"Good Enough" Counterrevolution

This post is essentially my comment to the "Good-Enough" Revolution post which I think worthwhile to be turned into separate article. Besides - I didn't wrote anything non-technical for a long time... "Good-Enough" Revolution stands that many contemporary goods are "good enough" to be used and hence consumer often do not have motivation to buy a new version of the same good (e.g. man using Windows XP wouldn't go for Window Vista as XP is good enough for most of every day tasks, like e-mail, Internet or editing some office documents). While this observation is absolutely correct I think that important point is missed - contemporary goods are deliberately created not to be durable to compel consumer to, well, consume. A silent "Good-Enough" Counterrevolution is in its high. Producers do not create goods that are designed to last any more. Almost anything you are buying nowadays is deliberately designed to last for a short, programmed time and then broke. I think that the only consumer strategy to deal with it is to buy the cheapest version of an appliance you need - it would usually serve you the same time as its high-end version, while cost a half of it. Your washing machine served you for 10 years? – I bet that a new one would not stand for more than 2-3 years. Your old electric kettle worked for 5-7 years? - Buy a new one and it would leak in a year or so. Talk to guys who are working in electronics service/repair centers and they would tell you that stuff nowadays is PROGRAMMED to work for a predefined time and then broke. A friend of mine who works in a big car repairs firm told me that every car accumulator that occasionally served significantly more than a guaranty period is sent to the lab for examination to check out why did it lasted so long and didn’t broke. An observation about "good enough" was correct, but it's not applicable to the new goods - manufacturers are not interested in you wiping yourself with the same towels till your golden years. No, you should buy towels, use them and then buy new ones. We all are squirrels that have to rotate wheels of economy. No one asks squirrel whether it wants to get our of a squirrel-wheel marathon, right?

Consolas - ClearType font optimized for programming environment

Few patches you may need to use for this lab: You getting "Error 32 SignTool reported an error SignTool Error: Signtool requires CAPICOM version 2.1.0.1 or higher" - solutions is here. You getting "Request for the permission of type System.Net.WebPermission" - it could be caused by a range of reasons. In my case - I needed to set Execute permissions to "Scripts only" rather than "Scripts and Executables". If it not helps you - here few more receipts: partial trust WPF app Request for the permission of type System.Net.WebPermission

How to keep Format Painter active in Office-style applications...

Here is the trick - double click the format painter icon to format multiple elements. Press ESC to end formating.

ReSharper: no need to install hotfix when installing for VS 2005 SP1

The required hotfix is included in SP1. See this link for the full list of issues affected by SP1.

Is saying that C# is 'better' than VB.NET is a mauvais ton?

One of my favourite childhood books was book of a semi-forgotten today Russian author - L. Kassil. Misfortunately he didn't stand in competition with McDonald's of today literature world a'la Harry Potter. Now, you would ask - how it relates to the C#? - Here is the story: heroes of the book were arguing who's stronger - marine or soldier? Whale or an elephant? … - well, you got an idea. Now an interesting article in SDK Dev' Team blog paradoxically resembled me all of it - marine, soldier and whale :) In this article SDK developers present a coverage of various themes done for C# and VB.NET in Vista SDK samples: .NET 3.0 Samples # of Unique C# Coverage VB Coverage WCF 146 100% 72% WF 60 100% 95% WPF 434 98% 58% Cross Technology 23 96% 9% .NET Framework 2.0 138 95% 80% Totals 801 98% 66% Do you notice that C# coverage is a bit better? That's why I going to stand on the mauvais ton side and say that C# is better than VB.NET. Yes, yes, everything could be implemented in language constructions of both languages. But: 1) There is more important development in C# than in VB.NET (e.g. Enterprise Libraries). 2) I think that for historical reasons - most of the people writing in VB.NET are peoples who did a transaction from some sort of visual basic development. And VB projects in the pre .net era were kind of less 'hardcore' than, say, C++ projects, whose developers probably evolved into the C# rather than into the VB.NET. Except, how else you may explain that market offers higher wages for C# pplz (than to VB.NET)?

How to use w.bloggar after switching to Google Account on blogspot.com

Here is a detailed explanation on how to use w.bloggar for posting to blogspot after switching to Google Account. Just to add that host to be referenced is still beta.blogspot.com

I'm back

1. I'm back after really, really long blackout. 2. A lot to tell - it's even difficult to chose what to start with.

Boosting priority of Visual Studio .NET compilation

Long, long, long time ago a trick was published on CodeGuru, letting you to decrease priority of the compilation process (cl.exe) spawned by VC++ environment. Build process is a relatively resources-consuming task and those days - running a big build was almost freezing your computer for hours, hardly letting you to browse an internet site in the background. So, the trick was to look for the combination of CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP and NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS flags (together giving a value of 68 00 02) in the vcspawn.exe process and then change 00 02 into 40 02, which is the value of IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS (actually it's 0x00000040 - so you getting 40 00 after you swap its bytes to fit physical representation in memory). Now, today I encountered an absolutely opposite problem: we have a dedicated "daily build" machine, which only purpose is to run daily build, unit tests and pack daily build installation. I noted that a big span of time required for this whole process to complete is spent by compilation (cl.exe). So I wanted to increase its default priority and this way to speed up whole build process. Well, the old trick still works - all you need is to look for 68 00 02 in vcspawn.exe and change it to 68 80 02 (HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS).