According to Heise, IT jobs are particularly stressful

Interesting study revealed. do you agree or disagree ?
In german only, sorry !

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Studie-IT-Jobs-besonders-stressig-847283.html

Erste Microsoft Certified Prüfung steht bevor

... gut Ding will Weile haben - die Anmeldung zur ersten Microsoft Certified Prüfung ist gemacht, im Oktober ists soweit. *freu*
Ziel: Microsoft Certified Trainer...

Adding custom Prerequisites to Visual Studio 2010

While developing my Joinup Outlook Add-In with Visual Studio 2010, I intended to add my own Prerequisite to the Installer Project (yes, VSTO solutions do need quite a few of those..).
I did find information about how to add them to Visual Studio, but not about 2010.
So here it is, prominent actually, but due to a pretty different folder path to previous VS versions, I mistakenly thought this to be the wrong information.

In short, Custom Prerequisites go here:
\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages

Deploying VSTO Solutions (Outlook Add-Ins, Office extensions) & prerequisites

I am currently developing an Outlook Add In to synchronize Joinup.ch events to your Outlook calendar. While development is getting more and more streamlined (event with Visual Studio 2010), deployment was and still seems to be difficult.

Unfortunatly, depending on Office Versions you are targeting, prerequisites differ, and even more unfortunate is that the installer which is added to your VSTO solution doesn't seem to check for those prerequisites.

An extensive blog article / walk through can be found here.
Still not the easiest thing on earth, this walk through provides alot of necessary background information.

Good luck !
Denis

Coalescing operator in C#: ??

It's been a long time ! But another hopefully handy link about the maybe-not-so-well-known (At least by my I must admit) coalescing operator in C#.

return myObject ?? new MyObject();

basically returns myObject if it's not null. If it is, a new Instance of MyObject is returned..

http://www.sturmnet.org/blog/2005/06/15/doublequestionmark

Handy, no ?

Ruby On Rails

Just a short one: Until today I tried to get to like Ruby On Rails, and among other (really nice) ideas, RoR tells you in its log files which calls/functions/syntax's are deprecated - and it also shows you a link to an official site listing all deprecated items to the current version. But the link was/is broken. I keep mentioning and advising that RoR seems too young (ie. too many minor and major revisions being pushed out at the moment). But finding that even a deprecation link seems deprecated didn't make me more confident.

Windows 7 IS indeed very cool

After installing every version of Vista, starting at PDC Beta 1, keeping up my hope for improvements, i was very sceptic. There it was, Microsoft's offer of downloading Windows 7 Beta 1. After some blog-researching and reading raving comments about Windows 7, i started to hesitate. I bought a new notebook harddrive, an external drive, none of which enabled me to do an easy backup to recover from a bad problem with Windows 7 (the installation seems non-revertable).
Finally, I was brave, installed Windows 7 on top of my Vista (which is used for Software Development of various kinds) and prayed... I knew, would my installation fail, i'd be left with a unusable partition to be installed with a fresh Vista Installation. And days of development work lost.
It took about four hours, migrated 360'000 settings (of any kind) and booted up nicely ! And: Ever since, I've enjoyed using Windows 7 ! It's responsive, it looks nice and consistent. All my settings, last used files and so on, all still here. And if you ever read the manual (yeah, sometimes even IT people do that) about the new (requiring some time to getting used to) task bar, you'll be impressed. Microsoft seems to have put every thought in assigning many sensible key-combinations with NICE window and task functions.
I didn't thing MS was able to perform so well. Unfortunate that this requires a real disaster like Vista, but good to see that MS can do it and indeed did it ! After .net, this is a MAJOR winner !