This is the archived version of Roland Weigelt's weblog that ran from 2003 to 2023 at weblogs.asp.net

Contents tagged with PDC 2005

  • Looking back, looking forward...

    2005 was an amazing year…

    • GhostDoc became really popular (the VS2005 version alone had over 6000 downloads since the release in early November).
    • The PDC was a great experience, and visiting Microsoft before that was a lot of fun.
    • Being part of the “Show Off” session was nice; unfortunately it was pretty late, so people started leaving the movie theater before my video was even shown.

    My plans for 2006 (to be more exact, those related to .NET)

    • GhostDoc: After doing a bit of work after Christmas, it became clear that GhostDoc 2.0 will be a “large” release. Internally I’ll do some heavy refactoring on certain, isolated parts, throwing out some historical junk and moving to “C# 2.0 style” code.
    • Things I want to learn: From my current point of view, WPF is the thing I want to dive into.
    • Things I want to do: I’m in the process of founding a local .NET user group for the Bonn area, called “Bonn to Code” (yup, pun intended – all credit for that name goes to my colleague Jens Schaller).

     

  • GhostDoc Video is up on Channel 9

    If you want a quick tour through GhostDoc in less than five minutes, check out the video.

    It has already been posted on Channel 9 for a couple of days, but I was a bit reluctant to link to it as the first version posted was virtually useless. My original video was recoded by the Channel 9 staff, and in the process the texts in the Visual Studio source code editor window became completely unreadable. The second version is still slightly distorted, but the texts are readable and that's what matters in the end.

  • PDC 05: WPF (aka "Avalon") - Wow, I am impressed...

    Data binding everywhere (every control, every property bindable), data templates (that can also be changed on the fly, depending on e.g. the value of a certain property) – I just saw virtually all my GUI problems of the last years solved. Okay, there will be new problems, but this is such a huge step forward… impressive.

  • PDC 05: Monospaced fonts everywhere :-(

    In the sessions I’ve been so far, each time code is shown on the screen, it’s in some monospaced font. Either “Lucida Console” (which is kind of ok), or worse “Courier New” (by the way: am I really the only person on the planet to notice that this font doesn’t scale well? It sucks on high-resolution laser printers, and it’s not that great on-screen in sizes larger than say 12pt).

    Anyway, if we’d still be programming with C-style function names, I wouldn’t complain. But now that Microsoft advocates long identifier names for years, and the Framework libraries making heavy use of long and descriptive names (and I’m all for that!), why is it that everybody still thinks that code needs to be in monospaced font, even if it means that some identifier names span several meters on the projection screens?

  • GhostDoc - The Movie ;-)

    I just submitted my video for the PDC 05 “Show Off” session. Producing this video was much more work than I expected, which means that I won’t be able to release the final of 1.3.0 before the PDC (I’m already leaving on Thursday, as I’ll take a little detour on my way to L.A).

    The hardest part of the video was speaking English and presenting GhostDoc – either I mis-pronounced a word or stumbled over a wicked combination of “s” and “th” (which I wouldn’t care about in a real-life situation), or I made a mistake during the presentation. Fortunately with some editing, many things can be fixed.

    If the video is accepted, it will be shown at the “Show off” session and will be made available after the PDC. Sorry, I can’t post a download link before the PDC.

    Update: The video was accepted and shown at the PDC, and is now up on Channel 9.

  • "Show Off" at PDC 2005 ?

    Michael Swanson writes: “Show Off at PDC 2005”:

    We propose a PDC 2005 2-hour session called Show Off. The concept: "Why demo your cool application to a few friends, when you can Show Off to thousands of your peers at the PDC?" […] You and/or your team put together a single WMV file that shows off something cool about your application, tool, technique (or whatever). […] Videos are limited to 5 minutes. […] So, what do you think? Would you participate? We're trying to gauge interest before we spend a bunch of time on this.

    I think that’s a good idea. Hey, I’m actually thinking about making my own video (guess about what ;-), even though I’m not quite sure how speaking English in front of a camera works out for me – but I’d give it a try…