very funny, there are certain serious points to it that really everybody should consider who has to create user interfaces of any kind at all. Great!

A while ago, I read a tiny note about this in somebody’s blog and I want to start off by apologizing to that somebody because for the life of me I can’t figure out who it might have been — so no reference here. Sorry about that. Anyway, I followed up on the original information and I thought it couldn’t hurt to pull peoples’ attention to this a bit more. So, the ?? operator: It’s an extension in C# 2.0 (find the specs here, this operator is explained on page 14, then end of chapter 19.5) and …

A while ago, Developer Express announced the availability of a free version of their Refactor! product for Visual Basic .NET. The official download page is accessible via this Microsoft page. Now there’s a video available on Channel 9, showing an interview with Mark Miller, the Developer Express chief architect for IDE tools, and Jay Schmelzer, the lead program manager of the Visual Basic team at Microsoft. Mark demonstrates a lot of the functionality of the free Refactor! version, so if you ha …

Valery just posted a blog article about a tool to insert headers in a bunch of files. I don’t have too much to say about that, but the comment form on the blog didn’t want me to post the following (a server error message about a potentially dangerous form post, lol), so I thought I’d just put it in my own blog instead. Here’s the comment I wanted to post: Wow! That’s some solution for a tiny problem… How about a small shell script:

#!/bin/sh

for file in *.cpp; do
  cat my\_new\_head ...

This Saturday, I’ll be on my way to Tech Ed 2005 in Orlando. My first Tech Ed, so I’m certain that will be great fun! I’m sure I’m going to catch a lot of sessions, after all the agenda is huge (and even what’s left in the personal planner still looks intimidating :-)).

I guess I’ll also be spending a lot of time around the Developer Express booth, being a member of their DX-Squad. So in case someone should be looking for me there, you know where to find me. …

A new version is ready, for the download please see the plugin’s own page. These are the more important news, apart from smaller fixes:

• The whitespace hint lines are now drawn with a delay, which greatly improves the performance overhead when navigating around with the caret quickly. The delay can be configured in the options.

• New Emacs style scrolling is available. This means that scrolling starts not only when your caret is actually in the top or bottom lines of the text editor, but a f …

I just thought I’d pass this on from Wesner Moise’s .NET Undocumented blog: Open Generic Types seem to be an undocumented feature in C# 2.0 that might be quite useful for Reflection-related work. Basically, it allows the handling of Generic types that haven’t been “closed”, i.e. it’s still unknown which other type(s) the Generic type is supposed to work with. Read it, it’s interesting! …

I just stumbled upon a funny problem related to the new .NET 2.0 attribute InternalsVisibleTo in conjunction with a strong-named assembly. The situation is this: I have that assembly that exposes its internals to another assembly (for unit testing) using InternalsVisibleTo.

Now I decided to sign that assembly with a strong name. Suddenly, I got the following error message at compile time: _Friend assembly reference ‘UnitTests’ is invalid. Strong-name signed assemblies must specify a public …