Monthly Archives: March 2008

HyperTerminal and Vista

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Filed under Uncategorized

Ok. Yet one more reason to dislike Vista.

Granted, I don’t regularly use HyperTerminal, but when you need to hack at some AT commands, well, it sure was handy to have around.

And it’s been there ever since, what, Windows -1?

But alas, no more.

So, off on the hunt I go. Now, I’ve known about puTTY for quite some time, but I always thought it was a telnet/TTY client. But much to my surprise, it just relatively recently got an upgrade with direct serial access under Windows.

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I gotta say, for dinking around with your typical modem setup, this new puTTY honestly seems to work far smoother than HyperTerminal ever did.

C’est la vie, HyperTerminal. May you rest in peace.

FEBE to go

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Filed under Utilities

If you use FireFox (and if not, what’s up with that), you need to check out Chuck Baker’s FireFox Environment Backup Utility (FEBE).

Slick little tool for saving all your FireFox goodness for that day when, suddenly, you realize you’ll be paving your machine and having to dig through your subconscious to come up with all those bookmarks, RSS feeds and FireFox extensions that you use everyday but couldn’t name to save your ass.

One Big Control or Lots of Little Ones (redux)

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Filed under .NET, ASP, Rants, VB Feng Shui

Some time ago, (or here in the wonderfully virtual web world), I questioned the whole aspect of all this pile of controls in ASP.NET. Of course, you’ve got the grids and listviews, and you also have all the radio buttons, checkboxes. But then you’ve got a separate validator for each kind of validation you want to use, and even validators to let you combine other validators in “AND” and “OR” logical relations.

My thoughts were “Jeez. this is madness.”

Wouldn’t a single control that you could adapt to different display behaviors, validation rules etc be much easier to work with and create a more maintainable solution?

Well, apparently someone at Microsoft had the same bright idea, at least with the new ListView control in ASP.NET 3.5.

Take a read of Fritz Onion’s article in the latest MSDN magazine.

He describes the new ListView as a control that can “literally replace all other databinding controls in ASP.NET. That’s right. Every last one.”

Now, if they’d do the same for that validation nonsense, we might be getting somewhere!

Quick Find in VS2008, Not So Much

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Filed under Uncategorized

It looks like I’m not the only person experiencing absolutely terrible performance in VS 2008 when performing what is ostensibly known as a “Quick Find”

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This is the dialog you normally get when you do a Quick Find (Ctrl-F).

Note that I typically have it set for Entire Solution, Hidden Text and Use Wildcards.

With things set up this way, on a Core 2 Dual Core machine, I typically see a 2-4 second delay when I click the Find Next button. Pressing F3 to continue the find yields similar times.

And this is when the next occurrence is on the same line of code as the current occurrence!

Not much of a “Quick Find” in my book.

I tried all the various options, and nothing has any effect EXCEPT for the “Look In” option. If I change it from Entire Solution, to, well, anything else, the finds are then instantaneous.

If anyone knows of the cause or solution, I’d love to hear about it. So far, I’ve turned up bupcus on this one.

Till then, the Find In Files (Ctrl-Shift-F) option seems to be the best alternative.