Oracle gets decorated by Microsoft… with an Obsolete Attribute

Read this story in my other blog.

Using the CodeDom to do scripting with .Net

Read this story in my other blog.

How to prevent Extension methods from appearing as global functions

Read this story in my other blog.

What I don’t like about iPhone

A couple of weeks ago I caved in to peer pressure and got myself an iPhone 3G 16GB (probably very stupid since the 3rd generation iPhone is released next week). Before I tell you what I don’t like about this phone I should probably mention that I do love the iPhone, but nothing is ever so good that it doesn’t have room for improvements. I’m also aware that many of the things I will comment on here are being addressed in version 3 but I’m still amazed that some of these features are not available already.

OK, here’s the list:

• Copy and Paste.
  Why in the name of everything that is holy didn’t the iPhone support Copy and Paste from version 1? Come on, I got my first Nokia phone in the early ‘90s and it had Copy and Paste back then.
• MMS
  Que? A 3G camera phone that doesn’t allow me to send MMS? Come on…
• On Screen Keyboard
  Why can’t I tilt the phone while writing a SMS and get the wide-screen keyboard layout like I can in the web browser? I have big fingers and want the slightly larger buttons I get that way. The same goes for typing notes, or adding appointments to the calendar.
• Low resolution camera.
  This will only be slightly better in the next version, but come on, most new phones have at least a 5 megapixel camera, some have a lot more.
• Video
  Since the camera itself is able to record video why wasn’t that available earlier?
• True GPS
  While driving I need to hear the directions being read to me. I don’t always have a passenger beside me that can read them to me.
• Step into text
  The magnifying glass that appears when you press and hold your finger over the text area you’ve just typed in is pretty cool but not very intuitive, it took me a while before I noticed and learned how to step back into a line of text to correct a typo without deleting everything I’d typed after it. I’ve also noticed that sometimes this magnifying glass appears in the wrong spot so that you actually don’t see where you put the text caret. This is especially true when browsing the web and typing in web forms.
• Missing buttons on the keyboard
  I like that the on screen keyboard adopts itself when I type an address into the address field of the Safari browser. Replacing the space bar with three other buttons containing the period, slash, and a “.com” button. This is great since an URL can’t contain any spaces while dots and slashes are pretty common. Switching over to the numeric keyboard from here also shows less buttons than while typing anywhere else. Also a good idea, only show buttons with valid characters. However the thing is that parentheses are valid characters and some addresses do use them (IMHO a bad habit but still valid) but there are no parentheses buttons on the keyboard.
• BUG!
  Sometimes, granted not very often, after synchronizing the phone with iTunes all downloaded applications stops working. They might show their splash screen and then simply die. When did happened to me I did a Google search and found that many others had had the same problem... Some of them going back more than a year back. Why haven't this been fixed with new updates to iTunes? Is it just because Apple have the motto: It just works (and when it doesn't we don't want to hear about it).

Windows 7 = Windows 6.1

I was rather confused when I first heard that Microsoft was going to call the new version of Windows for Windows 7 since in my mind it’s Vista that should have been version 7.

The first version of Windows NT got the version number 3.1 to align with the 16-bit version of Windows. Later there where a 3.5 and a 3.51 version of NT before the release of NT 4. After that came Windows 2000, which was Windows 5. Then Microsoft released XP which I thought should have been version 6, but the version number was set to 5.1 even though it was very unlike Windows 2000.

Instead Vista got the version number 6, even though I think it should have been 7. Now Windows 7 release candidate is available for download. The main difference between Vista and Windows 7 is the new taskbar and not much more (well, there are a bunch of other goodies under the hood, but from a user perspective the taskbar is the main noticeable difference) so in a sense it should really be Windows 7.1 since I think Vista should have been version 7. But lo and behold, the version number in Windows 7 is 6.1 and not 7.

Console.WriteLine(System.Environment.OSVersion)

Go figure.

Meetings, Version 2.0, at Microsoft

The other day there were an interesting interview with Steve Ballmer in New York Times. The way he likes to run meetings these days is very much like the way I’ve tried to get my colleagues to adopt to for our technical meetings. Lets face it meetings are usually very winding and often gets rather boring. I usually wants to get to the conclusion of a topic as fast as possible so we can make a decision based on that and then move onward.

Internal

 

April Fool!

You didn't really fall for that one did you? :)

Internal joke sent via e-mail with a link to this page... Please ignore :)