September 2005 - Posts

• Celtic knots continued

  I found out how to make Adobe Illustrator and InDesign display the knots in a usefull fashion: the line height in point should be set to the same height in point of the font. Makes sense in retrospect ... Posted Sep 27 2005, 06:36 by Dirk with no comments

• Celtic knots

  We finally found what promised to be the definitive artwork thing for the invitations: the Celtic Knot Font by http://www.clanbadge.com/. This gives us loads of flexibility! Posted Sep 26 2005, 07:05 by Dirk with no comments

• Tom Boonen is World Champion!

  Almost 10 years after Johan Museeuw, we have another World Champion. I am, of course, talking about the noble sport of bike racing on the road. Tom Boonen had a superb year with victories in the Tours Of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, two stages in the Tour de France (with the Green Jersey until he had to retire due to injury). And now there's the crown: the title of World Champion. I'm sure he'll wear the rainbow jersey with honour and pride. Posted Sep 25 2005, 04:10 by Dirk with no comments

• One more piece clicks into place: mail merge in InDesign

  I am a computer geek, and therefor, I want to make the invitiations for the wedding on pc. The fact that we have a mega bombad printer at work has, of course, nothing to do with that decision. Today, one more piece of the puzzle clicked into place: Mail Merging. I want to personalize every invitation with the names of the invited people, but I didn't want to write those names by hand. Since we are more or less commited to making the invitation using Adobe Creative Suite 2.0 (I recently bought the For Dummies book), I was hoping that there would be a Mail Merge in Illustrator like in Microsoft Word. No dice, however. The for Dummies book thaught me that Illustrator can produce only one page. Which is fine for an anonymous invitation, but bloody insufficient for a merge. InDesign, on the other hand, seems to have enough features for our purposes, and can do a classic Mail Merge. And we can always import an Illustrator document into InDesign, should the need arise. Posted Sep 24 2005, 08:28 by Dirk with no comments

• Some more interesting links

  mainly about Avalon/Xaml/WPF Cube Navigation - now this sounds like a cool thing for a dice roller program ;-) Spell Checking in Windows Presentation Foundation Building MSN Virtual Earth into You Applications On a side note: Microsoft seems to be fond of the word "Foundation" lately: Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Team Foundation Server. So I excpect them to rename "Windows Future Storage" into "Windows Storage Foundation" ;-) Posted Sep 23 2005, 05:56 by Dirk with 1 comment(s)

• Some interesting links

  About Avalon/WinFX, Windows Forms, Team System, ... The XPS (XML Paper Specification) Depot Starting an application without showing a form How NOT to start an application without showing a form Cleaning Up Old Avalon Installs Keeping yourself out of trouble using SystemEvents ComboBox OwnerDraw in 5 minutes Outlook macro to create work item and changeset hyperlinks Posted Sep 21 2005, 08:00 by Dirk with no comments

• I hate it when that happens

  I managed to catch a cold again during the weekend. Not serious, but enough to inconvenience me. I can work, but I don't dare to do any sports. I hope I'll fight off this cold as fast as the previous one. Posted Sep 20 2005, 10:27 by Dirk with no comments

• User Friendly

  My close friend Andreas, for whom I do some occasional programming work, gave me an out-of-the-blue present in the form of two User Friendly comic books. I had read only one User Friendly cartoon before (the unforgettable "Pebkac") but that is now remedied.  I really dig that stuff, even if the comics quite often engage in Microsoft bashing. Those who know me, know that I'm more on the Microsoft (.Net) side of things, but I also have a healthy ability for self-humor. That being said, if the Microsoft Black Ops department has improved at the same rate as Windows, people might be justified in starting to get afraid of them ;-) Posted Sep 17 2005, 06:58 by Dirk with 1 comment(s)

• How To Compile Asp.Net 1.1 Applications in Visual Studio 2005

  The answer is so simple that I'm amazed I didn't think of this before, and even more amazed that nobody else seemed to think of it before either (or at least didn't write about it). You will need Robert McLaws's MSBuild Toolkit, which you can find here. The toolkit enables you to compile Visual Studio 2005 projects for .Net 1.1. The catch is that it seems to be restricted to class libraries and Windows Forms applications (though I didn't test the latter). Since the company where I work specializes in Web Applications, we were left with a problem: what to do with our Web apps? Now think of this: to Visual Studio 2003, web applications are really nothing more than class libraries that happen to contain a few aspx files. The only difference is in the .csproj files, where we have VisualStudioProject/CSHARP[ProjectType = "Web"] for web applications, and VisualStudioProject/CSHARP[ProjectType = "Local"] for class libraries. So I took one of our Asp.Net 1.1 Web Applications, edited the .csproj file and wrote Local instead of Web. I then opened the project in VS2005, and compiled it for .Net 1.1. I opened the web application in IE, and to my utter satisfaction it actually worked! More amazingly, even the design view of the aspx files works. The connection between the aspx files and the codebehind files is lost, though. This means that when you add an asp.net control to the aspx file, you have to manually declare the corresponding protected field in the aspx.cs file. This is a trade-of that I'm willing to live with: losing this connection allows me to use Visual Studio 2005 and, more importantly, Team System. Posted Sep 15 2005, 08:05 by Dirk with no comments

• Some more links to pages with MS Office 12 screenshots

  Presspass xbetas Posted Sep 14 2005, 11:04 by Dirk with no comments

• Some less belligerent words about the new Office UI

  I am sure the Office UI people put their heart into the design of the new UI. From what I could see on the pictures, the new UI looks sleek and modern. My weblog entry from yesterday is about one of my favourite pet peeves, but I want to stress that I don't want to critisize this new UI or the fact that UIs evolve. My pet peeve is about the way the introduction and the adoption of a new UI is handled at Microsoft Posted Sep 14 2005, 07:59 by Dirk with no comments

• New Microsoft Office User Interface

  Office 12 will feature (once more) a new user interface. Some screenshots can be found here. This is my favourite pet peeve about Microsoft products: they never manage to make all applications look the same. Wenn Visual Studio at long last looked like Office XP, there came Office 2003.  And now that Visual Studio 2005 will finally look like Office 2003, there comes Office 12/Vista/Whatever. I simply want all my applications to have a consistent look-and-feel. Is that so difficult? I image it would be natural to have things like menus, toolbars, icons, whatnot embedded in the window manager of the operating system. All applications could then simply use those elements. When Microsoft releases an update to those elements (along with a new version of Office if they really want to), all other applications simply take on the new look-and-feel as well. Oh well ... I'm willing to settle for second best: make those new menus, toolbars and so on accessible from .Net, right from the start. I don't want to have to rely on third party component companies.  The same goes for those tool windows with diamond docking in Visual Studio, by the way. Posted Sep 13 2005, 06:40 by Dirk with 1 comment(s)

• Learn Avalon by Watching a Channel 9 Screencast!

  Tim Sneath produced some webcasts - probably because I asked him for a "total beginner's guide" :-) Posted Sep 12 2005, 07:25 by Dirk with no comments

• Common problems when enabling RPC/HTTP(s) in Outlook 2003

  The answers are described here. Posted Sep 12 2005, 07:23 by Dirk with no comments

• John Howard's Infrastructure Essentials

  John Howard is doing a series of webcasts and web log entries about infrastructure essentials. Here's entry number 10, which also contains links to previews entries. Posted Sep 12 2005, 07:12 by Dirk with no comments