There's already a highly functional random number generator available through the Win32 API. It's used to calculate the amount of time left when you copy files.

Matt Dockerty

Thank you :)

Matt Dockerty

Darn :)

Matt Dockerty

So I just need to master the art of insinuating a threat to a someone's personal safety? :)

Matt Dockerty

For what seems like the nine zillionth time in my career I'm gearing up to have 'that conversation' with a manager. The one where I say that administrative accounts are for trained sysadmins, not special accounts for the people calling the shots. It's got to the stage now where my latest system designs include an account tier with slightly more privileges just to cater for this mode of thought. Is it just me or does everybody go through this?

Matt Dockerty

Heh, I remember these from a long time ago. These days my database layers are so abstracted they're writing the stored procedures themselves '; TRU.NCATE TABLE Posts; --M ;)

Matt Dockerty

Brilliant, I'll have to try that.

Coffee Brain::MakeCoffee() {

Fridge fridge = Home.Current.GetFridge();

if(!fridge.ContainsMilk) {
throw new NoMilkException();
}
// ... //
}

Matt Dockerty

So if I was to dereference the pointer to the structure of what you're talking about and consider the sizeof the issue am I to assume that you've been trying to get at properties of people which don't exist? I've never found C++ to overwrite my thought processes :) --M

Matt Dockerty

I'm writing a browser app which isn't out yet so I won't give details. I needed to do something which would have taken all year in Javascript, to build and to run. ActiveX and Java could be replaced by a little yellow bar at the top of the browser window in todays MS environment. WPF was the clear choice. That I could get some animation in there at low cost was a great bonus. It helps me visually imply what is going on as the UI is used and so makes it intuitive to use. So far so good. The XAML syntax was familiar to me as an HTML guy, the styling more flexible than anything CSS can do, the whole code model was intuitive and I was using it straight away. Its stable already, no undecipherable errors using it for the first time. All unlike Workflow Foundation which wasted lots of my time. Then there's the downside. It's sloooow. It can do amazing things but getting up to about 12 concurrent simple animations it loses its responsiveness. I've seen my dev machine run Crysis so I was expecting more bangs per buck out of WPF, that kinda sucked. So in summary, mostly rocks, fringe-sucks. The main business case I can give for using it is increased productivity in some scenarios (over heavily-involved DHTML for instance) and being able to offer more flexibility to your customers. It's not going to be long until everybody has seen a fade-in, or a realtime zoom, or a pretty glow radiate around something and will just expect you to be able to do that for them if they ask.

Matt Dockerty

Or worse you can be typing something in the middle of an update nagathon and accidentally give permission for the system to be shut down. They might just be trying to protect their non-technical users from urgent threats like Blaster but many of the updates that we get these days aren't for threats, but still nag you. I'm sure I read something about good UI design and avoiding superfluous user prompts (lol, don't get me started about UAC). My compatibility list did not need a system reboot, it probably didn't even need an IE reboot. I would have settled for 'please restart IE when possible to begin using a new compatibility list'. Better still just nothing, nobody really needed informing that this list would be updated, like Chrome does.

Matt Dockerty

Absolutely. I tried Chromium for a while but couldn't be bothered updating it by myself and went back. Windows update can occasionally get out of your way but I get sick of the reboots, and especially reboot nag screens. I remember being told that MS was going to treat a reboot as a bug in Vista, obviously not a very high priority one. The last thing that wanted a reboot was an update for the compatibility view list for Internet Explorer. That just seems lazy.

Matt Dockerty

Lolol. $ sudo root barbie.

Matt Dockerty

Dressing up Barbie requires kernel mode hooks as every programmer knows :laugh:

Matt Dockerty

Games needing elevation? Wonder why. Manic Miner never used to pop up an elevation prompt. Get the kids a Spectrum +3.

Matt Dockerty

I'm finding it just as easy/productive as Winforms and much better when it comes to doing eye candy. Might be because I've got a history with web development and Flash. I think the big problem is it's all pretty vast and new. I'd imagine there's a steeper learning curve transitioning from forms development. Performance really is an issue though, especially when compared to the blazing animation speeds of Flash. I've got a layout routine that manipulates about 40 controls, animates about 20 of them, repositions some, deletes a few and adds a few more and it's taking a good tenth of a second to work. Anybody know if there's a way to suppress layout updates for a section of code? Every dependency property I change seems to cause a superfluous layout update immediately which is where I think my precious milliseconds are going.

--Matt

Am I missing something? Why not just put a label control on the form? Use a canvas if you want absolute positioning. I'm really enjoying working with WPF. It's as slow as hell even on good hardware but it's a real improvement for UI coding.

--Matt

I'm surprised to see Opera sat at the bottom of all these benchmarks. It seems like the fastest browser in practice. What is sure, is that unless every browser offers fast Javascript and everyone uses these browsers, we're still going to be constrained by the lowest common denominator. IE6 then.

Matt Dockerty

Wow, I'm applying for a job at MSN! Being in the UK I tend to look at the slightly more realistic figures here. According to this, developers are getting paid slightly less across the board than last year :(

Matt Dockerty