23 February 2004

Broderbund Software... and C#   This is so cool, even if you might take it as mostly marketing (sorry in advance)... Having spent many years using a Commodore 64, and owning "Print Shop", "Loderunner"... geez, I even remember "Reader Rabbit", but I think that was for my Mom's school computers... the Broderbund name carries a lot of meaning to me... so when I saw their name on a recent case study for C#, it really jumped out at me... The Print Shop 20 Uses .NET CLR from MFC to Ease into the .NET Framework When Riverdeep wanted to write new features for The Print Shop in C#, it didn't want to have to convert the entire 20-year-old C++ code base of The Print Shop forward into managed code at once. The existing 1.4 million lines of code were not structured well enough to turn into COM components or to convert into managed C++. Riverdeep hit on the unorthodox approach of hosting the Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime inside their MFC-based C++ application, which turned out to work extremely well in practice. It seems to me that a company that has been building a successful software product for 20 years, and building on the same code base, doesn't make language and technology decisions lightly... so this is a very cool case study. Related... [Code/Tea/Etc...]   OK, this link is for me mainly so I remember to pass it on to the correct people tomorrow as part of my “I hate MFC” whining when we discuss where our software is going. What other blogs are saying about this post. 11:48:20 PM    comment []  trackback []

Image support in FlexWiki  Wouldn’t it be nice if FlexWiki didn’t need you to host your images elsewhere and link to them? OpenWiki has a nice system that allows you to upload files to be associated with pages, and FlexWiki would be a lot more useful if it could do that too because our users are not all expected to understand about hosting files. And no, I don’t have time to add the support myself… What other blogs are saying about this post. 11:39:38 PM    comment []  trackback []

Tejas wants CD-bootable Windows   Tejas Patel wants Microsoft to do a completely CD-bootable OS like the Knoppix Linux release. "I hope someday you guys listen to my requests." Related... [The Scobleizer -- Celebrating the Geek lifestyle]   Microsoft already sells a version of XP that can boot and run totally from a CD. It’s called Embedded XP and OK, it’s not exactly a retail item, but it is aimed at 99% of the markets where you’d want to do that. I’ve got a task on my list to create one that just holds all of the SATA and SCSI drivers that I will ever need and our disk benchmarking utility so I can just pop in a bootable CD into a system and get an almost standard measurement from the fitted disks on a system. What other blogs are saying about this post. 11:31:25 PM    comment []  trackback []

I need longer days and a holiday. Well I’ve finally finished moving (note to self. Next time move bookcases before hundreds of DVDs to avoid piles of DVDs being everywhere) and I’ve only had to block one doorway with boxes before I unpack properly. I need more space. Work wise I’ve had a good time lately. I’ve tested a flash drive that managed to write over 60mb per second for our needs (sustained, not burst) which isn’t too expensive for customers to not want. With their sizes and that data rate though even the 20something Gb that the top of the range drive has will be filled before you know you’ve even had a chance to start recording data but we can always run more than one in our system if people need more storage. Our resident graphic designer in the office set up FlexWiki on Friday as a replacement for our intranet and spent today moving content over. It turns out that if you say “Version Controlled Document Management System” instead of Wiki more people take notice J. I immediately set myself up a little namespace to ramble in and am trying to replace my currently paper log book with it. FlexWiki is great as long as you pay attention to file security on the WikiBase files and don’t have the IIS lockdown tool having blocked URLs with full stops in them. That one had me stumped for ages and so I’ll say FlexWiki 404 Can’t find file so that Google can help point anybody else with that problem at their web server security. Lastly I’ll just ask where all of my new readers where they came from. My hits have shot up recently and I don’t know why. What other blogs are saying about this post. 11:12:13 PM    comment []  trackback []

© Copyright 2004 Jon Shute.