Merry Christmas, ho, ho, ho…

Merry Christmas everyone, I hope you have all had a fun filled day! Santa was pretty good to me this year, with the number one gift being a Polar S725 watch, which measures heart rate, speed, cadence, altitude, etc. – very cool. [Weird thing is I bought it myself off eBay and then the family steal it then wrap it and put it under the tree?!?] The boys were spoilt again getting far more than they deserved ;-)

Kyle has his special present today, which is tickets to Narnia, which he is looking forward to. Kyle is a complete Narnia nerd, read the books, watched the BBC TV Series many times, and listened to the CD stories over and over and over again. Caleb isn’t allowed to go as we feel he is still a bit too young, and normally we wouldn’t let Kyle but given his level of interest we feel it is OK this time around.

For Caleb we have organized tickets to see a soccer game, unfortunately not the World Cup next year, but the next best thing :-) It is the next Queensland Roar game – should be fun as Caleb is an absolute soccer nut.

So all the best for the holidays and have a great New Year.

Design time in VS.NET 2005 – aarrgghh…

I wrote some custom controls for the Pocket PC (.NET CF 2.0) using Visual Studio 2005 recently. They were working fine in the designer right up to the point where I needed to do a P/Invoke – at which point the designer experience disappeared – just a generic bounding box. This obviously sucked and needed to be fixed!

This then lead to this article and this article. Something about adding a “DesignTimeAttributes.xmta” file to your project; now go look in the .NET help for a reference to this. I dare ya! That’s right there is nothing – wow, fantastic, a new undocumented feature – that is just marvelous. It seems like a good feature, just a weird and undocumented way of getting to it.

Well, just having this file is not enough to fix the problem, you now need “DesktopCompatible(true)” as identified in the next page of the first article. Again, no mention of this in the .NET help.

So I compile again, errors – wtf! Now I get some cryptic “genasm.exe” error. This then turns up this thread which helps to identify that I have a public generic List property that is causing the problem, which Microsoft acknowledges, but they *might* get to it in Service Pack 1. This is RTM right?!? Holy crap, so now I have to dumb down my class to get it to compile.

It now compiles and the design time experience is back. So now I have some undocumented file and attributes defined within my project and a dumbed down class – fantastic innovation within the platform – NOT!

So the questions is – do I have an ordinary design experience or a fully functioning class that can use a generic list? I chose the latter!

One year of blogging...

Well today represents the one year anniversary of my first blog post. Over this past year I have managed 122 posts, which I think is not too bad. Let's see if I can last another year :-)