Idle Musings of a Delphi Junkie

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Noun
Definition: The fear of long words
Useage: Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is longer than antidisestablishmentarianism

There is something about the irony of this word's definition that really amuses me. I should get out more. :-)

While working with Visual Studio.NET 2003 today, I wanted to change the location of a C# project. Simple, me thinks. I'll just save the .csproj in it's new location. Alas, it seems like VS.NET would be too confused by this, as it told me :-

"The project file can only be saved into the project location '(Existing project Location)'. "

So I Googled the MS newsgroups to find the solution and found this from a member of the Visual Studio Core Team :-

"If you have a solution with project1, project2, and project3 and want to move project3 into a new folder, you can open the solution in the IDE. Remove project3 (right click in solution explorer and chose remove), then in explorer, move all the files to you new location, and then re-add the project to the solution (right click the solution in the solution explorer). If this doesn't work for you, you can always open the .sln file and manually update the relative paths to your projects."

Why does the VS.NET IDE need to be so anal about this?!? Oh well. At least it makes it consistent with it's inflexible project creation logic. For example, try creating a project called c:\Test\SomeProject.csproj. I can't for the life of me figure out how to tell VS.NET that I don't want the project stored in a SomeProject directory! And don't even bother trying to create a new project in the same location as an existing one.

But of course, VS.NET knows my intentions far better than I do, so fighting against the IDE should be par for the course until I repent and admit the errors in my ways. :-(

Stephen King has finally released the final instalment of his excellent Dark Tower series. I guess I know what I'm doing this weekend. :-)

In a similar vein to my Google post earlier today, I was put onto this. Some people have way too much time on their hands.

This week I discovered the Google Deskbar. Very nice.

As Google is one of my most indepensibile resources (particularly Google Groups), it is great to have such easy access seemlessly integrated into my Taskbar. It comes with a set of pre-defined searches, but these can be removed, and custom ones can easily be added. Below are some of the ones I use :-


Delphi Newsgroups
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q={1}&btnG=Search&meta=group%3Dborland.public.delphi.*

SQL Server Newsgroups
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q={1}&btnG=Search&meta=group%3Dmicrosoft.public.sqlserver

.NET Framework Newsgroups
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q={1}&btnG=Search&meta=group%3Dmicrosoft.public.dotnet

And now for a shameless plug :-)

I've also developed an OTAPI add-in for the C#Builder IDE which integrates Google web and newsgroup searching into the IDE. It also has basic spell checking functionality. The newsgroup searching comes with a set of pre-defined Borland newsgroups which can be used to restrict searches by, but these can be customized. It also exposes a basic API to allow other newsgroup archives to be supported. There is a plug-in for the Tamaracka archives included to show how to implement this. It's written in C# but I do have plans to port it to Delphi for .NET.