Sorry for delay in posting. Preparing for a new role and starting up a new hosting project for my online activities is taking so much time that I have to review my current time management approach again :)

 

Anyway I just found that since today you can download a nice VPC image with Visual Studio Team System installation + training scripts from the very beginning to... see yourself:

 

 

If you haven't yet decided if VSS is enough and what SCM tool you really need simply TRY!

Argh...

 

I made a decision to code something in C++ again.

I wanted to check some new API from Vista dedicated to Application Recovery.

There are some new funcitons in kernel32.lib for that.

 

I could make an external reference in .NET like it's explained here but I decided to check if I still remember C++ and so on.

After several years of .NET coding and other managed environment comeback was really painful.

 

Recalling the syntax - okay - piece of cake, after 15-20mins of non-intentional mistakes I was back on the track.

Tool - well Visual Studio is wonderful but after switching back to C++ I see how much it's designed for intuitive adoption of managed .NET platform with VB.Net and most of all C# as main language.

 

Last but very optimistic comment I have which is little bit geeky is that I started to treat C++ these days as I'd done for assembly back in 90ties.

 

I mean, as in those times you could make nice design of code and get reliability through the higher level of language abstraction which was obviously more reusable and readable! but real performance, access to the nuts you got from assembly.

 

These days there is not much sense to switch back to assembly as most low-level access to the system is still made by system libraries.

 

No difference if I do it by

 

push [param1]

push [param2]

call SomeWinAPIFunction

 

or if I do: SomeWinAPIFunction(param1,param2);

 

point is to get quick access to all these functions and so on.

 

C++ is perfect for high performance code if you know what you're doing inside.

Similar argument as I could do in the past for assembly.

 

where current high level language standard is managed and if you need more... ;) that's how I felt C++ while checking Application Recovery API.

 

 

 

 

I don't know if you checked new New York Times reader for Vista.

It's a desktop application based on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

It's been linked in many blogs just after release so it should be easy to "google it up".

 

Idea is that if you're a subscriber of their internet news portal you can through this access get all articles on daily basis (like daily newspaper)

at your desktop locally stored and presented to you (using that reader) as regular newspaper. GUI is fantastic and concept is really cool especially that they integrated a single article into the Windows Desktop Search indexing filters so if you just type in your menu start search input something which propably can be found in one of NYT articles you will get direct url later.

 

Nice example how to use various aspects of Vista.

 

I showed up this application to several of my friends I had also a discussion why not to write an engine for the service like this.

If you use Vista/WPF or not a concept of an application which

 

1) works as a newspaper on your computer

2) has repository of articles packages by issue/date/etc

3) if you're online you can synchronize your subscription based on issues/daily editions/etc

4) if you're offiline you can read what you've already downloaded with nice search capacity and export to another format

 

If you can imagine just an engine for this application to make another NYT Reader, some demoscene magazine this way or simply just provide maybe authoring tool for people who would simply just start playing with the subject. I suppose it sounds nice.

 

On the server side you could have some webservice for "bigger" scale of the solution or maybe just simply URL/file download based repository and here we go..

 

I think that in my spare time I'll try to scetch architecture for this solution and check if these sources can be usable..

 

See you later then with some real code I'd like to show up after all.