Scott Hanselman

Congrats to Arild for releasing AhknSVN RC2. If you're looking to use Subversion within Visual Studio, perhaps at work or perhaps you're working on an Open Source project at SourceForge, this is the tool for you.

NOTE: If you do use TortoiseSVN at the same time as Ankh, do note that they are linked to Subversion 1.4, so they will upgrade your local SVN working copies. Make sure you upgrade both at the same time.

To be clear:

IMPORTANT NOTE: TortoiseSVN 1.4.0-RC1 is linked with the Subversion 1.4.0-RC4 libraries. Due to various improvements made to the working copy library, the working copy format has changed. Using TortoiseSVN 1.4.0-rc1 on any working copy created by previous versions of Subversion/TSVN will TRANSPARENTLY upgrade your working copy, which means that production-ready versions of Subversion/TSVN (1.3.x and earlier) will no longer be able to read it! Please be careful, if you use other Subversion clients (eg. the 1.3.x command line client), not to use the TortoiseSVN 1.4.x release candidate on a production working copy.

• Download AnkhSVN 1.0.0.2578 here
• Download TortoiseSVN 1.4.0 RC1 here (not required to use Ankh, but DO get it if you already have a 1.3 version of Tortoise on your system)

As with all things, YMMV and back up your life.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: If you get "Unable to retrieve folder information from the server" when using VS2003 in a Web Project, you may need to go into your TortoiseSVN settings and set "use ASP.NET Hack" which tells Tortoise to use folders name "_svn" to store details rather than folders named ".svn".

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My twenty-ninth Podcast is up. This episode is about disruptive technologies like Ruby on Rails, the rise of dynamic languages and what it means to the average .NET developer.

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

This show was FULL of links, so here they are again. They are also always on the show site. Do also remember the archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature.

Links from the Show

BLINQ (heg)		ARSTechnica on BLINQ (hej)		Castle (hen)
LINQ (heh)		Ruby on Rails (hel)		ActiveRecord (hem)
C# 3.0 (hei)		FTP Online Tutorial on BLINQ (hek)

NEW COUPON CODE EXCLUSIVELY FOR HANSELMINUTES LISTENERS: The folks at XCeed are giving Hanselminutes listeners that is Coupon Code "hm-20-20." It'll work on their online shop or over the phone. This is an amazing deal, and I encourage you to check our their stuff. The coupon is good for 20% off any component or suite, with or without subscription, for 1 developer all the way up to a site license.

Our sponsors are XCeed, CodeSmith Tools, PeterBlum and the .NET Dev Journal. There's a $100 off CodeSmith coupon for Hanselminutes listeners - it's coupon code HM100. Spread the word, now's the time to buy.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

• The basic MP3 feed is here, and the iPod friendly one is here. There's a number of other ways you can get it (streaming, straight download, etc) that are all up on the site just below the fold. I use iTunes, myself, to listen to most podcasts, but I also use FeedDemon and it's built in support.
  • Some other clients are Doppler (also suppose Windows CE), FireAnt, Nimiq, and PrimeTime Podcast.
• Note that for now, because of bandwidth constraints, the feeds always have just the current show. If you want to get an old show (and because many Podcasting Clients aren't smart enough to not download the file more than once) you can always find them at http://www.hanselminutes.com.
• I have, and will, also include the enclosures to this feed you're reading, so if you're already subscribed to ComputerZen and you're not interested in cluttering your life with another feed, you have the choice to get the 'cast as well.
• If there's a topic you'd like to hear, perhaps one that is better spoken than presented on a blog, or a great tool you can't live without, contact me and I'll get it in the queue!

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Had an interesting back and forth with Tom Wayson today. He wanted to be able to "modify the default behavior of DateTime.ToString()."

So, pushing aside issues of localization and the questions of "why would you want to do that?" let's look at the problem.

He has an intranet application and doesn't need to localize it. He wants to 'enforce' a specific date/time format and wants to avoid writing DateTime.Now.ToString("MM/dd/yy HH:mm:ss") everytime. He also doesn't want to explicitly set the system-wide settings in Control Panel | Regional Settings.

