Although he only talked about high-level stuff (Exception Handling and Memory Management), I think Brad did a pretty good job. I stopped going to the Microsoft office out here because of all the 100 level classes, I couldn't justify taking time out of the trenches for learning stuff I already knew. But hearing the lead PM on the CLR team speak? It was time to attend my first Houston .NET UG meeting. To be fair, there was also the Hal-PC C# sig there, but I've never seen that room so packed. Overflow rooms had to be set up. Way to go, Brad!

So as is usually the case with these events, I came away with a couple of golden nuggets of information, some of which is even relevant in v1.x of the framework! (Imagine that!) Here are a couple of the notes I took:

• Finalizers keep objects alive an order of magnitude (about 10) longer than objects w/o finalizers
• It's a really bad idea to throw an Exception from a finalizer.
• Check out Critical Finalizers in v2.0
• Finalizers are most appropriate for owned unmanaged resources (filestream, sqlconnection, etc classes are a case in point)
• It's kind of an "unwritten rule" that any object that has a Close method should implement the IDisposable pattern and they should do the exact same thing. i.e. Close should just call Dispose.

I brought my digital camera, but being the jerk that I am, didn't check to see if the batteries were working first (doh!). Thankfully, I've got a camera phone and was able to take a picture with Brad anyways (I'm the short one):

This is also where I got my Channel 9 guy along with a nice smattering of other cool swag. Sorry, Scoble, it was just a joke tho - I thought it would be more appropriate to write the ransom note in 1337 than have both of my subscribers download a bunch of newspaper-clipped letter images. I still want my million, tho :)

[ Currently Playing : Napoleon Solo - At the Drive-In - In Casino Out (4:47) ]

 |}34|2 M|2. Scoble,

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2) M1C|2050f7 MU57 0p3n-50U|2C3 w1n|}0w5 50 17 C4n 83 53CU|23 L1K3 L1nUx.

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Well, thanks to Steven's post .Text's MetaWeblog API - Edit Post Error... I am now just a couple of revisions behind the latest incarnation of .Text over here.

This has been a serious pain to get migrated from v0.94 (all because I need to edit my posts w/ the metablog api - go figure!) but a lot of it has been due to errors on my part. When you try to add content, you've gotta keep those Identity fields intact or you end up with "Server returned a fault exception" when adding a new post. Yuck.

Update2: Continuing my battle with this engine: It looks like the entry.FeedBackCount doesn't like to be DBNull or whatever (Imagine that!). I think I just might be g2g w/ the v0.95 .Text installation. Geebus.

 euiyun's Xanga Site - 2/8/2005 9:41:55 PM

Always good to see a bunch of Asians "go crazy". (ahahahahah!)

Bonus: It looks like it was filmed in good ol' H-Town - part of it at the Williams Trace (once Transco) Tower! w00t! And Wal-Mart. Gotta love Wal-Mart.

They're fun anyways.

 
Which File Extension are You?

I recently added Tabbing functionality for indenting/outdenting (hey, it's a trident term :) in my dogfood version of PostXING.

Quoting has just become 100 times easier for me.

I prefer to use the keyboard when posting/changing text attributes when possible, and this whole no tabbing business finally got me a little fed up. Wanna know the funny part? It ended up being about 8 lines of code, give or take for whitespace:

  1 protected override bool ProcessCmdKey(ref Message msg, Keys keyData) {
  2 	if(keyData == Keys.Tab){
  3 		this._designEditor.TextFormatting.Indent();
  4 	}else if(keyData == (Keys.Tab | Keys.Shift)){
  5 		this._designEditor.TextFormatting.Unindent();
  6 	}
  7 			
  8 	return base.ProcessCmdKey (ref msg, keyData);
  9 }

What other unsupported keyboard shortcuts would you like to see in PostXING (get em while I've got it fresh on my mind :)

[ Currently Playing : Dazed And Confused - Led Zeppelin - BBC Sessions CD 2 (18:36) ]

<snip>
Q: You mean you didnt kill 200K people or change the tilt of the Earth's axis?
a: not yet
</snip>
[Via brains-N-brawn.com]

Classic. I rather enjoyed the article, and think that a lot of people are missing the point. Not that my opinion matters anyways, but I thought it was kind of a neat POC.