Software Support Rant

So, I had this issue with my coding tools (Visual Studio 2008) where I installed the software/drivers for a webcam, and a major chunk of development functionality stopped working. Unfortunately, the installation timing closely coincided with my installing a service pack.

Long story short, I submitted an issue with Microsoft, got some mixed quality of responses from their support staff, and finally they pointed me towards 3rd party apps interfering and I spent a long time tracking down the source. During the course of that, they asked about a few other third party apps that they've seen cause interference. Today, they closed my bug report as Will Not Fix.

To me, having a system where random third party apps might interfere with your internal communication is defective, and should be resolved. I guess its the benefit of being the big guy. You get to say that certain cases are not important enough to fix. Perhaps its just sour grapes because its my case they didn't fix. I highly doubt Logitech would care that their drivers are causing me to not be able to write software. So, I guess no webcam for me on my main computer.

If anyone's googling for Visual Studio 2008 debug hang and ends up here, try killing LVPrcSvr.exe.

For people reading my blog (hah!) who don't care about my whining, here's a picture of Ruby

From Ruby June Hannah

Implementing Interfaces in C++/cli

This must be such a simple topic that its hard to google for, because I couldn't find it. So, I figured I'd blog it quickly for other .NET newcomers who've been mainly doing C#.

Given IFace.cs in dll SomeInterface.dll:

namespace Some
{
  public interface IFace
  {
    void Express(string mood);
  }
}

This would be implemented like so in DogFace.h:

#using <SomeInterface.dll>
#using <mscorlib.dll>

using namespace System;
using namespace Some;

public ref class DogFace: IFace
{
public:
   virtual void Express(String^ mood); //virtual is required
};

Pretty simple, but it took me longer than I would have liked.