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“Dipping into the Mail Bag”

  • Artigo

It’s time for Mail Call so we’ll try something different and dip into the mail bag to see what great questions are on your mind. Our first piece of mail comes to us from a developer across the Atlantic.

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Dear Andy,

You are so handsome and smart I just know you’ll be able to help me. I use WES 2009, can you tell me why some components in Target Designer are bold and some components are italicized? I’m so confused and flailing about trying to understand why this is happening or if it’s a bug. Here is a screenshot to show what I’m referring to:

 

Signed, “Flailing About in London”.

Dear FAIL,

First of all, thank you for the compliments, you’re so observant. But your flattery will get you nowhere.

Having a bold or italicized component name helps indicate something interesting about that component to you.

Bold components in Target Designer mean that it’s a Macro component. Those are components that only depend on other components and are for helping you quickly assemble runtimes by starting with high level application requirements.

Italicized components are seen in the configurable UI of macro components. This indicates that the italicized component name is *already* in your configuration. The components in a macro’s configurable UI that are *not* italicized indicates the component is *not* in your configuration and you need to go through a Dependency Check in Target Designer.

Why would you want to know whether it’s in the config already? Some configurations have hundreds of components and it may be difficult to track them all, a little detail like italicizing the name helps you track the state of your configuration and with how many new components may be added.

After going through a dependency check one time, all those components that were checked in the configurable UI should have been added to the configuration and should now be italicized.

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Andy, I’m baking a lemon cake and word on the street is that you’re a fan of Lemon-Lemon, is that the best way to make it or should I layer the lemon cake with Vanilla frosting? Also, I teach a college course on Embedded OS’ and have a question around training documentation.

There is so much documentation for the WES 2009 platform all over MSDN, it’s hard to locate the right collection of Help and Whitepaper docs that are suited for my class’s level of knowledge on certain technologies. What can you do to help me?

Yours truly, “Director of Learning Technology”

Dear DOLT,

This is a great question, because the struggle to deliver the perfect Lemon cake is to enrich one’s soul. Answer: Lemon cake with Lemon frosting.

Regarding the documentation, there’s great news to report. The team has been pulling together a lot of the docs and categorizing them into Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced topics and making them available from a single WES Learning portal.

It also links to some of the educational videos and screencasts, whitepapers from the product group and from MVPs and a lot more technical material. I just checked the page and there’s already 85 unique pieces of training content there and more is on the way. This should get you going in the right direction.

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That’s it, mail call is over and the mail bag is empty so if you have questions send them to me at wecrt @ microsoft.com. If you’re looking for dating advice, World of Warcraft tips or need help with your road test you can include those as well but you may not get the response you were hoping for :-)

- Andy

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