The October 2008 meeting of out user group will be held next week, Wednesday the 8^th. The chosen topic for this month was AOP.

Core: An Aspect Oriented Business Objects Framework

6:00 pm
Pizza and networking time

6:30 pm
Learn about aspect-oriented design patterns and how they can be used to quickly add common functionality to your business objects. Josh Heyse explains how Aspect-Oriented Programming allows for the separation of true business logic and the code written allowing interaction with user interfaces. The Core framework is a generation model that dynamically adds common services, such as logging, auditing, persistence, and security to business objects. Aspects, or behaviors, are requested using attributes or configuration files which allows services to be included only where necessary eliminating overly bloated objects and tailored for the environment into which the object is loaded.

7:45 pm
You may want to stick around after the presentation portion of the meeting and take part in our monthly open discussion. The topic is never arranged in advance but it's common that it reflects the content of the presentation.

I've been using Vista since the official release (skipped the betas) and I've been trying to convince myself that some of the changes were made for the better.

In particular, I've made some effort to get used to the new file explorer but somethings have been harder to put up with. Anyway, little by little I "fix" some of the new features.

Today, I had it with the unnecessary full row selection. It makes right-clicking the directory listing background much harder. The fix isn't trivial. It involves setting a bunch of flags in the Explorer settings in the Registry. The good news is that you can get it in a .vbs file (I don't recommend downloading and executing scripts from the Internet, so open the file in a text editor and inspect what it does to make you feel comfortable with what it does). There are other handy utilities there as well (Update: site seems to have vanished. I updated the link to a copy of the script I had. I could not contact the author to verify if it was ok to redist the file, though).

Next up is changing the selected/hovered-over item's background color in Explorer (Aero). That choice of blue is way to pale for me. I've read that it cannot be changed easily because it comes from a bitmap embedded in the theme itself.

By the way, I'm mainly using Windows Server 2008 with Aero turned on and the fix works there too.

Don't you hate when tools try to promote themselves in your work, especially if you paid for them?

Last night I was noavigatin around in Reflector when I stoped by the embedded resource named System.Data.Odbc.OdbcMetaData.xml (in System.Data.dll 2.0). What I saw was both familiar and a little aggravating.

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<!-- edited with XMLSPY v5 rel. 4 U (http://www.xmlspy.com) by Carl Perry (Microsoft) -->
<NewDataSet>
    ... xml content here ...