Monday, July 29, 2002

Today, the Groovers took me out to eat for my contributions to the COM Interop RCWs delivered in Groove 2.0 and the Groove Toolkit for VS.NET to be delivered in 2.1. The highlight was being presented with a shirt signed by a lot of teammates (John Burkhardt, Paresh Suthar, Jack Ozzie) but one signature in particular made my day: Ray Ozzie, who is a personal hero of mine. Thanks Ray! 9:09:14 PM

Remoting with Rotor. I'll kick off with the demos and slides from my "Remoting with Rotor" talk at the Rotor Workshop. The talk was about the extensibility points in .NET remoting, and how they create a wonderfully powerful & flexible toolset for people doing web services research.  [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] 8:59:10 PM

Want to be a better programmer?  Read The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas!  I can't recommend this book enough having already read others like The Mythical Man-Month, Writing Solid Code and Code Complete.[Paresh Suthar's Radio Weblog] Agreed. Great book, as are the others listed. 9:02:53 AM

Someone has finally written a decent article on Cutomizing Visual Studio .NET with Wizards. The difference between the article and others like this one on add-ins is that Chandu talks about the vital interface IDTWizard and VSZ and VSDIR files. .VSZ and .VSDIR files are poorly documented even in VSIP and yet are the key to understanding how to integrate with VS.NET. In my work with VS.NET, I found that a true understanding of VS.NET not only heavily involves things like VSZ and VSDIR files, but the Registry. The stunning thing about understanding VSIP and all VS.NET automation for that matter is that it is data driven from the Registry out, now from the top down. Things happen because of settings in the Registry that are used by the environment and do not proceed in a top down or object manner. VSIP has a huge learning curve and I can't talk about it here but the trying to make sense of it and VS.NET finally came when I dropped trying to understand the 300+ classes in an object kind of way and dug into the Registry and realized that it was data driven out from there. More on this later. 8:56:19 AM

© Copyright 2002 Sam Gentile.