A Quirk in List.Find()
Earlier today I was having a chat with a friend of mine, who lives in Vancouver, about finding items that are stored in generic Lists. He flicked me a code snippet that looked something like this:
List<foo> list = new List</foo><foo>(); // .. do some stuff Foo f = list.Find(delegate(Foo f) { return foo.Name == "Bar"; }); </foo>
Straight away I fired back with an update to the code which used lambda expressions instead, as I'm a fan of how concise they are 
Damn you, Crystal Reports!
I've had Visual Studio 2008 installed for quite a while. When I first installed it I decided not to install the Crystal Reports components because I was fairly certain that I'd never need them at home.
Well, the worm has turned! On my new gig, I have the joy of working from home. It just so happens that I also need to use Crystal Reports. How silly of me to not bother installing a few extra components the first time so I didn't have to go through the pain of going through another VS Setup.
On the surface this doesn't sound like a painful experience right? WRONG. It's a lot more painful than you think.
.NET-fu: Signing an Unsigned Assembly (without Delay Signing)
This article is also available in: Italian
The code-base that I am currently working with consists of a large set of binaries that are all signed. The savvy .NET devs out there will know that any assembly that's used/referenced by a signed assembly must also be signed.
This is an issue when dealing with third-party libraries that are not signed. Sometimes you'll be lucky enough to be dealing with vendor that is happy to provide a set of signed assemblies, other times you won't. If your scenario fits the latter (as a recent one did for my colleagues and I), you need to sign the assemblies yourself. Here's how.
Resolving Side-by-Side Configuration Issues
I've been meaning to blog about this for well over a year now, but for some reason I never got round to it. This came up in conversation the other day with a couple of workmates and it prompted me to revisit the issue.
Have you ever fired up an application on Windows XP and got the following error?
The application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.
Informative isn't it! What about if you fire up the same application on Windows Vista?
The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail.
This does tell us a little bit more about the problem, but not a lot more.
Microsoft want to Annoy you, Cancel or Allow?
Before I even started using Vista, I hated UAC. I read about it all over the place, and laughed at the stupidity involved in asking users to constantly "cancel or allow" every action they wanted to take. As soon as I was forced to use Vista for work (both on my work laptop and on site with the client) I turned off UAC on both installations.
Living in Australia has a Downside
This may come as a surprise, but living in Australia can have it downsides 
Right now I can only think of one, and that's (part of) the reason for this post.
We may have constant sunshine, lovely beaches and a lifestyle to die for, but our broadband just sucks. That's a fairly sweeping statement, so let me clarify a little more.
Broadband plans in this country are extremely poor value. The service that you receive for the amount you pay is substandard. It's that simple. Those of you in places like the UK, USA and Hong Kong may find it obscure to consider that a country exists where you can't get an unlimited data connection for DSL. You may also find it difficult to believe that some connection speeds are cut to that of a dial-up connection if you download too much. But that's exactly what happens here.
Requisite Vista
When I started my new gig on the 15th of this month, I was handed a new laptop to do all my work on. It's a nifty little gadget with 3GB RAM! Very schmick. There was one catch..
... see, the company is migrating to Vista, which means I have to use it too. A while ago I posted my thoughts with regards to installing Vista, so as you can imagine it's a little bit strange having to use it.
Microsoft Take Auto-Update Annoyances Another Step Further
Microsoft's Automatic Update feature has always been annoying. I don't care who you are, none of you can possibly say that it's not annoying I thought that it wasn't possible for it to become any more annoying than it already is, but today I was proved wrong.
My main gripe was that almost regardless of the update, the machine needs to be rebooted. You've updated my desktop picture? Reboot required. My IE install has had another check box added to the options? Reboot required. Notepad's default font has changed? Reboot required.
A Crack in the Vista
I'm sure that everyone knew that this was going to happen at some stage. Whether or not they believed it'd happen so quickly is another matter. Either way, it's official, the new wonderdumpling operating system from Microsoft has been cracked. Aparently the activation and installation of the whole thing has been bypassed, and it's available on the web. Check out this SMH article for more information.
Why do they bother? Microsoft's software is always going to be a target for hackers and crackers, and I think it'd be a better use of time and resources if they focussed on improving the user experience and giving the user more control and power when using the OS instead of trying to labotomise the machine if the software is cracked (and hence causing a crapload of problems for legit users) then they'd find that their users would be happier and they wouldn't end up with so much egg on the face!
Vista Speech Recognition – Maybe try it in Yiddish?
As a final post for today, I just got sent this classic Google Video from Dan over at Shifty. It's pretty funny!
Having said that, I'm sure that most devs know how tough something like voice recognition can be to build. Try demoing something like this to the world, it'd be an absolute nightmare! I do feel a bit sorry for this guy, as I'm sure he's not the one responsible for the internal workings of the software.