Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I mentioned awhile ago that there wasn’t much good music that I’d discovered recently, but I just came across two newer albums that I thought I would mention:

• Buckcherry - 15
• Particle - Transformation for the People (live)

“15″ is the first album from Buckcherry since they broke up for awhile, but are now back in the swing of things. The album is pretty damn good, I listened to it straight through at work today (on headphones). I was at a bachelor party this weekend (which is another story altogether) and the song “Crazy Bitch” was played several times; in spite of its harsh lyrics, it’s a good party song.

“Transformations for the People” isn’t a new album from Particle, but it’s a DVD recording of a live show. There are several songs from their “Launchpad” album, and some new ones as well. My favorite is Triple Threat, which is a 25 minute jam, I love listening to it while I’m working, it’s awesome. Particle is going to be in Minneapolis on November 2nd, I’m definitely going.

So there you have it, these are my picks for July

Ok, so it turns out to be very easy to localize a form in Visual Studio.  As David mentioned in the comments on my previous post, all you need to do is set the Localizable property to true, and the VS designer will generate code to pull the strings from a resource file.

Did that, and FxCop passed all the default rules, whoo hoo!

One thing that can be counterintuitive about generics is the way it kind of “breaks” inheritance.

For example, suppose you have the following two lists:

List < string > stringList = new List < string >();
List < object > objectList;

You might expect to be able to cast stringList to objectList like so:

objectList = (List < object > )stringList;

Because, after all, a string inherits from object, so this shouldn’t be a problem, but it actually is.

When you make a List < string > instance, you’re inheriting from List < T >. Similarly, when you declare objectList as List < object > , you’re again inheriting from List < T >. What results from this is that the types of these two lists (List < string > and List < object >) are actually siblings in the inheritance hierarchy, both having a parent of List.

While inheritance is powerful, it’s not incestuous Don’t try to mix siblings

I’ve been trying to make this WinForms app that I have pass all the default FxCop rules.  The last one that I’m stuck on is reading all my string literals from a resource file so that I can switch languages easily.  This has turned out to be a pain in the ass.

It’s annoying to have to set every label’s text, every menu item drop down, etc. with a string from a resource file.  I haven’t given it a whole lot of thought yet, but theres gotta be an easier way to do that.

Also, do I have to have a bunch of blank items on my form while I’m in design mode?  If I blank out all the strings on my forms, won’t that still generate the following code in the designer.cs file?

label1.Text = “”;

Is FxCop smart enough to leave that alone, or will it still bark at me about a non-localized string?

I check it out and report back

I decided a couple of days ago that I want to compete (finish) a triathlon. So I’ve set a goal to do at least one triathlon next spring/summer. I’d like to do it early, sometime in May, so that if I like it I can do at least one more that summer.

I found a list of triathlons in Minnesota that I can select from. I’m going to pick a shorter one to try at first. The one that looked good was one in White Bear lake, with a 600 yard swim, 13 mile bike, and 3.1 mile run. When I go running I usually do about 3 miles, so I thought that was a good length to start with.

I was at Lifetime last night for my first gym visit since deciding to do a triathlon. Swimming is effen hard. I have a lot of work to do.

I have to laugh as I write this. I’m sitting in a local Dunn Bros. coffee shop, doing some studying before my certification test later this morning. Dunn Bros has replaced Caribou as my favorite coffee shop because of the free Wifi they’ve got at most locations.

As I sit here and study, there is a woman sitting across from me with one of those nice Apple wide screen laptops. The problem is, she can’t get connected to the Wifi for the life of her! She asked me if I was connected, and I said “yeah, it just picked it right up.” She’s been moving around the coffee shop trying to find a better signal or something, it’s funny I guess sometimes an Apple doesn’t “just work.” It’s even more humorous because it’s a completely unsecured wireless network, something that you should be able to connect to by accident
UPDATE: The woman asked the staff for some help, so a cashier and a manager both came out to hack on her laptop to try and troubleshoot, I wish I had a camera

I just got Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 installed, no problems during the install, as usual. I can’t recall the last time I had any issues installing Firefox, its really seamless. This also marks the first version of Firefox that I’m not going to install a theme for. The default look has been improved with some slight tweaks. The effects are a little nicer, some nicer shadowing, etc. all minor things but they come together really nicely.

The downside is that none of my extensions survived the upgrade, probably only because they weren’t marked as compatible with future versions, I’m sure they WILL work as soon as they are tagged that way by the publishers.

You can download the Beta here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

UPDATE: Ok, the built-in spell checker is awesome. It underlines the misspelled words in red, right click on the word to see the suggested spellings, sweet. You can load custom dictionaries too, so other languages are supported.

One thing that has come to annoy me is when a bug is found and a developer does some work and then wants the bug retested. Inevitably (and I’m more guilty than most) the developer will say something like “Okay, try it again, it should work now.” Notice the use of the word “should”. That word just reeks of indecisiveness. Should it work? Or does it work? If you fixed it, then it just works. If you’re not sure, then do what needs to be done to make sure.

I do this so often, for some reason it just sounds very comfortable to say, but I’ve been trying to catch myself before I say it or write it in an email now.

Erin and I were heading to her parents’ cabin in northern Minnesota for the long weekend on Friday night, when we hit a deer on Hwy 371, just north of Little Falls, where 10 and 371 split apart. I hit the deer on the passenger side fender and the grill area, so the damage could have been way worse. And luckily, Erin’s parents just happened to be about 5 miles behind us on the road, so when we called them, we just had them pull over and pick us up so we could continue on to the cabin.

The car is still in Little Falls getting worked on, I just paid the car off in March, but thankfully I kept the comprehensive insurance so I’ll just have to pay the $500 deductible instead of the whole bill.

Since Erin had the rest of the week off of work, our friends Becky and Rett graciously let us borrow their car for a couple days so Erin could have a car during the day. (Thanks!)
All in all, for hitting a deer it was actually rather painless (for us, not the deer).