Daily Archives: July 29, 2004

Toshiba Tablet and Acer Tablet

Tablet

Well – now I have a Toshiba M200 and will soon ahve to give up my sweet little baby AcerC110. :'( I am actually fantasizing about asking my client if they want the Toshiba in exchange. But maybe I won’t. I definitely don’t have the same emotional draw to the Toshiba. Though it’s a way faster processor, longer battery life, larger screen and full size keyboard, it just doesn’t seem as – all I can think of is “tight” – as the Acer. I can’t describe it. It’s not because the Acer is more compact. The only think I can really gripe about is the touchpad. It stinks. It lags all of the time. I ahve asked around and others have the same problem. The model I got (M200) doesn’t come with a DVD player and the one I have for the Acer (which I was hoping to trade for the extra battery I bought) has a firewire connection. But alas, the Toshiba doesn’t have firewire (and no there is no such thing as a firewire to USB adapter – don’t think I haven’t spent 2+ hours googling for signs of one). It seems to start up 100% of the time in portrait mode, even when you are in keyboard mode.

But it’s much faster, much better battery life, bigger screen and only 1.1 lbs heavier. And it’s silver – ooh aah. I’m sure when I get used to it I’ll be cooing about it as well. I have to say though, in 20 or so years of computing, I have never talked about a computer the way I do about the Acer. What on earth *is* it about that tablet???

That’s all I can say about it at this point because I had to stop playing with it and do some other type of work.

Debugging Ian

dotNET

Since Ian Griffiths doesn’t have comments, I just wanted to make sure I got his attention with that title.

Do you know that VB.NET doesn’t have Data Breakpoints either? And that it won’t in Whidbey, either? (Hmmm that C# book I received today in the mail looks tempting…)

I’m sure many many programmers who came to .NET from VB6 spent hours trying to get it to work in VB.Net. This was the other lost debugging function that I refer to when I say there were two things that we lost when coming to VB.NET. Don’t ask Kathleen Dollard about Data BreakPoints. ANd if you must, be prepared to run….fast! (she misses them too!)

update  okay I was taking it personally, but it’s NOT a VB thing. … I tried every single language option in this drop down and every one gave me the message “[language choice] does not support data breakpoints“. (except when I selected Unknown) I wonder where you can use DataBreak points. As Paul Vick says in the comments…it just can’t be done in managed code because of garbage colletion. So this is just a big tease! 🙂

A C# Primer for Aspiring Programmers

Community Cheerleading

I suppose hearing Jeff Richter give me a ribbing over the course of 3 days about using VB as my primary language for developing in .NET, was what inspired Charles Petzold to choose this, of all of his books, to send me as a thank you: “Programming in the Key of C#: A Primer for Aspiring Programmers”. Certainly I can learn a thing or two from it (and certainly Richter is agreeing vigourously!)

What I look forward to most with this book is Charles’ anectodes on the history of software development that is promised in the book description.

Oh, okay and to learning C# from the ground up!