Loud Thoughts

Today when I hit F5 in my Visual Studio project (a sample Win32 console application), I got this weird error "msdia80.dll cannot be loaded". I did a quick search in the Internet and found a few solutions:

• Reinstall Visual Studio SP1: Unfortunately, this is not a viable option because we know how much time it takes to install SP1
• Register the msdia80.dll: This is a very easy fix. But where do we find this DLL? Here is the answer: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VC

I tried the second solution and it worked fine. So this is what we need to do:

1. Open command prompt.
2. Navigate to the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VC
3. Run this command "regsvr32 msdia80.dll"

That's it. Enjoy debugging your application.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft has released XmlLite, a light-weight fast XML parser exclusively for native C++. XmlLite is supposed to be a near-equivalent of System.Xml namespace of the managed world. I said "near-equivalent" because XmlLite is just a forward-only reader. It does not provide schema/DTD validation or DOM implementation. Neither does it support XPath or style sheets. So perhaps it is far from near-equivalent.

But what I like about this parser is that it focuses on performance and low overhead. More importantly, it is meant for native C++ apps. After all, MS hasn't fogotten the C++ community.

Kenny Kerr gives a good overview of XmlLite in this MSDN article

technorati tags:XmlLite, XML parser, native C++

Posted by Ann Catherine at 9:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently came across Trac, a minimalistic web-based project-management and bug-tracking system. Normally, these kind of products come with a plethora of features; but turn out be seldom used. It is better to have a light-weight product with just-enough features, but easy to use. This is the idea behind Trac. It is the best fit for developers to organize their work without disturbing the development process which is deployed in the team/organization. Trac is Wiki-based and interfaces with Subversion.

The only problem is that it is not trivial to install it on a desktop due to the intricate requirements for particular version of Python and other software. But we managed to get it running along with its WebAdmin plugin. There are quite a few Trac Hosting sites like CvsDude, WebFaction.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 5:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2005 SP1. This includes some 70 improvements like Core Duo support, performance improvements in TFS, integration of TFS with Excel 2007 etc.
VS2005 SP1 Release Notes say

Service pack installation takes longer than the original product installation:
Installing Visual Studio 2005 SP1 takes longer than installing the original release version because the SP1 installation is much like a product installation, but with additional installation tasks. Installation time depends on which product is installed and the computer’s configuration.
Installation requires significant disk space:
Disk space equal to that taken by the original product installation may be needed to install a service pack .
If you have more than one Visual Studio product installed, you will need disk space for each service pack installation. You can find an estimate of the required disk space on the download page for the service pack.

Update: You should make sure you have some time available for the installation. Here, it took more than one hour and a half with 99% of the CPU occupied all the time!

Posted by Ann Catherine at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft has released IE 7.0 to public. Microsoft has included features like tagged browsing, subscribing to RSS feeds etc. into this version of IE. Phew... At last..:-)
Read more from CNet News

Posted by Ann Catherine at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I played around with Flock some more and I have a better feeling of the same. In my earlier blog, I had overlooked the fact that it is a beta version of the product and the minor issues can be pardoned.
Some cool features I like are automatically saving the bookmarks to del.icio.us, reading my blog as a feed etc.

Now I really like the idea behind the Flock browser. It tries to harness the power of Web and integrate many applications like blogs, flickr photos, del.icio.us etc. This concept is very powerful and is the part of the recent ideas like Web 2.0, Social Network etc. But in order to achieve the status of a social browser, Flock needs a lot more power. George talks about this in his blog. He talks about a social browser which provides good visualization of the wide-spread content on the web. He calls this application FolkMind and has started an Open Source project named Folkmind for the same. It is really interesting, especially the project's caption "Virtual brain of humanity" :-)

Posted by Ann Catherine at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I tried a first preview of the Flock browser which can do a lot more than a normal browser-it can blog posts, add flickr photos to blogs etc. It is built on Mozilla browser platform.
But unfortunately, my first Flock experience was slightly disappointing. I tried to blog from flock, but it always said Login failed! I tried to add my Flickr photos to my blog, but that also failed with error messages in BIG font. :-(

Posted by Ann Catherine at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I upgraded my blog publishing platform and changed the look and feel of my blog site. How does it look? Do give your comments.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are many mind/brain mapping software available under Commercial or open-source distribution. One of the most popular is FreeMind. This is a very easy-to-use mind mapping software written in Java. Yet another one is VisualMind which is a commercial software in similar lines.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 2:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is a good introductory article on Longhorn by Chris Sells. The UPDATE at the top of the article is interesting. :-)

Posted by Ann Catherine at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today was the second day of Microsoft Tech-Ed 2004 at Bangalore. It was not a very great event this time. I expected more coverage of Microsoft technologies in the event. But it didn't happen. This time, many people felt that the quality and quantity of technical matter showcased in Tech-Ed is degrading over the years. I really could not figure out the reason for this. Is this happening for all the Tech-Eds through out the world? Or is it a peculiarity of Tech-Ed in India?

Posted by Ann Catherine at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night, we tried to install Linux Fedora Core 2 on our home PC. We got stuck a few times. Our machine already has two Windows OS running on two partitions. We didn't want the Linux bootloader because we want to use the Windows bootloader to choose the OS. Hence we skipped the option of installing grub. After the installation, we tried to copy the boot loader using the dd command. But the OS refused to boot the next time. Then we repeated the installation with the option of creating the boot loader. Even this attempt was not successful. Apparently, an extended partition cannot be made a primary partition. Any thoughts on this?

Posted by Ann Catherine at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Few days back, George mentioned about the use of Mozilla as an application development framework. Today I read a few articles on this and found the amazing capabilities of the Mozilla browser to act as a full-fledged development platform which can be used to develop stand alone applications or browser-based cross-platform applications. The framework is called XPFE (Cross Paltform Front End) framework. It consists of a set of web-based standard technologies like XUL (XML based User Interface Language), CSS, JavaScript. and a few more components which are used in deploying, packaging. localization etc. You can read more about it at Mozdev.
Interestingly, the UI mark up language XUL is pretty much similar to the Microsoft's Longhorn markup language XAML (XML Application Markup Language). The similarity lies in the fact that we can add UI controls to a form/window using simple XML tags.
There is an exhasutive list of applications developed using the XPFE framework at Mozdev.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mono 1.0 has been released. It is an open source implementation of the .NET framework. It includes the SDK and tools to develop and run .NET applications on Linux, Mac, Windows and Unix platforms. The Mono project which is sponsored by Novell gives a compiler, CLR, class libraries, an IDE, debugger, a blog reader and a lot more. Read more about it from the Mono project web site.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I installed IIS 5.0 on my new Win 2000 machine at office. Surprisingly, no ASP page would work on my system. ASPX, HTML pages worked beautifully. I was confused. I searched in the Net and came across the article by Microsoft on how to troubleshoot this issue.

In fact, it is a problem with the IWAM_##Computer Name## account. This user needs to be added to the Local Administrators group. Now my problem is solved.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Microsoft Devdays 2004 is scheduled for May 5th at Bangalore. It is a one-day event. The agenda claims that they will introduce Whidbey and Yukon and a lot more. Wonder how deep they are going to deal about it.
Let's wait and see.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At last, I submitted the article. The editor has replied saying that it will take one or two weeks to get it reviewed by different people. Altogether, it was a nice experience. I learned a lot from that work. We are planning to write more articles.

Posted by Ann Catherine at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)