If you disregard the disallowed goal, England’s display was appaulling… completely and utterly outclassed by the Germans… I know who I’ll be supporting from here on in.

These are some of the highest paid people in the country and yet to look at them… what the hell do they get paid to do? Can’t pass… can’t defend… can’t run… the list goes on! But stick them in their clubs and they all play great. What the hell went wrong?

Is it Fabio Cappello? The formation? What???

The only player worthy of a mention is David James who was superb and the one player I think who deserves an honorary raspberry is Wayne Rooney… talk about over hyped… he was pitiful. So many times over the last week or so have I sat and watched as he’s given the ball away… failed to keep up with the game… I know he’s been injured but please… if he’s not up to the job, he shouldn’t be on the pitch.

Overall, I can describe the England performance as woeful… completely and utterly woeful. Before today I would have said they were lucky not to have gone out. Now, they deserve to go out!!!

Welcome home boys!

Well, first up, let me make one thing clear… people rave about Visual Studio and slag off Delphi… mostly it seems because Delphi is old. Well, old it may be, but from the perspective of the visual form designer, Delphi 5 is in my opinion still streets ahead of Visual Studios efforts. This could just be because I’ve not spent years learning all VS’s tricks, but I didn’t spend years learning Delphi’s either. Delphi 5 had some great tools which made laying out forms a snap.

As an example… tab order… when I layout a form, I very rarely stick the controls on it in the order I want the user to tab through them. So, in VS I have to select each control and tweak it’s tabIndex property… in Delphi, I right click the container, select ‘Tab order’ and up pops a dialog that allows me to simply drag and drop control names to set their tab order.

Alignment… why in gods name when I switch from Line layout to Grid layout in VS do I have to close the designer and then re-open it? Delphi can do that on the fly. And best of all, Delphi’s snap facilities at least appear to work well and make it a breeze to layout forms so they look nice.

Control overlap… why oh why when I layout a form in VS do the controls end up overlapping each other when I run the application? Why do things seemingly decide to change size on their own between when I design the form and when I execute it? These two issues alone have caused me numerous headaches and coupled with the appalling snapping in the designer… laying out forms in VS is a nightmare. I’ve never had this problem with Delphi, except when I start using the skinning facilities of the DevExpress controls… then they can change size, but just plain vanilla controls… if they don’t overlap at design time, they don’t overlap at runtime… unlike VS where they don’t overlap at design time, then at run time the controls overlap and render over one another.

Adding multiple instances of the same control… how do I add multiple instances of a control in VS, without having to go back to the toolbox and click it again and without using double click in the toolbox? In Delphi I simply select the component from the palette with Shift pressed and I can add a multitude of instances of that same control.

And that brings me nicely onto a major gripe… straight out of the box, the component set provided by VS is dire. I don’t use string grids very often, but just when I want to, I can’t because there isn’t one available in VS. Overall, the standard toolbox offering in VS is completely eclipsed by the good old Delphi VCL.

So, now I’ve used C# and Visual Studio for more than just a few minutes, do I have anything good to say? Well… not really no. I’m using it through necessity as I don’t want the headache of trying to get Delphi hooked up for writing PowerPoint add-ins. If Delphi provided an easy means of doing this I’d use it, but unfortunately it doesn’t, so I’m stuck with VS.

C# as a language is pretty good and fairly straight forward to switch to from Delphi, but there is one thing I really don’t like, and thats the fact there is no interface definition so it’s not so straight forward to see what your classes provide as you have to trawl through the actual functionality just to find out what methods are provided by the class.

So, that’s about all I have to say about VS and C#. I’m actually developing a product with it which I hope to release soon, so for the foreseeable future at least, I’m going to have to use VS, but given the choice between VS and C# or Delphi and Object Pascal… that requires only a split second to compute. Delphi would win most of the time, unless it’s tricky to achieve the desired result with it… for example, Windows Mobile development… that would be VS and C#.

I do find it quite interesting how most companies have gone down the VS and C# route when they could probably achieve the same results quicker with Delphi.

Disclaimer – These are my thoughts based on the short time I’ve been using VS and C#. As I’ve stated, it would be my weapon of choice for certain projects such as Office add-in and Windows Mobile development or building applications that need to be distributed on Win32 and Win64. But, overall, it’s just not my favourite tool.

