Daily Archives: February 12, 2005

Thinking about mass market appeal for tablet pcs

Tablet

I don’t use my tablet on an everyday basis and I am hardly a tablet power user. I am a programmer who is curious about the tablet as a way to extend my user’s relationship with their applications.*

However, for mass market ink appeal, I don’t understand why Josh Einstein’s extension to Outlook isn’t getting people more excited. Everyone uses Outlook (please don’t take that literally). The market is already there. This may not be the killer app that will drive people to purchase tablets, but once they are using them, they should be damned glad to have a tool like this.

Eventually people won’t be choosing between tablet and not tablet. They’ll just be buying their mobile pc and one of the common features will be ink. And don’t forget, another will be speech recognition. Believe me, Josh is thinking about this too!

*If you have ever had to do tech support for your applications, you probably know why “relationship” is an appropriate term here. 🙂



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My first .NET article printed on real paper

Just Rambling

I just realized that the box sitting in the corner of my office which came while I was out west was filled with copies of the Mar/April 2005 issue of Code Magazine. EPS is kind enough to send issues to Vermont.NET. (We also get mags from ASPNetPro)

In this issue is my first .NET article that has been printed on paper – not just online. I did have a few FoxPro articles in FoxPro advisor many years ago.

The article is “Creating Debugger Visualizers with Visual Studio 2005” a very cool and underplayed feature in the next version of VS.NET. You may have noticed that I have written quite a few blog posts on this topic in the past so it was fun to formalize it as well as to update it for some of the nice changes that were made as of the November CTP bits.

The article has all samples in both VB and C# because of the big differences between creating attributes, inheriting objects, etc in the two languages. In fact, as far as I know, these are the first VB samples for debugger visualizers in print. Even the MSDN Library still only has C#.

There were two articles written on this previously – Scott Nonneberg wrote one on MSDN Online based on Beta 1, and Morgan Skinner included visualizers in this early article which based on pre-Beta 1 bits.

I was hoping to get a chance to drill into this and a few other of the new debugger display attributes at TechEd but it looks like that won’t be happening. I see only 29 developer specific topics in all of TechEd2005 and it’s not one of them.

Anyway, I hope the article is useful to many. There are also articles in there by Juval Lowy, Deborah Kurata and Dino Esposito as well as a few others. It’s nice to be in such fine company. 🙂

My second in print .NET article is coming very soon – though in a different magazine.

Thanks again Rodman!



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