My award from IntelliJ IDEAL Plugin contest

It's made in Haiti

Windows Vista and Daemon Tools

Yesterday, I installed latest version of Daemon Tools (v4.08). After finishing installation I had no problem, Daemon Tools can create virtual drive and it worked well. But this morning, when I turn on my laptop, I've got a black screen, Windows Vista cannot display logon screen as normal.

If you have this problem, don't worry. Restart in Safe mode and uninstall Daemon Tools, and now your Vista will back.

I think the big problem now with Windows Vista is compatibility with other applications (while they work with Windows XP). You saw my problem with Daemon Tools, and you must know that I cannot make a phone call via Globe7 'cause if I try, Globe7 will crash.

Actually I had a BSD (blue screen death) with Vista but seems it is problem of Kaspersky Anti-Virus's driver (it still beta).

My daily tools

These days I'm working in a project using .NET and Firebird and also I decided to use UML to support modeling. So I need to find some tools to have me can do my work better. And here are them.

UML modeling tool: Actually I don't like UML tools are made by Java, they look ugly (application and symbols for modeling). So I want to find a UML tool it has a native look (in Windows). On my way, I found UMLStudio, it's really very small, only 3MB. But it's not free. Do more searching, I found StarUML. It has a native look, runs fast, free and open source. Even though it has some bugs but it's good enough to use to model.

Developer and DBA tool for Firebird: As I found, I have 2 options. One is EMS SQL Manager for InterBase/Firebird and another choice is IBExpert. After a try, I really fall in love with IBExpert. If you are familiar with TOAD (actually TOAD does not support for Firebird right now), IBExpert can do better than that. And IBExpert has a personal version, it's free.

And one more thing I cannot forget, it's SmartSVN. Visual Studio has AnkhSVN but I don't like it very much, it's really heavy. Another choice is VisualSVN but it has less features than AnkhSVN and it is underlying on TortoiseSVN. So I decided to use a SVN client rather than a Visual Studio add-in and SmartSVN is my choice.

What the hell is going on with my combo box?

These days I'm very busy with my works. But I found a problem and it can take me about 3 minutes to have a break and I use it to write this post.

The problem I found relates with ComboBox control in .NET Framework 2.0. A ComboBox control has a DataSource property which accepts a List<T> as value. And then you can specify value of ValueMember and DisplayMember for it to use as value and text in combo box.

I have a Tag(int id, string name) and ofcourse a List<Tag> (it is not empty). I filled the list to a combo box, use "id" as ValueMember and "name" as DisplayMember then set SelectedIndex is 0 to make sure that I always select at least one item on the list. When I click the arrow of combo box, the drop down list appears but I don't select any item from list. Then I've got SelectedIndex is -1 while my expected value is 0. At this time I want to crazy 'cause don't understand why it happened.

But later I found that, the problem is the DisplayMember's data. If the first item of the list has a "name" is an empty string, you will have this problem. Seems M$ implemeted to select text value to get the index. But if it's an empty string, the returned index will be -1.

Thanks M$ to make me crazy ;-)