He noted that the output of DateTime.Now.ToString on a standard en-us machine in the states gave this output:

8/15/2006 3:27:27 PM

It looks like the output of ToString is the combination of the DateTimeFormatInfo.ShortDatePattern and DateTimeFormatInfo.ShortTimePattern. So, he: 

But the output was still 12 hour time:

8/15/06 3:28:34 PM

Ah...a little Reflectoring shows us that the default format string for System.DateTime is "G" as in System.DateTime.ToString("G") where G is one of the presets.

From PowerShell we see:

PS>C:\Documents and Settings\shanselm\Desktop
[DateTime]::Now.ToString("g")
8/15/2006 3:28 PM
PS>C:\Documents and Settings\shanselm\Desktop
[DateTime]::Now.ToString("G")
8/15/2006 3:28:02 PM
PS>C:\Documents and Settings\shanselm\Desktop
[DateTime]::Now.ToString()
8/15/2006 3:28:15 PM

So we add:

And gets the output he expects, indicating that "G" is the combination of a ShortDate and a LongTime.

8/15/2006 15:28:57

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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WARNING: This post has nothing technical going on. Maybe a little because of the MP4 compressed video, but that's a stretch at best. If you don't have young kids, or perhaps you hate pets and/or small children, ignore this post.

My good friend Eli told me after the birth of his lovely young daughter:

Kids go through three phases, Plant, Pet, Person. My daughter (A month old at this point) is currently a Plant. We feed her, she water us, and she sits for long periods. Z is now in the Pet stage. He'll follow you anywhere and smiles when he sees you.

God help us when they become People. Because with People come Opinions.

Z is eight and a half months old and he's unstoppable. He's a biscuit away from walking and he roams the house ruling with an iron, if slightly moist, fist. This is an obnoxiously long video with no audio of my pride and joy roaming the house.

A few notes and disclaimers. The kitchen is being remodelled so that's why we have no countertops. Z is in the "decoy drawer" that I've setup for him that includes old remote controls and random safe stuff for him to 'discover.'

This video is an MP4. If you have trouble viewing it, try Quicktime, a newer Windows Media Player, or the amazing-give-it-to-your-famly VLC Player.

File Attachment: ZMischief.mp4 (5882 KB)

We'll be back in tech tommorow.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Microsoft just released Windows Live Writer, an offline blogging editor tool.

It's beta, so there's a few bugs.

• The first glaring one is that if you have a lot of categories on your blog, the categories dropdown goes forever and continues down past the toolbar.
• Another irritating one is that only GIF and JPG show up in the file types list when adding an image to a post - um, PNG?
• There's also no syntax highlighting or auto-formatting for the HTML view.

All in all, it looks a AWFUL lot like BlogJet, my preferred blog editor, down to the properties tab. The irony is, of course, that all these editors basically use the same DHTML Editing stuff built into IE or some flavor of it, so the actual editing experience will feel much the same.

Here's a list of other VERY good blog editors that I've used personally. I posted about a few last year as well, but John Forsythe has the complete list of ones that work well with DasBlog.

• Zoundry is also a great blog writer that supports DasBlog swimmingly.
• Rocketpost is nice, clean and lightweight and has some nice Photo effects.
• WB Editor has a fresh and clean interface, but a smallish text editing area at low resolutions.

One important thing to note about Windows Live Writer (and Zoundry as well) is the support for RSD - Really Simple Discovery. Omar added this to the current source tree of DasBlog recently. This will be in DasBlog 1.9, but, as always, you can compile the source yourself and get it now.

RSD worked great during the setup phase with Windows Live Writer as seen in the screenshots below. The writer detected DasBlog's capabilities and API support and configured itself without asking me a single technical question. Nice.

Windows Live Writer also has an SDK for extending the application.

Here's my final thought - why would a Product Group that offers a blogging editor and has their own blog, ask users to go to an MSN Group to offer feedback?  Isn't that kind of not-bloggy?  Remember earlier in your post where it was said blogging was a two-way medium?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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