May 2005 Entries
One of the big misses for the VB.Net 2005 release was the lack of refactoring support in the editor. C# has this built-in and the vb team, I believe, realised too late that it was a mistake to leave it out of VB.
Well Developer Express Inc., in partnership with Microsoft have now saught to remedy the situation: They have released a free plug-in that works with Beta 2, and it looks to offer a richer refactoring experience than the c# standard fare.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/downloads/2005/tools/refactor/
Of course they want you to register to get the full functionality, and they are going to try and sell you the pro version ($99), that goes without saying, but having good (and free) refactoring support in VB.Net 2005 now brings it back on par with C# as a language of choice...
Today I saw a signpost on a motorway that stated: "This signpost not in use", which is plainly false.
I was trying to think of other things that exist only to deny that they do. Government leaks maybe? Those pages you find in some manuals that say "This page left intentionally blank" which is another bare faced lie. It got me thinking of other signs you see, like "Part-Time Signals" (it's coming to something when not even a traffic light can get a full-time job) or "Oncoming traffic in the middle of the road" (why not have a sign in the other direction saying "Get on your own side of the road NOW!"). It reminded me of the daft error messages we often present, which lead to a google search for some, which in turn took me to http://www.plinko.net/404/ - the 404 research lab which is worth a few minutes browse. Messages and signs are often ambiguous. See Joels rant on the Microsoft Anti-Spyware messagebox for a recent example but I am sure there are many more to be found.
Anyway back to that sign - I worked out what they should have done. They should have left the first sign completely blank then placed a second next to it with the following message: "That sign not in use -->. This sign fully operational" which would have been much clearer.
Is it just me or does the fact the our industry consistently invents new forms of English for no real benefit bug everyone else too? I'm not taking about all jargon, some of it is very useful, reducing a complex idea or description down to a single word or phrase (e.g. it's easier to say "Backup" than "An extra copy of your work, eg documents, pictures etc, saved onto floppy disk/CD/tape, so that if your computer is stolen or breaks down you don't lose everything." ), but who came up with these gems:
- Performant - is it really so hard to say "performs well"?
- Well-formedness - er how about "the xml document is well formed" rather than "the xml document has well-formedness"!
- Outdent - obviously the opposite of indent (according to some versions of Powerpoint)
I have this vision of some committee spending pleasant lazy afternoons in a summer field dreaming up these words. They probably came up with the HTML colour names too. DarkGoldenRod anyone?