Jomo Fisher has put together a list of steps to take when you want to use Visual Studio 2005 to continue to maintain your .NET 1.x applications under the .NET 1.x Framework.

What’s the best way to implement the following semantic (feel free to change the signature)?

bool ConvertFromStringToT<T>(string in, ref T out) {…}

I’d like to be able to call it like so:

int x = 452;
double y = 77.7;

ConvertFromStringToT(“123”, ref x); // x is now 123
ConvertFromStringToT(“abc”, ref y); // y remains 77.7

I came up with a solution that relies more than I’d like on run-time behavior rather than compile-time behavior, which is why I’m asking.

If you read the ReadMe.htm from the Visual Studio 2005 setup, you’ll see a detailed list of up to 23 things to uninstall in the right order (plus 2 notes if you have trouble).

To solve this problem, Dan Fernandez posts about a VS05 uninstall tool that worked wonderfully for me.

Soma says it all.

As MS releases new frameworks, folks always ask “Does MS use this?” Of course, MS has tons of existing apps that would be silly to rewrite, but when we build new stuff, we generally use the latest frameworks that make sense.

Towards that end, John Gosman continues his history of Expression Interactive Designer aka Sparkle, mentioning the percentage of managed code in  (100%) and the number of P/Invoke calls (1 — HtmlHelp) to get what is probably the most amazing app I’ve seen in years, whether managed or not.

This is an interesting, and free, service that you hook your app up to and when it throws an exception, it’ll log it w/ the service so that you can track it from afar.

These kinds of services are exactly what web services are wonderful for. Does anyone know of any other such services? I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t actually know, but does MS provide one in this space or other developer-oriented web services for other than development?

I love CleanMgr.exe's ability to clean out my temp folder, my internet cache and my recycle bin in one swell foop, but that damn "Compress Old Files" option drives me crazy! Luckily, Scott Hanselman got a .reg file from Shawn Van Ness and now I don't have to put up with that option. Wahoo!

Not too far behind Indigo and Avalon's beta 1, WinFS posts their own beta 1 (although Tom Rizzo, Director in SQL marketing says it may be a tad early). Since their "endgame" is "that WinFS will be in beta when Windows Vista ships," so long as they don't move past beta to RC or RTM (or back to alpha), they've hit it. Congrats! : )