21 May 2004

Bill backs blogs? Strange but true. Just in case you haven’t already heard, Bill Gates addressed the CEO summit at Redmond today and among other things tried to sell the high powered attendees on the advantages of blogging. Microsoft already has some 700 staff members blogging regularly on a variety of sites, including of course Radio Userland, but now it seems the trend has gone even higher than the development ranks and touched Bill. Part of the reason of course for the sudden support is that blogging is a great way of communicating just what your business is up to, and a fantastic way of being open with your customers. It works too. The most interesting thing in the announcement though is just what wasn’t said. Bill didn’t say that Microsoft were working on blogging tools but you just know that we can’t be too far off from that now. Personally I’m half expecting to see Microsoft buy up Channel9 (http://channel9.msdn.com) since it was developed by a bunch of Microsoft employees and already has a very big following. So, this thing got me to thinking. I’ve had an idea for a desktop based blogging tool a while back and I think now might be the time to do something about it. Keep watching this space and I’ll keep you all informed. Course I’d have to fit it in around work and of around writing the new book. WHICH by the way, I’m about to start making a massive dent in. Stay tuned for more on that too. You can find info on the Gates blog stuff at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3734981.stm among other places.   comment []9:59:36 PM

Tablet PC 2005 is coming… Just picked up a neat bit of info at http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/tabletpc/evaluation/lonestar/default.asp It seems we are just a few short months away from the release of the next version of XP for Tablet PC. Catchily named Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (just think, the guy that names these things probably earns a large mortgage a month) its going to have a number of really cool new features including the TIP – a pop up input panel that appears wherever the pen is detected, regardless of the application. This is great news especially for supporting web based applications. More news when I’ve had it, and especially once I’ve had a chance to develop with it.     comment []9:52:18 PM

Apress have started to blog It seems everyone who’s anyone is getting into it now. Apress staff have just started blogging over at http://blogs.apress.com Well worth a look. comment []11:09:43 AM

C#’s ‘using’ statement There’s been a big push in many teams to get up to speed as quickly as possible with the .NET framework. You’ve been there I’m sure – you spend all that time learning as much as you need from the framework in order to start actually producing useable applications. But, there seems to have been less of a push to actually learn the intricacies of C# as a language. One area that I’ve noticed this is most common is with regard to the Dispose() call and garbage collection. I’ve seen (and written, I admit it) a bunch of code like this SomeClass myObject = new SomeClass();             // do something with the object myObject.Dispose(); It’s pretty well known that .NET’s non-deterministic garbage collector can get bogged down with a mass of objects waiting to be got rid of, and that in turn can lead to a performance degradation. So, in the light of that calling Dispose() on objects that implement the IDisposable interface seems like a good idea. But wait a minute – C# can do this for you. using ( SomeClass myObject = new SomeClass() ) {             // do something with the object } This code has exactly the same effect as the previous example, but with the advantage that the object is automatically disposed of at the end of the ‘using’ scope block. ‘Using’ will also dispose of an object in the event an exception occurs, which can be very handy indeed.   comment []10:12:26 AM