maandag 13 augustus 2007

Cleaning a Keyboard

My keyboard is about 5 years old, and it has been used extensively. During these years, it has become more and more filthy.
Now, I thought the time has come to do something about it. Basically, I had two options:

  • Buy a new keyboard
  • Clean my keyboard

I thought the second option was more of a challenge then just buying a new one.
So, this is what I did.

To give you an idea of how filthy my keyboard actually was, I've made a picture of it:

filthy keyboard

After I took a picture of the layout of my keyboard, I removed all keys from the board. You can imagine that the picture I've taken comes in quite handy when I wanted to place the keys back.

removing keys from keyboard

I've put all the keys in a bucket of water, and cleaned them.
After removing all the keys, the keyboard looked like this:

stripped keyboard

Hmm, this contains a lot of filth as well. I made good use of the vacuum-cleaner to remove most of it.
Then, when all the cleaned keys were dry again, I could put all the keys back to where they belong. The result: a clean keyboard:

clean keyboard

It was quite some work, but, devving with a clean keyboard is much nicer then using a dirty one. ;)

woensdag 8 augustus 2007

C# 3.0: new language features

I've already written a blogpost regarding LINQ and new language features that we may expect in C# 3.0 a while ago.
Since the release of VS.NET 2008 and thereby C# 3.0 is coming closer and closer, I was planning to write an updated blogpost about the new language features in C# 3.0.

However, I've noticed that John Papa has already written an excellent article already concerning the language enhancements in .NET 3.5, so I've decided to just link to that article:

.NET 3.5 Language Enhancements
That's much easier for me, and it saves me some time. :)

zaterdag 4 augustus 2007

XSD Schema for configuration of Log4Net

A few days ago, I was playing around with log4net, the open source framework that allows you to easily log messages in an application.

Since log4net is very configurable, I wanted to have Intellisense in Visual Studio.NET when I'm editing the log4net configuration.
Therefore, I need a schema definition for the log4net XML configuration file so that I can set up the Intellisense for the log4net configuration as I did here for NHibernate.

Unfortunately, it seems that the source of log4net doesn't contain such an XSD.
So, before I take the time and effort to create such an XSD, I wonder if anyone has already made such an XSD for log4net and is willing to share it. :)