How long should it take to create an e-mail template? Go ahead, take a guess. Five minutes? Ten minutes? Twenty?

Try 45 solid minutes!

Before I sat down, I thought to myself, “Self, how hard can it be to create a template in Outlook 2000? Sure, it’s older software, but it’s Microsoft, right? Made for the average computer user.”

Whatever. I gave up and had to just copy and paste my layout into a new e-mail. I suppose I’ll have to do this each time I need to use this particular design. Very frustrating. It seems that the deeper into Outlook you dig, the worse the user interface gets and the less things make sense. I found some VERY wacky things in there under the templating and forms menus. Quite frightening.

This makes me want to switch to a different e-mail client. Any suggestions?

I recently downloaded Microsoft’s free version of Visual C# 2005 and a few days later, began being harassed by a tiny balloon which would pop up every half-hour or so reminding me that I needed to register within 30 days or I wouldn’t be able to use the software anymore. Okay, fine, I bit the bullet and decided to register.

The first page I encountered required me to sign up for Microsoft Passport. But wait, I thought Passport was dead? And why force me to sign up just to register my software?

Continuing on, I received a confirmation e-mail for my Passport registration. I also received an e-mail requesting that I verify my e-mail address by clicking on a link, which I did.

In the meantime, I had finally gotten to the Visual C# registration page and had entered in my information. Clicking save resulted in another e-mail in my box, asking me to confirm that my e-mail address is correct. But wait, didn’t I do this already? Oh yeah, that was just for Passport. Don’t bother sharing information between applications, guys. Sheesh.

After receiving confirmation for my Visual C# registration, I had received a total of four… yes four… e-mails after registering a single product.

Does it really have to be this way?

Why Microsoft would choose to set up Rover as the default search character in an operating system they call Windows XP Professional is beyond me.

I may have to check out some of the other shows on dnrTV this week. .NET Gotchas and Databinding in .NET 2.0 in particular look like they would be interesting.

public void RestartService(string name)
{
    ServiceController service = new ServiceController(name);
    service.Stop();
    Thread.Sleep(2500);
    service.Start();
    Thread.Sleep(2500);
}

You guessed it: “name” is the name of the service to restart. It must exactly match the actual service name or bad things will happen. I added the sleeps for good measure. They may or may not be needed depending on how responsive you want the service to be immediately after restarting.

Now if only C# made it this easy to restart a UNIX process…

Actually, there is. One way would be to install OpenOffice. It allows you to save a document directly to a PDF. This makes so much sense, doesn’t it? Which brings to mind another question… when will Microsoft add a similar feature to Word?

If you don’t want to wait around for them to do that (and don’t have the inclination to install OpenOffice), check out these instructions for converting to a PDF by printing to a file and using a couple of free tools. It was quick and easy for me, and now I have my PDF and my $30.

For some odd reason, I assumed that a product like Visual Studio made by a giant like Microsoft (and with a whopping $350+ price tag) would be at least comparable to, if not superior to, Eclipse (which, of course, is free). I was woefully incorrect. Some of the best features of Eclipse, such as auto-refactoring, are just not available. Other features have been implemented, but in a castrated form. It’s almost as if Visual Studio tries too hard to make things easy to do, and in the process destroys a great deal of the flexibility which made Eclipse so pleasant to use.

After using Visual Studio for a week or so, I gave up on it and have switched back to Eclipse and an open-source C# plugin which I found. The plugin offers syntax highlighting and not much else, so I’m essentially writing C# in a souped-up version of Notepad, but it’s still better than trying to make my way around VS. Maybe I just haven’t inculcated the Microsoft way of doing things yet, but I’ll take Eclipse and Java back any day. I’m sure Visual Studio is useful in many cases, but for writing automated tests against APIs it just stinks.

Ward must feel the same way.