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Jan Schreuder blogged about it earlier, and the buzz around Sandcastle is growing… Brenton House posted about Sandcastle last friday, stating that it might have been the day Sandcastle would be released. Unfortunately it wasn’t, so the waiting does not stop yet. It even looks like we might be waiting a little longer: “In addition we plan to include Sandcastle in our August CTP release of Visual Studio SDK.” (taken from a thread on the MSDN Forums)

MSDN 2 Library has been online for a while now. When you visit the ‘old’ MSDN library, you see the following text: “We’re upgrading the MSDN Library to a new publishing system which provides improved performance, better search relevance, XHTML compliance, URLs which don’t change after product releases, and more. During the next few months we’ll gradually move content over to the new site, although MSDN Search will work across both sites automatically.

Since not too long ago, I joined the MSDN Forums. The MSDN Forums is a big community where lots of knowledge is passed around. I recommend joining. Yesterday I ran into an interesting post. It’s about an overriding method that exactly seems to match the call, but doesn’t get called. In stead, the base method is called… Apparently this is because of override-resolution starting at the base working its way up, and a method declaration that matches more than you would think it does.

“Consolas is a monospaced font (like an old typewriter) and good for programmers setting code (its core purpose).” The above quote is taken from the Microsoft Design website, and specifically the part about ClearType fonts. It states the main reason for developing the Consolas Font Pack (download here) is to develop a better font for ‘programmers setting code’. Because of this, I primarily tested Consolas in Visual Studio, my editor of choice when writing code 😉

Having a database management class called DatabaseManager, I wanted to make a property for this DatabaseManager in a BaseForm. This way, every form inheriting from BaseForm would be able to use the same instance of the DatabaseManager. Because the DatabaseManager exposes functionality to interact with the database, I wanted it to be internal. The property for the DatabaseManager in the BaseForm would have to be internal and protected, so only derived forms would be able to use the property.

Recently I ran into the Microsoft Skills Assessment page. After singing in with your passport, you can take all kinds of skills assessments for various Microsoft products, from Visual Studio 2005 to Windows Storage Server 2003. Because I’m looking in to getting an MCPD certification, I was curious about how I would score without even preparing for a test. It’s pretty neat to be scoring 80% on the first test I took: Microsoft® Windows®-based Client Development with Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and Microsoft Visual C#®.

Lots of stuff happened the past few months, so it’s time for a personal update. Here we go… I’ll be attending an MSF4 Agile Masterclass @ Microsoft in July In August my girlfriend and I will be the proud owners of a house in Grasrijk (a part of Eindhoven). We can’t wait … ! Because of this, our apartment in Eindhoven is for sale right now (for pictures and info: www.

BloggingAbout.NET was upgraded today! We are now CommunityServer 2.0 enabled. Because of this, I also changed the look and the description of my blog. Why not do everything at once 😉 One little extra piece of information: since the update it is no longer possible to reach a blog by typing in the url bloggingabout.net/username. This has been an extra service since blogginabout.net went to CommunityServer 1.1. Now, whit the upgrade to 2.

<p> </span><span lang="EN-GB">People tend to push difficult work back. I have to admit it can be more appealing to start out with a highly interesting or fun part of the work that needs to be done, in stead of doing the difficult stuff first. I&rsquo;ve done that myself in the past. But by doing that you enable <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy's_law">Mr. Murphy</a> to come and ruin your project. Especially when his visit occurs in the final phase of your project!

At our current project, we have an application which is deployed using No Touch Deployment. Because of some SEHException we got a few months back, we started our application in a separate thread using a launcher class which contains the Main() method for the application. Recently we added functionality to display HTML pages our application generates, so we added the ActiveX webbrowser (in AxSHDocVw.dll).<p> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; thread.ApartmentState = ApartmentState.STA;<br /> </font><font size="2"><br /> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; thread.

ScottGu blogged about IIS 7.0 on the MSDN .NET show. He and Bill Staples did an interview on IIS 7.0, which will ship with Windows Vista Beta 2. As Scott said: IIS 7.0 is a major, major update and improvement to the overall Microsoft web platform stack. See it. You can find it here.

Sometimes when you’re inside a method you would like to know which method called it. Or even which object. For instance when you write a TraceListener, it might be pretty cool to make the TraceListener smart enough to find out what object called him and from which method. The StackTrace object in .NET makes this pretty easy. Here’s a howto… First, we iterate through the stackframes that are available on the stack, looking for the one we need.