A cold day in hell

Yes, it has indeed arrived and I am actually posting again.  I really need to force myself to write more often.  I am finally working on getting my last changes to the C/Side utils rolled up and published.  my target date at this point is 2/12/11.  Lately (and by that I mean the past 2 months) it has been difficult to force myself to work on my editor project.  I suppose that is the problem, that I feel as though I have to force myself.  I'm finding it difficult to muster the enthusiasm to work on my own projects outside of work after putting in a day coding AT work.  This must be kind of what it feels like to be a professional writer.  Sometimes you just have to force yourself to put pen to page.  Last night I modified my Navision object parser library to allow writing out of objects without ID numbers attached to variables and methods.

Continuing to play by the C/Side

I made more changes to my C/Side utilities last night.  Decided to change the FieldValue from a struct to a class.  I think I shall leave the remaining Field and Filter structs as is since neither of these should change once they are created.  Added lazy loading logic to the Record class, and by extension it's linked FieldValue class objects.

I am going to finish up my changes to the C/Side wrapper this week so I can focus on my parser and editor projects this weekend.  Been watching too much tv and coding too little, but what else is new.  For those not aware, I have a Navision parser project that I've been working off and on for the last 4 years.  I started putting a lot of effort into finishing the project this year and I hope to get it wrapped up and released in 2011.  This parser will be open sourced just like the C/Side utils.  I am also working on an alternative editor to the classic C/Side one that everyone is used to.  It turns out building an editor is a LOT of work so I doubt I will be releasing it terribly soon, but it will be worth the wait when I get it released.  The editor will not be open source but there will be a free version.

C/Side integration utilties Alpha released

I just posted the first release of my C/Side Integration Utilities project.  I hope it is well received and that the community contributes on this project.  It took me a few weeks to hammer out as well as a bit of help.  I can't thank Kamil Sacek enough for his help.  Perhaps I will post it to SourceForge as well.  I think in the future I would like to provide some wrapper classes for accessing a client instance as an ADO.Net data source.

Let Microsoft assist you in poor browser security

"Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant" is a nice pretty name for a nasty underhanded little trick by Microsoft. They recently snuck a firefox extension into one of their updates that installs without telling you and then makes itself impossible to uninstall. Impossible that is, unless you make a quick hack. I found nice simple instructions on the WyDay site explaining how to manually uninstall this little gem. "Assistant" is a nice name for a rather bad piece of software. This "Assistant" assists Microsoft in installing software into your computer via the firefox browser without telling you about it. It's to make the "click-once" technology work in Firefox, which would be fine if they actually explained what they were doing and asked the user if they wished to install it. It seems like every time I start to believe that Microsoft is getting their act together, they go and do something despicable like this.