Yesterday Microsoft released Silverlight v3. Trying to install the new version I had a few sad findings. First of all, Silverlight v3 is not supported on Windows 7 with IE 8. I sure couldn't install it, and figured it might be because Win7 is still in Beta or the fact, that I'm running the 64 bit version of the OS. But check their system requirements:

While trying to figure out what was going on, I tried to see what would happen if I ran the 64 bit version of IE8, and discovered that silverlight does not support the 64 bit version at all. But ok... Adobe flash doesn't support the 64 bit version either.

I think, that it's weird.

Who can show the worst code ? Recently I ran into something like this:

        public string[] GetSomeVeryStupidArray()
        {   
            Dictionary<string, string> customers = GetCustomers();
            string[] list = new string[customers.Count];
           
            list[0] = customers[Constants.FirstConstant];
            list[1] = customers[Constants.SecondConstant];
            list[2] = customers[Constants.ThirdConstant];
           
            return list;
        }

        private Dictionary<string, string> GetCustomers()
        {
            string[] customers = new string[]
            {
                Constants.FirstConstant,
                Constants.SecondConstant,
                Constants.ThirdConstant
            };

            Dictionary<string, string> values = new Dictionary<string, string>();
           
            foreach (string name in customers)
            {
                values.Add(name, name);
            }

            return values;
        }

        internal class Constants
        {
            internal const string FirstConstant = "FirstConstant";
            internal const string SecondConstant = "SecondConstant";
            internal const string ThirdConstant = "ThirdConstant";
        }

Obviously I rewrote this a bit, so I don't offend the person who accually wrote it, but what the f*** is going on ??? I found code similiar to this, in accual production code. The worst part is, that I saw, that some other developer has been copy pasting these methods into new areas of the application we're working on, without even thinking about, what it is he's pasting.... Only two days left...

Since I got my first windows mobile device, I've been hating the license rules for the OS. Some years ago, I bought a danish QTek S200. Since I live in Denmark, it came with a danish OS.... I always hated danish operating systems.

I want to get the OS in english and install that (I'd even pay for it). Now that appeared to be a struggle. The danish OS had a higher version number than the english. The installer refused to do a "downgrade" to a lower version number. This appeared to me to be a way for HTC (QTEK), to prevent doing changes they wouldn't allow.

Those learnings is about 4 or 5 devices ago, and is still an issue to me. Whenever I get a new device, I prefer to buy a Danish one, since we have the special danish characters on the hardware keyboard (my current device is Touch Pro), but I don't want that crappy danish OS.

Beeing a little bit of a stubborn geek of nature, I needed to find out something about this. The keyword is Hard SPL. If you need to flash a device, with an OS that the vendor doesn't like, start googling for Hard SPL.

Sometimes I receive some strange error messages from TFS. This error occurs once in a while, I wonder why TFS requires Messenger to be runnning? I'll connect to TFS anyway, after clicking OK.