Why am I writing anything about a language that isn’t new? Well, being a die hard Delphi fan-chick I thought my first foray into the world of C#, .net and Visual Studio may provide some useful insight to any other Delphi developers looking to move to the dark side

So, the project… right now, I’m preparing a big presentation for work. It’s a training course, and as such I have some things I want to do… these aren’t mind blowingly clever things, but PowerPoint out of the box just can’t do them without some pretty intensive labour. For example… macros at design time… you can’t (or at least I couldn’t find any way of doing it) have macros assigned to shortcut keys that run in the editor… you can’t even access useful events like ‘PresentationOpened’ without resorting to an add-in.

With this information in hand, I figured that I’d implement all the funky features I want in my own custom add-in. If it pans out and I can make it work well (so far it’s going really well all things considered) then I may release it as a low-cost commercial product for other budding presenters.

But enough of that… lets get into my thoughts.

The environment… the first thing is the obvious difference in keystrokes. Somethings that in Delphi require a single keypress require key combinations in Visual Studio. I know that the more I use it, the more conversant I’ll become with the GUI, but for some reason many of the keypress don’t follow logically. Take the Step Into, Step Over and Run buttons… Delphi, it’s F7, F8 and F9 respectively. VS it’s F11, F10 and F5 respectively… hardly a logical progression. In Delphi, F12 toggles between the visual form and it’s code… in VS, it’s F7 for the code and Shift+F7 for the visual form.

My next gripe… double clicking a C# source file in the project explorer in VS opens the editor with some HTML in it??? WTF? Double click means open the file I’m clicking in practically every other context I can think of, so why in VS does it open something else? Even using the ‘Open’ option from the popup menu results in the same thing! I’ll say it again… WTF???

The editor in VS is OK, I find some of it’s auto-formatting stuff a bit annoying because it ends up with code which isn’t in my natural style, but at least the code ends up looking fairly standardised without too much effort from me. The visual form designer seems a bit clunky somehow… I can’t quite put my finger on it, but suffice to say, I don’t think it’s as nice to use as Delphi’s.

So, I’m not overly impressed by the environment.

The language… I’ve said this many times to colleagues… a good software engineer will be able to pickup a new language and be productive with it in a matter of hours. Now not wanting to blow my own trumpet, but all things considered (new environment, first real use of the language, first Office add-in and first Office ribbon customisation) I would say I’ve done pretty well. The guts of my add-in are now complete and I can interact with my presentation in (for the most part) the manner I wanted to. I have a few small gripes but these are of my own making and I plan to fully tackle them later, but for now… I can setup the data I need, I can store information in the presentation and retrieve it… and the whole thing has only taken me about 8 hours (including time design icons). Most of this has been engineering the ribbon customisation.. it’s so picky and the documentation sucks. The help is appalling… for some reason my local help is limited to the Windows Mobile SDK so I have to go hunting for information on-line… great when I’m at home, but shite if I’m sat in an airport terminal with no WiFi. I’d like to say that Delphi’s help is better… in some respects it is… it’s all there, locally, out of the box, but compared to the help that shipped with Delphi 5, both VS and the later versions of Delphi suck when it comes to the help they provide.

Setting up the project… this was a snap… simply create a new project using the Visual Studio Tools for Office and you get the option to create an add-in. Add ribbon customisation as a project component and you’re away… it really is that easy. I’ve dabbled a little bit with the Windows Mobile SDK in the past, and creating an app for my smartphone was just as easy, so big up to Microsoft on that. Whilst I could probably do the same with Delphi, I just know that it would require lots of fiddling and faffing to get anywhere close to a working add-in. Who wants that hassle? Besides, I’m a firm believer in picking the right tool for the job and in this case VS and C# is it.

