Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2

Yesterday I received a box with four DVDs with the materials from the Visual Studio 2005 Beta experience, containing VS2005 and also SQL Server 2005 and 'We fly 24/7', an end to end project done with VS2005 involving Windows, Web and mobile applications.

I was using the Beta 1 Express edition of C# for a while, but given that I find easier to work with VS2003 I haven't used it to do any real job. So I was taking it out of my notebook and installing the new tools. I started at 9 in the morning while working in the office, and finished ten minutes before 12, a long process but not so different from VS2003.

I made a mistake in the middle because I went first for VS2005, then for MSDN documents and finally for SQL Server, and in my haste to have everything ready I didn't read the installation notes for SQL which specify that you need to uninstall the Express version before. That is, I uninstalled my Beta 1 versions of everything, but never realized that VS installs a SQL Express by itself, and when I started looking for Server Management Studio I found my menu with only the SQL Express and no tools at all. After reading the notes and following the instructions everything was completed without major problems (a funny thing happens in my notebook because my screen resolution is 1400 by 1050 pixels with 120 DPI fonts, and the images and some buttons during installation were out of place, but in the desktop computer everything goes smoothly). Now is time to start running!

What I want from ProtoLib

This are the kind of questions that I want to answer using ProtoLib, and a small real life example for each:

1 - Do I have any book about unit testing?

I have lots of books that I haven't read yet, specially in digital format, and as part of my training I choose a field and study about it between three and six weeks. A list of what I have around is a good starting point to make a schedule, and usually I spent an evening preparing that list. Also, sometimes my friends ask for something to read, and it could be easier for them to start wandering around instead of resting in my memory.

2 - Do I have any book writen by Isaac Asimov?

Sometimes I read a book or article and if I like it, I start looking for other works from the same author. This happens frecuently with the articles which I read in the Internet, but also with books (my last chase is for Neal Stephenson books).

3 - Do I have any good book about Science Fiction?

I heard this kind of question each time that I start talking about books, probably because I go very enthusiastic in many topics, very fast, and this seems to be contagious at least while I am around (later people wonder why in the world do they have a book about ants in their hands, o other fields equally funny).

4 - Is 'Writing secure code' a heavy book or can I have it in my pocket for my que waiting moments?

This came when I am preparing my study list because I usually have something to read with me at all times, just in case to been stuck somewhere with nothing to do.

5 - Where is my copy of 'Inside C#'?

This is an issue with my paper library, and a big problem with the digital books.

6 - Which books are lent?

Just to keep track of them, even than sometimes they get lost in time and space.

The biggest issue with this kind of questions are about how to capture the data of each book, which was the main reason to which I haven't made a program in Delphi ten years ago, because I prefer to spent my time reading instead of completing boxes in an window. I started thinking again about this project when Amazon opened their web services, which allows you to retrieve books data from their servers. That way I will be able to answer other questions:

7 - Is there any book like 'Lord of the Rings'?

Amazon have a list of 'similar products' for most of their inventory and it's a good way to know about books that I liked.

8 - What is people saying about 'C# in a nutshell'?

There are two kinds of reviews, one editorial and other made by the customers of Amazon. Even than I am not very confident in reviews made by people that I don't know, they are a starting point to decide if it could be worth to invest some time looking a book.

9 - How much is costing 'The soul of a new machine'?

They have a list price and also other offers, mainly used books. This is also a good way to know how much money I have spent in paper.

10 - Which books are in my shopping list?

I take some time regularly to go to the books shops and browse the shelves, but usually I wait for a while before buying, to have time to think if I will read that book or not (my budget in money and space for books is very limited), and sometimes I forget many books until the next time that I go to the shop. Having them in a 'wish list' might be a solution for that.

At the same time, I have some usability ideas about ProtoLib:

- For data entering

1 - I want to write a ISBN number, a title or an author's name, and receive a list of books to pick the right one to have it's full data retrieved.

2 - I want to be able to classify a book under many categories. For example, 'C# in a nutshell' could be classified as a book on programming, .NET, Windows, Web and maybe other fields.

3 - I want to drag a file from a CD and being asked for something to identify it (say, the ISBN), and ProtoLib must remember where is that file, and also to recognize it if I have another copy somewhere else.

- For presentation:

1 - I want a tree view of my library having each title inside each category assigned to it. Many books will appear several times in the tree, because sometimes I want a quick view of all the info that I have for a field, and it's easy for me to navigate a tree presentation and arrive to broad conclusions in a short time.

2 - I want an international application, because my library is in Spanish and English, and the same happens with my friends.

3 - I also want to know that 'TCP-IP Illustrated' is the same book as 'TCP-IP Ilustrado'.

4 - I want a list of my books, filtered by any criteria available for them. The data will be more or less the same than in the tree, but faster to group and sort.

5 - I want to have the option to run ProtoLib without install anything, just calling an application in Windows. I want this to be able to keep a list in a USB disk and to read in a cybercafe if I am on the road without my own computer.

On an structural point of view, I want to be able to extend ProtoLib to other kind of products (Amazon have a broad field of things offered in their website), and also to have different interfaces. I will start with a Windows application, but probably I will want it in my PDA a week after I have one, and a web front end could be good to interchange books with my friends, and having web services around could tie the Windows version with my friends libraries.

Next time I will review the programs that I found that are more or less in the same league than ProtoLib.

A bit of history

I like books very much. My library includes around 600 books and magazines, and I also have good number of manuals and articles living in my CD collection.

In 1995, when I started working with Delphi, I was playing with the idea to make a program to catalog my books and to share it with my friends to have a kind of semi-public library (some of them have good collections too), because at that moment I couldn't find a product for Windows with all the features that I wanted. Finally I made other kind of programs, with a broader approach to classification, and the book project went to the closet.

Usually I remembered where most of my paper books were and was able to go for each one in my shelves, but since we moved to Ireland a year ago (leaving the library at my mother's house) I must rely in the digital collection, which is more difficult to remember. I start shuffling my CDs, and sometimes directly jump to the Internet and download the files again (which is a problem with the excelent Microsoft 'Patterns and Practices' material, because I always got lost in the website). I started thinking again in a book management program, but now in C#, given that I like it much more than Delphi.

The biggest issue with that project, apart from the fact that I spent most of my day in the office, is that even I am using C# since 2002, I haven't done a complete project in it (something that I did a lot of times in Delphi). I made web services, Windows apps, ASP.NET apps, libraries, components and a lot of other things under the .NET Framework, but never started from nil and finished with a fully installed and supported product. This is a challenge, but at the same time it scares me a little.

At the same time there are other problems around. This will be my first atempt to write in English (as you probably guessed after the first sentence), and I will try to set up a development environment at home to use in other projects. I am waiting for a DVD with the Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2005, and probably I will finish the job using it, even than I will start with VS2003. Time constraints are in place too, because I don't want to spent more than four weeks of my spare time before having an idea about if I am able to do the job that I want in a reasonable lapse. I will start working only with my things at home, but later I might place the project in SourceForge, and I haven't done any serious job in open source before. Part of my idea is to learn from the comments from other people about tools and programming, but at the same time is a little scary to allow my creatures to run naked in the wild open (I *know* that my code is *perfect*, but there is a curse that make it become horrible each time that I show it to somebody I respect and admire, or to Magoo). I am also mentoring a friend in Argentina about the .NET Framework and probably we will use this project to set up the tools to have a distributed development team in place. All in all, the next four weeks looks very interesting :-)

My next post will be the specifications for ProtoLib.