Scott Hanselman needs your help with a serious accessibility issue in VS 2005. I’m pretty sure I got that tip about the /fs switch from him. It’s invaluable for high screen resolutions.
Vote now. I command you.
Windows Media Player 10
With my recent computer troubles I ended up visiting Windows Update a lot. I noticed Windows Media Player (WMP) 10 is now in production, so I decided to give it a whirl. The UI got some little tweaks: now the menu is impossible to find, the background is a nice blue and they’ve started emphasizing some things that were always in the product, but were previously hidden. I’ve never used iTunes, but I assume a lot of the tweaks have to do with iTunes’ success. MS is at their best when they’re trying to crush a competitor to a pulp; and the only way for them now is to make a better product, rather than strong arm tactics.
The feature I wanted to talk about, though, is the ability to sync music to my Pocket PC right in WMP! Before I had to use, um, my backup copy, yeah, of Plus! Digital Media Edition for that feature, and even then it was poorly implemented. But the new Media Player has integrated it superbly. That one feature isn’t good enough for me to switch to WMP for everything: I am still a tried and true Winamp fan; but it’s nice to see competition has improved things.
I also hear that WMP 10 has a better .NET Primary Interop Assembly, so I’ll add that on the list of things to look at.
Unit Testing in Visual Studio 2005
When I first heard about VS 2005 Team System, I got a little jazzed about being able to do Unit Testing, and run FxCop right inside the IDE. But then it kind of dawned on me that it was only going to be in Team System, and the 15 different versions of Team System weren’t going to replace the current 4-5 versions of Visual Studio, merely supplement them. Now I’m kinda bummed. Why should only big enterprises and giant software teams get the benefits of unit testing?
That’s why I’m joining this petition. If you think Unit Testing is important I encourage you to join too.
Unit Testing support should be included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 and not just with Team System.
Outlook 2003 is great, but…
There is one feature Outlook 2003 doesn’t have that it should have: I get a lot of spam, on the order of 100 messages a day. That may not be much, but it is really annoying. Outlook 2003 is pretty good at filtering the junk. So far no false positives, which is good, but that means it tends to let some junk through. Usually, I’m pretty vigilant with my email checking, but even then the spam is sometimes too much.
The feature I’d like to see is ContextMenu item to select multiple messages as junk at time. Currently, I have to click each email. Annoying! Plus, it shouldn’t be that hard to do (famous last words in software), since the functionality for one message is there.
Any other features outlook 2003 should have? Tell Microsoft.
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