Parallels Build 3186

Parallels have just released an updated version of their Mac Desktop product.  Details of what’s new can be found here.  It took a few goes to download it – I guess it’s pretty popular – so you may have to show a little patience.  It’ll be worth it.

More Idelness

After posting about IDEs, I thought that I should also post about a notably absent feature of VS 2005 – the ability to target different versions of .NET.  I’m sure there’s quite a lot of developers who have to work on both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 projects.  Why should you have to use 2 IDEs?  Having to use MSBee doesn’t do it for me.  I’m talking about proper, full, first class support in the IDE.

Idelness

Having built the Mono version of nspectre recently, I thought about how I interact with the IDE (in may case the IDE I’ve spent most time in is Visual Studio.)  Working on the Mono build of nspectre, I used MonoDevelop (with the Xml Editor plug-in) on Ubuntu Edgy and ran NAnt from the command line.  When I’d built nspectre, I ran the example console program from the command line, too.  To access CVS, I used LinCVS.  So, I had a few windows open – with a decent size monitor, having a bunch of windows open is not the problem it would otherwise be.  And it was easy to figure out what I was doing.  It was comfortable.  This realisation came as something of a shock to someone who has been used to doing nearly everything in the IDE.

I hear “integration with the IDE” as a frequent requirement for tools.  What’s not to like about integration?  I guess the problem is when the integration is such that it gets in the way of understanding what you are doing – or locks you into a particular or uncomfortable way of doing it.

ModalBox

Let me come clean. I’ve always hated pop-ups in web applications. I don’t just mean the ones that tell you you’ve won a cruise or that you’re the Emperor of the World, I mean all of them. It’s always felt like an attempt to apply a desktop paradigm to the web. But, sometimes, there’s a need for something to stop you in your tracks, the sort of thing for which, on the desktop, you’d use a modal dialog. On the web, you’d scratch your head. Until now. The prototype framework and script.aculo.us have enabled some excellent web UI advances. And ModalBox is one of them. Try it out.

Upcoming release

nspectre is nearing a 1.0 release.  The new functionality that will be in 1.0 is the ability to use functions for specifications (instead of templates.)  I’ve completed the code that provides this functionality and amended the schema accordingly.

What’s that coming over the hill?

Scoble has linked to an interesting post about the Next Big Language.  I like the idea that the Next Big Language could just end up being called NBL, which would make naming its successor interesting.  TNBLATPNBL (The Next Big Language After The Previous Next Big Language) anyone?

A little more validation

Version 3.0 of the Enterprise Library contains a Validator Block – there’s a CTP here.  Looking at the details on Tom Hollander’s blog, this block has the closest functionality to nspectre of any framework I’ve come across.  There is a difference in design philosophy – nspectre is designed to have as few dependencies as possible.  There are dependencies between the Enterprise Library blocks.

Firefox and NTLM

I’ve configured Firefox 3 or 4 times over the last 2 years to work with Windows Authentication.  And I keep forgetting which setting it is you need to change.  So I thought I’d record it here.

Type about:config into the address into the address bar and find the following setting:
network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
and enter a comma delimited list of hostnames.  Works for me.

Here’s some official documentation for more info.

VS 2005 SP1

3 letters and 5 digits that should strike fear into the hearts of those who are foolish enough to try to install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 when they have restricted disk space available on their system drive. I had well over 1 Gb of space on my c drive. And I had another 15Gb on two more drives. My first attempt to install SP1 was long, drawn out and fruitless. Eventually, I figured out that I had insufficient disk space. So I unpacked the Service Pack into a newly created folder (on a drive with oodles of space) and watched that fail too. You might think that an installer that needs a lot of disk space could check to see if the disk space is available or that it might let you choose where it creates its working files – maybe in the next version. After a little light googling, I came across an answer, thanks to Heath Stewart. It works. I am forever grateful – and hopeful that SP2 is a little easier to install.