Month: April 2009

19/04/2009

MacBook powering two external displays

I tend to hook up my MacBook on one of my external displays when I sit at my desk. I have two 22″ screens, one which I use for the MacBook the other I used for my desktop PC. A while ago I gave that one away and so the other screen was only gathering dust.

The MacBook only has one external display port so in order to hook up two displays you need to do some research. One possible solution is the DualHead2Go from Matrox. You hook this up on your display port and it basically directs half of the signal to one screen and half to the other. So you need to set your resolution to a rather big one, the MacBook is not powerfull to power two displays at 1680 * 1050. It wil also set you back around 300$/€.

Then there’s ViDock, a very powerfull solution but it comes with a powerful price, almost a new laptop (700$/€).

And then there’s DisplayLink‘s technology, which enables displays to connect via USB. They’ve been around for some time and now have drivers supports Mac OS X. I went for this solution from EVGA, compared to the others it’s relativly cheap at around 70$/€ for their best model (UV-16 +). Which can power displays up to 1680 * 1050, just the resolution I wanted. While it can’t play HD content smoothly, normal usage is just fine.

18/04/2009

This week on my screen #7

NHibernate Criteria Builder, haven’t looked at it in detail, the goal is query the database as close as possible to the business needs.
Retrieve a nested component with the criteria API.
Optmizing a software + services application, what you run into in when making a responsive smart client.
Writing smart clients with WCF, UI’s and threading the horror, service life cycle.
NHibernate Query Cache, how to make some changes have an effect on the cache and others not.
Ayende comments on the repository pattern, I’ve run into these issues as well.
Ayende also made a lot of posts on NHibernate mappings while some stuff you’ll already know there’s bound to be something you didn’t know.

14/04/2009

Updated to BE 1.5

Just a small post to see if everything is still up and running, only the lightbox extenstion is having a small design issue. Apart from that everything went smooth. For those using MS SQL 2000 as backend, you can just use the upgrade script that comes with the 1.5 release.

12/04/2009

Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0 on OSX

I installed Mono and MonoDevelop again this week but found out rather quickly that not much has changed in MonoDevelop since the last time I used it. MD went 2.0 recently while Mono is now 2.4.

I probably should have guessed that all the problems I ran into using MD were still not resolved because of the red letters on their site discouraging using MonoDevelop on the Mac. On the forums however I found out that in the next version a lot of improvements should make it into the Mac distribution.

Mono is closing in on .Net, it was good to see that a lot of the c# language enhancements as well as new .NET features have made it into the platform. Including automatic properties, lambdas, etc. Linq is said to be supported as well but I was unable to write even a simple query. I never got the select statement to work. Could be me though.

What I did find interesting was how you can create native looking applications for almost every platform while using the same Mono core of your application. I really want to try that out! On the Mono site you get linked to Cocoa# for OSX but that project seems to be rather silent though a user made a recent contribution. I did like the way on how you could use the existing development tools available, xCode and Interface builder so you would not need to learn another application. There’s a video demonstrating the approach.

A more active project, with the latest version released in March, is Monobjc which seems to have the same goal as Cocoa#. I’ll probably try this one out first. Anyone with some Objective-C and Cocoa experience will recognize the way it works in this tutorial. Though at first glance you can’t use xCode to write your c#.

Oh yeah last time I checked you can use Spring.Net with Mono too.