Archive for January, 2007

Okay Apple has yet again raised the limits of my expectations. They actually released a cellphone with the “original’ name iPhone.

An extract describing what the iPhone stands for:

“iPhone combines three products — a revolutionary mobile phone,
a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet
communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and
searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also
introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch
display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything
with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and
sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely
redefining what you can do on a mobile phone. ”

source: Apple website

I stumbled on an article that said you could now scan barcodes using a webcam. Curious about it went to the website Barcodepedia.com

Indeed you can hold a barcode in front of your webcam and it will show you the result. More important is when there is no result you can add the barcode to the system. try it with barcode 5414306105027. It’s a dutch magazine that I added.

If you are interested in this technology you can download the flashcomponent and use it for free (even commercially) as long as you leave the advertising in the lower bottom. Nice hé

 Download
 

If you want to see what sort of website you can build with technologies like ASP.Net Ajax, .NET 3.0, Linq, DLinq and XLinq then you should check out the following article on Codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/Ajax/MakingGoogleIG.asp

This release of Virtual PC 2007 introduces the following features:

· Support for Windows Vista™ as a host operating system

· Support for Windows Vista™ as a guest operating system

· Support for 64-bit host operating systems

· Support for hardware-assisted virtualization

· Built-in support for network installations

Get it here :

https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/Downloads.aspx?SiteID=288

Every self respecting ADO.Net developer knows the DataSet Watch. It’s that nice add-in that allows you to view the contents of a dataset, datatable during debug.

With the new version of visual studio .net 2005 the concept of visualizers has this function built-in. However the default dataset visualizer is rather well… euhm… “Default” ?

I was reading my Codeproject Newsletter and saw the title “DataSet Watcher 2.0″. Yes indeed it’s an updated version of the vs.net 2003 add-in but then for vs.net 2005. It has got more capabilities than the default viewer.

current features are:

• Dynamically resizing controls and windows
• Full-screen grid popup for viewing very large DataSets.
• XML schema viewing support
• Ability to add/rename/delete tables to/from Dataset
• Ability to hide selected tables when there are a lot of tables
• Ability to add/rename/remove columns to/from tables
• Ability to hide selected columns in tables with many columns
• Changes made in the visualizer are reflected to the original dataset
• Easy deployment
• Row filtering support
• Typed Dataset support
• DataTable support
• Rowstate support

planned features are:

• Ability to create/edit/delete table relations
• DataTable snapshots, allows you to save the state of the table for later use.
• Diff/compare to compare table state with previous snapshots.

Sounds interesting, no?

More information here: http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/DataSet_Watch2.asp