In conjunction with the announcement of the Express products, Microsoft's Channel9 is running a coding contest. Each language has its own judge, and yes of course there's a C++ judge. “The Summer of Express contest is a worldwide skill contest where developers are challenged to create “non-business” applications using the newly announced Express products.” And yes, you can use the betas -- in fact that's the whole point.

 Why not?

Kate

This is fun! If you want to get started using Visual C++ to write managed or unmanaged code, but you don't want to buy the full product, what can you do? You could use the free Visual C++ Toolkit, which I've told you about before, but that doesn't include the IDE though it does include some very nice samples and whitepapers: one blogger was nice enough to say “the samples alone are worth the download.” At Tech Ed Europe, Microsoft has announced the Express versions of the 2005 products, including Visual C++ 2005 Express (that means they're in beta now, whereas the toolkit is the current released version. You can't release products you create with a beta.) You can download now, so go ahead!

Kate

ps: if you know who the gentleman is at the top left of that Visual C++ 2005 Express Beta page, please drop me a note. I swear we've met and it's going to bug me until I get a name.

Did you know that one person -- Bob Bemer -- pushed the development and adoption of ASCII? Or that he was also responsible for the backslash and escape keys? (There's more, too, like naming COBOL -- check his site.) Isn't it a shame we don't hear this stuff until the obituary? I love this quote: "He was a coder until he couldn't code any more. He lived it and breathed it." While I love dealing with customers, and doing “big picture” architecting, as well as training and mentoring, I too love to code, and I hope someone can say that about me someday -- 50 years from now would be fine.

Kate

My latest codeguru column, C++ Language Changes for Visual Studio 2005, has been uploaded to the CodeGuru site.

Scott Bellware has to reschedule his appearance at the East of Toronto .NET User Group, much to our regret. We're looking forward to announcing the new date soon. The good news is that Marcie Robillard has stepped up to the plate and agreed to shuffle her “DataGrids and GridViews” talk forward a few months. Same time, same place, same URL. See you there!

Kate

On Tuesday, June 15th, Scott Bellware will be at the East of Toronto user group (meeting on the Durham Collage / UOIT campus at Simcoe and Conlin.) Scott will talk about Unit Testing and he's bringing his own prizes:

I have loved this trick since I saw it and I've just decided it's time to share it. Say you have some application or folder open, but it's minimized or has stuff on top of it, and you want to drag a file to it. Here's how I was taught to do that: grab the thing you're dragging, and drag it down to the taskbar, then wait patiently without letting go. If you let go, Windows will nag you:

So you wait, eventually the window opens up, and then you drag back up from the taskbar before dropping. If you're trying to drag another file into a product like FrontPage and a file is already open, you want to drag all the way to the top menu bar, otherwise the new file will just be inserted into the open document -- hardly ever what what you want.

Next time, try this instead. Get your drag started, and after moving the icon just a few pixels, and without letting go of the mouse button, use your other hand to ALT-TAB. Pop around to the target app and let go of the ALT-TAB, then let go of the mouse button to drop your icon onto the target. This is faster and less frustrating and now I do it all the time. I just checked, and you could do this even in NT 4, if not before. I just never knew, until I saw Scott Hanselman do it in a presentation. Very neat trick.

Kate

Now people I haven't even met are blogging about donuts... not that the back door he describes could persuade me to scan my own groceries, until the UI improves dramatically. It's forever telling me to put the bag back on the scale or take things off the scale until I'm ready to abandon everything I've bought just to make the process stop.

Kate

My blog about knowing what you want when you're networking (a job, an article, or whatever) triggered some more thoughts about knowing what you want in other situations. This post is about meetings.

I hate meetings. One of the great things about having so many remote clients is that I don't have to go to meetings. [Many years ago we were doing some work that ended up in Visual C++ 4. One day my Microsoft contact called me, saying "I'm just going into a meeting and need to know a, b, and c." We talked for about five minutes and then he headed off to the meeting. Four HOURS later he called me back to tell me the results of the meeting and as I got off the phone I was filled with gratitude that I had not been in the meeting. It's been an important part of my business model ever since.] But if you're going to go to a meeting, the least you can do is make it worthwhile. The key to this is to know what the meeting is for and what you want from it. These are not always the same thing at all.

Every meeting, no matter its nominal purpose, can give you something you want. A status meeting is an opportunity to be recognized for recent accomplishments and to get the credit you deserve. Or perhaps it's an opportunity to get a decision maker to make a decision the way you want it made. A sales meeting is easy; you want the sale, or permission to submit a proposal, or to be put on the list of bidders. A "let's get this stuck project unstuck" meeting or a kickoff meeting have obvious purposes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't stop to think about what you want from them. Do you want to be assigned the unsticking tasks? Do you want a deadline moved? Do you want someone else's behaviour to be redirected?

Occasionally I wander into meetings without particularly thinking about what I want from them, just because it's the regular meeting or because my client invited me. Those meetings are boring and horrible. About 90% of the time I decide in advance what I want from the meeting. I usually put a little thought into how to get it, but what seems to really matter is just knowing what I am aiming for. Almost without fail, I get it. (If I go as part of a team and discuss it out loud with my team mates before we go, I have never got less than I wanted.) And this isn't just a matter of taking advantage of the unprepared people who wandered into the meeting without a plan and can be bent to my will . The really neat meetings are the ones where everyone in the room knows what they want and we dispense with the rest of the nonsense and get down to brass tacks. Then we really get things done, and I don't hate those kinds of meetings at all.

Kate