matt.griffith

This is your life, are you who you want to be?

This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be... ...when the world was younger and you had everything to lose?

- Switchfoot

From the Department of Broader Horizons I bring you two excellent design magazines:

This weekend I learned two new web development tricks.

Do you need to set the width of one element equal to the 2.78 times the width of another element? Use Dynamic Properties.

Do you need to include different code, or CSS styles, for Internet Explorer? Use Conditional Comments.

Milan Negovan ported the Markdown conversion tool to C#. It is BSD licensed. I can't wait to try it out! See Milan's Announcing Markdown.NET post for more information.

Sometimes the best way to learn a new object model is to explore it at runtime. That is what makes OutlookSpy and OfficeSpy so valuable. The .NET Component Inspector, from oakland software, will let you do the same thing with any .NET assembly. Very cool!

In this article mwadams describes some of the problems in the current VS.NET designers. Some of the same problems exist in the Web designers too. So far all of the Web Designer problems I've tested are fixed in VS.NET Whidbey. I hope the same is true for the Windows Form designers. But until Whidbey arrives, mwadams provides some excellent advice.

This post brought to you by the letter W and Mike Gunderloy.

Joost Ronkes Agerbeek is documenting his experiences as he readies his first product for release. In his latest post he discovers that some times good enough is, well, good enough. This is a lesson that I am reminded of by my current employer every day. In fact, if you plan to start your own software business I recommend you work for a small ISV for a couple of years first. Or better yet, start your own ISV today and document the process the way Joost is. You are bound to learn a lot that way too.

In this article Jason Bock documents the trip he took to get a better design time experience for one of his Windows Form controls. Thanks Jason!

WinOE Workflow Prepped For Whidbey, Longhorn, Office 12 In 2006 - Just in case you're not tired of learning new APIs yet. [Mike Gunderloy]

It isn't clear what is going to be available in the Whidbey timeframe, but I definitely need to look into this further for my day job.

P.S. I didn't get around to saying this when Mike posted his 500th post. But I don't know how Mike does it. I love The Daily Grind. I would be lost without it. If something interesting happens in the Microsoft/.NET world Mike points to it. The Daily Grind is a must read for any Windows developer.

It seems that while he was sending out Double.MaxValue the system was enable to use Double.Parse() on it. In other words, he wasn't able to "roundtrip" his value, like Double.Parse(Double.MaxValue.ToString()).

...

Using Edge Cases as Magic Numbers is more evil than using Magic Numbers [Scott Hanselman]

There is a similar issue with DateTime data when you try to use simple serialization - or serialization from a class -> XSD - to build an interface. That reminds me, I need to look at how Xml Serialization works for nullable types in Whidbey.

...after a quick Google search...

It looks like Christian Weyer already answered my question in this article.