Slapout Tech

Here are some interesting tech quotes I ran across this last week. “Past you is always the worst enemy of any programmer.” –John Siracuse, Accidential Tech Podcast, Episode 156 “Good design makes users more effective” –About Face, 4th ed. Page 16 “As funny as you might see it, successful software is a nice and effective UX on top of some magical black box” –Dino Esposito, MSDN Magazine, February 2016

When you’re working on a Visual Studio extension, VS let’s you test it in an “Experimental Instance” of Visual Studio. This experimental instance has its own settings in the registry. This means that it can have it’s own theme as well. Since I have my main instance of Visual Studio set to to the Dark Theme, I like to set the experimental instance to the Light Theme. This way I can tell at a glance which one is which.

The other day a coworker was getting a strange error in Visual Studio: Statement is not valid inside a method/multiline lambda.  The code causing the problem looked this this: Public Function GetSupplyList() As IEnumerable(Of SupplyItemDto) Implements IReadData.GetSupplyList It took us a minute to realize that in Visual Basic.NET the Implements on a function has to be on the same line as the function. You can also use a line continuation character ("_") to fix the issue. Of course, this is the exact opposite of  Implements on a class where the Implements keyword has to be on the next line or you'll get "End of statement expected".

For a while, my MacBook Pro had been running really slow. Programs would take a long time to start up and I couldn’t figure out why. Googling around I found people saying to check the memory, CPU usage and hard drive space. I had plenty of hard drive space available and Activity Monitor (Mac’s version of the Task Manager) indicated no problems with memory pressure or CPU cycles.    Finally one day l was Googling the problem again and someone said to check the disk permissions. So I went into the Disk Utility, selected my hard drive and clicked on Verify Disk Permissions . After running for a while (~20 minutes) the system showed several permission errors. I ran the Repair Disk Permissions option. Then I rebooted and now my Macbook Pro is running much faster. So if you’re having problems with your Mac and you know your have plenty of memory, hard drive space and no CPU problems, check your disk permissions. 

Last year I complained about Microsoft removing color from Visual Studio 2012. I've recently started using Visual Studio 2013 and was pleasantly surprised to find that color had been restored to the icons. Thank you Microsoft for listening to your users! Now, if we could just get Apple to put some color back in iTunes...

The UPPERCASE MENUS in Visual Studio 2012 don't really bother me like they seem to bother everyone else . What gets to me is the lack of color. Every time I try to click the Save icon I end up clicking the Open File icon. Without color, they just look too much alike:  For comparison, here's what they looked like in VS 2010:

I've been working with PowerBuilder for close to a decade now. In that time I've seen PB developers create some screens that, while they functioned properly, could have been ….. a little nicer looking.  In this blog post I briefly go over a few things that, IMHO, can help you create better looking PowerBuilder apps. I plan on writing a series of blog posts that expand on each of these items. I'll update this post with links to the other posts as they become available.  Standard disclaimer: I'm not a graphics designer nor do I play one on TV. Take what I say with a grain of salt.  Color Probably the simplest thing you can do to make a PowerBuilder application look better is to add a bit of color. Just don't overdo it. You want to make the screen visually appealing without it becoming a distraction.  Icons The second thing you can do to make your PB apps look better is to add some icons. Although PowerBuilder comes with several ...