GIMP 2.8 Features

This post over at Gimpusers.com outlines some of the interesting things coming up in the 2.8 release.

Single window......praise be!!

Microsoft Developing Silverlight For Linux.

In a story that might add to the recent (and in my view unrequired) arguments within the Linux community over the inclusion/use of Mono based software and development tools, it would seem that Microsoft are now porting Silverlight (thier Flash alternative) to Linux.

The full details of the story can be read at the link above but Microsoft are basically working with Intel to port Silverlight to the Moblin platform (Intels netbook desktop/distro).

All of this seems fine until you take a step back and think "Why did they not use Moonlight, the native Linux port developed by the Mono guys"?

Hmmm..... is this the start of what everyone expected? Perhaps not but it's still a worrying sign.

London Stock Exchange Migration.

This article from Computerworld covers further developments from the LSE on the migration from a .Net based platform to a Linux/Unix/Oracle based system.

Apparently they liked it so much they brought the company. The full details are in the article,

Verity Stob - Abigail's Windows 7 Party

After what has been a very long week in one way or another (both at work and at home) Vertiy's latest aritcle had me in stiches.

I guess that could be another sign that I am slip sliding my way to middle age but I did and still do find Abigails party an excellent play. The fact that the rather excellent Verity has made it a basis for her Windows 7 Launch Party piece was perfect.

Can for the life of me imagine where Microsoft got the idea for a launch party drive from!

A Sensible Linux Bot Opinion

After lots of typical IT reporting this is a sensible opinion on the Linux Bot story.

RIP VSJ (Printed Version)

After a number of years (about 8 I think !) VSJ has anouched its last printed version.

It's a shame as it was in my opinion a well written Journal. I will miss it dropping through the door.

Microsoft Still Like To Spread FUD!

I just read this article in which Microsoft's training material for a PC selling chain's staff state that Linux apparently limits a PC's

The full details appear to have been posted here.

I find this at first amusing (as the stuff that they state does not work, well, does!) but then I start to get annoyed that they are still trying to convince people using FUD rather than dragging their dated, fat, slow and technically inferior product up to date.

NDesk.Options C# Command Args Parser.

I have a small application that I am working on that can receive args passed it's Main() method. While looking for some nicer code than I could conjurer up I found NDesk Options a C# based parser written by Jonathan Pryor which makes parsing args a very easy task.

It has a Git repository which I cloned which includes documentation. It seems a simple but powerful solution to a boring problem.

Howto open a Visual Studio file from an application into a running Visual Studio instance.

I have a little utility application that I have been working on for some time which is used to edit our applications .config files (note these are essentially the <appSettings> section from our web.config wrapped into client specific files). For a while I was struggling to solve what I thought was a simple issue. That was that I wanted to set the application as the default tool to open the .config files with within Visual Studio (right click on a file and Open With, this will let you set a tool to open the file with and even set it as the default).

The problem started when I next went to open the default web.config and it obviously tried to load it via my application (which does not handle the default web.config).

I amended the Main() method of my application to check for the file name (crude but it works) and only continue loading the file passed via the command line arguments if it matched a set patten. That worked..... kind of!!

The trouble was when ever the application came across a file it did not want to handle it would, as designed, open the file in Visual Studio. However, rather than in the running instance of Visual Studio it always opened a new instance of the application.

After much digging about and Spy'ing I discovered that you have to pass the /EDIT parameter to DEVENV to have the file open in a running instance. So DEVENV /EDIT $FileName is the pattern.