August 2008 Archives

Recently I've been forced to look more and more at licenses for third party software that I use. This is in my opinion a complete waste of time and just a justification for more lawyers. Reading any license text is like reading the most boring end dense textbook you could possibly find on a trivial subject, and manages to make the subject incredibly complicated and hard to understand.

I got really excited that Tales of Vesperia was finally coming out (come on, a wolf with a pipe that fights with a sword, what more can you need?). I played Tales of Symphonia on my Wii, since it was listed as one of the all time best GameCube games and I really liked it, apart from it's obvious dated graphics. So when the news were that there was to be an HD version of that game coming out, I was all excited. Oh, foolish me.

So once again the curse of non trivial toy examples strikes. After spending about an hour trying to place a custom usercontrol onto a simple windows form in Visual Studio and C# I give up. In the most trivial example that I came up with it works fine, but as soon as I try to do this in my own little project (niftysolution plugin) visual studio does nothing but crash every time I try to drag my wizard generated empty user control onto the canvas of my slightly modified form.

The source control history is a precious asset. How your source code evolved over time, what and who made the changes (and why) are questions that can all be answered by the history. It's important to try to preserve the history, but it's also very easy to forget and not do it. It is very frustrating to do some detective work only to find out that the trails end cold when someone copied the file without telling perforce. Best of all, the person who did this might have quit and you have now no clue as to where that file originated.

I guess I made the last post a little bit of a holy crusade and while I guess that is just fine for a blog like this I did just throw it out there that I hate the non windows look and feel of the p4v application without any motivations, so I decided to just download the thing and rediscover how crappy it still is and write it down this time.

Perforce have had a strange development over the last couple of years with their UI clients. Perhaps not so strange from a manager's perspective or even a marketing perspective...