I was going to say, the one thing I really like about the VS editor is it’s region capabilities… but I just fired up Delphi 2009 and that supports regions… Cool

So what have I concluded from this first foray into the world of C# and VS… well… I’ve said for quite a while that what makes .net development difficult is the size of the libraries, and I stand by that. Some of it gets in the way, like nearly everything being an object… I know in Delphi there are lots of objects, but C# just seems to be a little too OO in places. Overall though, I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made and I’d be pretty happy to get into some more in-depth development with the tool set, but there are somethings I just don’t like. Classes for example… no definitions… just bang it all in the body of the class… it makes finding stuff a pain in the ass as you can’t just skim a header and jump to the implementation of the method like you can in Delphi, regions help but it’s still a nightmare. The use of ‘this’… in some places it seems to be required, but in other it doesn’t… this could just be my n00biness showing through, but when I’m in a class in Delphi I hardly ever use ‘self’.

Overall though, I’m pretty pleased and I hope to have my add-in finished with just a couple more hours of work, and well… I have now at least used it in anger… the question is, is that worthy of a place on my CV?

In short, it appears to be related to Microsoft’s SmartScreen filter, but for more information head on over to my wiki and check out the write up of the guys research.

The tests were done with ACFW Version 0.82 and WordPress 3.0 (Beta 1).

The site listed as the referrer is www dot submitter software dot com… they succeeded in posting 5 comments, all punting a piece of software to help drive traffic to your site by abusing shareware software sites and their PAD files… whatever they are. The software in question is actually produced by a another company, so I can only assume that submitter software is an affiliate looking to increase their earnings… maybe I should drop the software house a mail I thought… let them know about the unscrupulous tactics employed by people pushing their products… then when I looked at the products produced by this company I figured they’d probably applaud.

Of course, there could be a perfectly legitimate reason why my site was being spammed… maybe the site owner purchased advertising services from the company they make a mention of on their site and they had no clue what they would do to increase their traffic. So… Rebekah Hudson of 177 Captain HM Shreve Blvd, Shreveport, Louisiana (with the email address kphudson@comcast.net), I’d love to hear how you are involved with submitter software dot com (other than being the registrant).

So, how to stop this kind of crap if your site gets blitzed by this sorted of traffic… well, it’s actually quite simple if you can modify the .htaccess files and your server has mod_rewrite enabled. Google the search string +”block” +”referrer” +”apache” and you’ll get quite a lot of pages that provide details of how to block visitors based on referrers.

Cast on 58 stitches

* K2, P2 to end (last two stitches should be K)
* P2, K2 to end (last two stitches should be P)

This sets the pattern.  Continue for another 74 rows.

Knit 2 rows

* P2, K2 to end (last two stitches should be P)
* K2, P2 to end (last two stitches should be K)

This sets the pattern.  Continue for another 8 rows.

Cast off in pattern.

To complete, you need to sew up the sock along the starting and side edges. Then, find some cord (I knitted one with my french knitter and attached a couple of bobbles by knitting into the cord) pop the cord in place, fold the sock over on the 2 knit rows and then sew up the final edge to make the cord tube. This was knitted with Palette yarns 019/219 series yarn on 2.25mm/13 gauge needles. If you want a plainer sock, you could use something like the 018/219 series from Palette.

Here’s a piccie of my finished sock… the picture has been doctored to remove the background, but I’m sure you’ll get the idea.

The scarf is very straight forward…

Cast on 8 sts
Continue in garter stitch for 266 rows
Cast off

If memory serves, I knitted this on 4mm needles using both the red and white wool (Palette yarns 018/219 series). The tassles are simple loops tied on through the stitches. Depending on how you want your sackboy to look, you can adjust the length… as you can see from the photo, I went for the contemporary look so I made the scarf nice and long.

The hat is also fairly straight forward. This time I knitted with Palette yarns 018/219 series on 2.25mm/13 gauge needles using the following pattern:-

Cast on 94 stitches (thumb method)

* K2P2 x 23, K2
* P2k2 x 23, P2
* Sets pattern for first 6 rows

Continue in STST.  If required, change colour to seperate ribbed band.

STST for 6 rows.
  If you are adding a letter, then start it on the next
  row (should be a knit row) and work as required.
STST for a further 6 rows

Now, on each knit row, work the first and last 10 stitches like this:-

* K2 K2Tog K2 K2Tog K2

Continue until there are 10 stitches, then on the next knit row:-

* K2Tog to end

Break yarn, tie off stitches.

Make a pompom, sew up the hat and there you have it

It’s a PDF, so simply download it, print it out and get busy knitting