Perhaps I am a bit bias because I work at a software company and we sale, software.  But I really don't believe in the "Open Source" movement(software should be open source and free).  I believe in owning the source if I buy a product I should own that revisions source, I should not be dependent upon a specific company for bug fixes. There are Intellectual property right issues with this, but i digress.  I see today that the European Commission in its ill informed and infinite wisdom has announced Open Source (meaning free software.) solutions could provide savings in the long term.(Open source gets European boost)  Being a USA hard core capitalist, I don't get it.  How will open source compete and improve over time what will propel them to the next level?  How will they decide the direction of their "Product"?  From my observation these projects add features based on the whim of their developers.   In the world were software costs money we have customers, typically you want to keep these customers so you listen to them, help make their lives better so you can sale more to them and hopefully others.  It's why we push the cutting edge when we see fit and wait in the back ground while the industry settles on standards.  Its why software companies invest Millions in design and usability research.  Were are the "Open Source" customers?  Even if a "Open Source" project is successful what keeps it together(like after the lead developer, develops a life)?  How would any Company or Government agency keep up with all the forks and what works together on which platform(My only answer, consultants.  And they typically are not cheap).

After long last Microsoft has finally released SQL 2005 Compact Edition (formerly known as SQL Mobile)download link.  The question to be answered is how it took so long to allow support outside of the mobile platform and why it took Microsoft so long to wake up and think this might be a good idea?  When I was looking for a light weight desktop Database I only saw one good prospect SQLite (which also had an update January 9).  At any rate its nice Microsoft has something better then Access DB  to offer Client side programmers.  If you want to compare SQLITE and SQL 2005 Compact Edition.  Also I have found a nice ADO.NET 2.0 data adapter for SQLITE at System.Data.SQLite.  Overall SQLite has been a nice little database that we haven't had any real issues with, unlike our Access db.

Rick Strahl was complaining about component vendors poor selling techniques and I agree. His rant was inspired by Kevin Dente's post How NOT to sell software (Kevin got free license out of his post, oh the power of public forums.) 

I am also getting sick and tired of the licenses hoops we have jump through in order to install third party components on our DEV systems and the crap it entail to get them working on a build system.  I can't count the number of bugs filed from some novel approach to license control screwing up an end build.

As it turns out, If you define and implement your whole class/structure in a .h file a consumer needs to mark it #pragma unmanaged.  If you don't delete will get confused and issue the errors i received from my earlier post.

Would you like to just get some work done in VC++ 2005 or 2007?  Then rename or delete the following file:
<VS root path>\VC\vcpackages\feacp.dll

Beware class view(I don't use it my project is to large) will no longer work.  And c++ winforms will not work.  I have Visual Assist X and CodeRush/Refactor! so i still have all that Intellisense offers only better!

With one little mistake comes a nasty memory leak.  We found this in some of the code i wrote

CMenu* CLMI::GetLenderMenu(void)
{
    //test if lender should show up if not
    if ( !ShowLender() )
        return NULL;

    CMenu* clm = new CMenu();......

Sadly clm was never reclaimed, and MFC redraws the Main menu every time you blink so can you say bad :(

This is interesting, I am moving a vc++ project to VS 2005.  When i run it in debug mode i receive this error:

---------------------------
Microsoft Visual C++ Debug Library
---------------------------
Debug Assertion Failed!

Program: c:\Dev\Point\PointMain\Debug\Winpoint.exe
File: dbgdel.cpp
Line: 52

Expression: _BLOCK_TYPE_IS_VALID(pHead->nBlockUse)

For information on how your program can cause an assertion
failure, see the Visual C++ documentation on asserts.

    void RemoveIt(CDlgAncItem* item)
    {
        if (item)
        {
            RemoveIt(item->next);
            delete(item);
        }
    }

Looks like its time to start playing with Orcas.  After reading this month's CTP download details there finally looks to be some meat.

Download the CTP VPC image at:

Microsoft Pre-release Software Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" - January 2007 Community Technology Preview (CTP)

Since I am still working on my blog about what I did for my winter break I thought I would share a couple items that I noticed in this morning.

Alfred Thompson's Blog talks about an issue I think of whenever I hear Spec documentation is being designed without customer involvement. And I found Scott Gu's announcement that the new Yahoo Messenger is build with WPF and .net rather interesting.

I picked up this issue from Mike Walker blog  where he reports that the US Secret Service is calling the ATM system unsafe after reading this post and the original report from Bob Sullivan's blog.  It Basically amounts the the fact that researchers that work for an Israeli computer security company have released a report in how the ATM network can be compromised in order to reveal PIN numbers.  ATM PIN's are essentially decrypted and encrypted on every network hop so if one machine is compromised it becomes simple to crack the PIN's encryption. And apparently this is some thing the Russian Mob is very interested in.  The Israely company release this report after being dismayed with the American Banks lack of action(Banks were informed of this security flaw in the ATM protocol 2 months before the release of the report.)