some quick info on new stuff

from Tim's Sheath's blog (a little outdated now but it has good stuff)

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2004/07/20/188775.aspx

that's all...

Heard Chris Sells is writing a Winforms 2.0 book

I heard/read that Chris Sells is writing a Winforms 2.0 book. I wish him GodSpeed. I really enjoyed his Winforms 1.0 offering. Granted, his book what not a reference book, but it was full of the type of juicy nuggets any developer craves...

Absolute First Impressions

Here are my first impressions, The interface was slicker...new project types to choose from in the compact development side. Gradients are used very nicely. When I created my first app, I looked at the toolbox, I see now a MaskEditBox, a web-browser control...nice...the splitter control is gone! there is a splitter of sorts. A flow layout control and some new components (background worker?). I love seeing the refactor menu at the top. OK. it is 7:37 and I am going back to bed...

Setting up VS2005

I decided to put the Beta on a VPC image. I choose a old XP1 image,. First I remove the old versions of VS, then loaded SP2 plus all the Security Updates. (I am not sure if I should have installed Yukon. I just left my old Sql Server 2000 in there...oh well). Finally after all that was done I was ready!, I clicked on the setup, chose the tools, I left out J# and C++ and continued. Let Microsoft get the info from my setup experience, and let it rip. It was 1:00 AM , so wimp that I am I let it run all night long (all night)...at 6:30 my dog Lizzie. woke me up. after I let her outside...I eagerly went to my laptop to see what happened (it felt like Christmas morning), at first got the message that It wanted the J# redistributable package (?), after I clicked so the package is removed I was warned that it would be great If I installed Office with Project SP something something...I guess I will get to it at some point. My "user experience" file was sent to Microsoft. I wonder who looks at those things. and then I was ready to go...

Thanks

When the Build fairy decided to load the Beta, I tried to download it, but it was taking forever!!!, my friend Gary Bushey told me that it took him 13 hours to download. But once you had it, the setup was fairly painless, meaning it required little babysitting. Thanks to Rob Cannon who was kind enough to help me on my VS2005 setup.

Starting my VS2005 Beta journey

The Beta 2 is out!!!, guess what, it didn't hit me. In the past, (harking back to the older VS versions) I never had time to play with Beta tools. I was too busy working for a living. Of course when the product went live, some of the early adopters were already past the tribulations of whatever learning curve and well on their way to Cannan...So I decided to start playing with the Beta now...and start learning some cool stuff now...

Exporting printer settings

Joy! I got a new laptop! (not mine really, the company's ) so I have to go through the ritual of migrating my junk to the new hard drive. When it comes to printer definitions, I resigned myself to the idea of recreating my printer settings by hand. I found this tool from Microsoft that will do that for you. I tested it and works like a charm: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=D6915F13-EDE4-4708-83C1-0091EEADE293