VS.NET 2005 – Beta 1 to Beta 2 in 100 minutes

100 minutes – that’s what it took to remove Beta 1 and install Beta 2 on my Fujitsu Laptop (P4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB). I include the full details below :-

Uninstall VS.NET Beta 1 : 10 AM to 10:16 AM (16 mins)
Uninstall MSDN for VS.NET 2005 Beta 1 : 10:16 AM to 10:22 AM (6 mins)
Uninstall VS.NET 2005 Device Emulator : 10:22 AM to 10:23 AM (1 min)
Uninstall VJ# Redistrib Beta 1 : 10:23 AM to 10:24 AM (1 min)
Uninstall .NET SDK Beta 1 : 10:24 AM to 10:27 AM (3 mins)

Install VS.NET Beta 2 : 10:30 AM to 11:23 AM (53 mins)
Install MSDN Beta 2 : 11:24 AM to 11:44 AM (20 mins)

Not bad for something that’s still in Beta

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My first MSDN chat

Yesterday (Apr 27th, Indian time), I hosted my first chat on MSDN India Community Chats.

Title : Visual C++ 2005 – Language Enhancements

Description : Join this chat to know the goals behind C++/CLI, how it’s an improvement over the now-obsolete MC++ syntax, handles & pointers, the new managed array syntax, implicit boxing, templates, generics, deterministic destruction, STL.NET, IJW and higher interop performance.

I couldn’t use the Chat-Host application as it required a moderator to activate me as Chat-Host and unfortunately, two of the moderators were in Singapore for the Asian Region MVP summit and the third one was on the Bangalore highway, so I ended up using the browser chat interface for the chat. I enjoyed the experience and though fewer people turned up than normal (probably reflects how C++/CLI is not very popular in India), those that turned up were seriously interested in the new features for C++ coders.

Maybe I’d do one again in future, though I hope there’d be a moderator to activate me as Chat-Host – keeping track of questions was tough with the browser interface and the Chat-Host app has an easy-to-use interface for answering questions.

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Simulating polymorphic operator overloads with C#

Isn’t that a fancy-sounding title? Jambo Johnson (Mister .NET) thought so too and so we used that as the title for our combo-article on The Code Project :-

• Link to article

Basically, the article shows how you can work-around the operator-overloads must be static limitation in C# to simulate polymorphic behavior for operators.

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Send mail without specifying an SMTP server

Frequently, this question pops up in newsgroups and forums where people ask how they can detect the user’s SMTP server (usually to send a mail from the app without using MAPI). I always reply with my solution of querying the MX record for the target domain and then SMTP-chatting to that server directly – it’s easy to do, it works on any machine and it’s also the fastest way to send email (minimum number of SMTP hops).

I wrote an article demonstrating a class that does exactly this (it derives from an ATL7 class, so you’ll need VC++ 7 or higher)

• Send mail without specifying an SMTP server

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