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As well as general rantings, one of the main purposes of this site was for me to blog about the ins and outs of working on software. It hasn’t quite worked out like that, has it? The main reason is the speed at which my development goes; two to three hundred projects (in Visual Studio alone) can make someone a bit quick at getting something designed and developed. Because of this, blogging would just slow things right down.

The only real good shot I’d have at blogging the development of an application would be to work on something using a new technology (eurgh – I don’t like applying the technology term to software) that I would have to learn as I go.

Here enters WPF. Despite messing about with it and getting three or four apps at a good stage using it, I’m still not completely sure on quite a few things, such as best design practices. Besides, the app-to-blogged-about has already been to an advanced state-of-being in Windows Forms, but the direction of both the application and the source wasn’t quite where I wanted them to be. These two reasons, among the “new tech” reason and possibly others, are why I will artificially slow down its development to a degree that I can make blog posts about what I’ve done that session/day/period.

It’s FluidBar that I will be working on in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC. At the time of this post, that link reflects the WinForms version (take a look at its Requires field).

The next blog post should be about FluidBar and Visual Studio 2010, so stay tuned if that kinda thing does it for you, I guess.

One of the things I like with new versions of Windows is the possibility of new features for developers. Windows 7, like Vista, seems to include a few little things for us to play about with, namely the ITaskbarList3 Interface exposed by the Windows Shell.

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After moving over to the 64-BIT edition of Windows Vista, I encountered problems with Visual Studio 2005.

The first problem was to do with the Visual Studio window not redrawing itself when an executed application had finished running and VS did not have focus.

The second, and most annoying problem was with external libraries, as I couldn’t continue development of some projects because of it. Thankfully, I was able to work out how to fix all of the problems except for one. It’s just a shame that it took me months to re-visit the problem as development suffered for it.

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