New Lens: Canon 70-300 f4-5.6 IS USM

Since a few days I am a proud user of the Canon 70-300 IS USM Telezoom lens. My first impression of this lens is very good: it is fast, has a wide zoom range and the image quality is near by a Canon “L”-Lens. The only drawback is that it is a little bit too loud especially when the image stabilizer works.

Now I have my photo equipment complete (for a few days ): a powerful macro and portrait lens (the Sigma), a universal lens for all-day use (the kit-lens) and a great telezoom for action and wildlife photography. Stay tuned for the results

Green Grass Desktop

Yeah, Mac OS X Leopard comes with that cool new desktop wallpaper showing simple green grass. I decided to have my own green grass desktop for Tiger and wanted to share it with you. Feel free to download and use it on your own…

Is this a lucky bear?

Last week we had a visit in the public zoo in nuremberg. I thought I take my EOS with me to take some funny pictures of the animals there. But I was shocked by what I’ve seen there. I think the employees in the zoo will do their best for the animals but I learned that most of the animals are surely not very lucky… so I have a question: is this a lucky bear?

iPhone: will it blend?

As some of my loyal readers know, some weeks ago, I shot my mobile. Today I found a knock-off of my video (;-)): Blendtec made a short video of blending an iPhone – will it blend? That is really sick…

Unable to get the project file from the webserver

Sometimes when working with Web-Projects in Visual Studio 2003 i’m getting this error message while all settings of IIS and the project files seem to be ok. Now I found one solution for this problem: clear up the VSWebCache folder in your documents and settings folder and it should work again. The cache seems to be poorly maintained by VS2003 so it could cause problems when the project structure has been reworked.

ResourceManager again…

So I think I found out the reason for the curious naming conventions of the resource namespaces: if you compile your project with visual studio, the full default namespace of the project and the resource filename build the resource name. If you build it with NAnt only the filename of the resx-file builds the resource name. This is very annoying because at development time we build mostly with visual studio and at deployment time we build and pack our projects with NAnt.

So what’s the solution? When you create a Windows Form or an ASPX Webpage within Visual Studio it will link code and resource files together. The compiled in resources then have the namespace of the class from the form or page. You can clean up the code to have only a class definition in it so you do not have to compile in all the references a WinForm needs

Using .NET Resourcemanager

Everytime I give the ResourceManager a chance I’m running into the same problem: usually I get a ManifestException ” Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture”. So, what’s the problem? When you create an instance of ResourceManager you have to supply the root name of the resources and the assembly of them.

The difficult thing is the root name! I thought this is given in the form <AssemblyName>.<ResourceFile> (without a file extension). But that’s not always true. To make sure you have the right name just open ildasm and examine the assembly with your embedded resources. The manifest contains an entry beginning with .mresource public. The name after these words is the right resource root name (without the .resources extension).

Here’s an example. The manifest contains the entry .mresource public De.Speedesign.CustomMessages.resources. So you have to create the ResourceManager this way:

ResMngr = new ResourceManager("De.Speedesign.CustomMessages", typeof(MyClass).Assembly);

Usually it’s a good practice to hold the ResourceManager in a static variable and create it only once.

News from Ed & Fred

In February I introduced Ed & Fred which came to me in three sorts of flavours (Classico, Ed & Fred and Sonnenallee). On this morning I made a cup of the Espresso “Classico” which was the last of the three sorts I was testing. I am stunned about the fine but full flavoured taste of this Espresso. So my favourite out of the three Ed & Fred espresso’s is “Classico” by far!

A new Lens: Sigma 105mm f2.8 EX DG Macro

Today I could not resist anymore! I bought a new macro lens for my Canon EOS 400D. It was the winner of three candidates I had for a macro lens (the other two were the Tamron 90mm Macro and a Canon 100mm Lens with an ultrasonic motor). Whereas the image quality of all thre lenses is nearly the same they differ in price and overall quality of the body – of course the Canon has an ultrasonic motor which is faster and more silent. So I stroke the balance between price and quality and took the Sigma.

I made some quick test shots with my new lens and could say that I’m very much impressed of the colors, depth of field and of course the sharpness of the lens. Although the first five photos where no artworks, I’m sure I will have much fun with this lens.

How to get a MacBook Pro

Leah Culver wanted to have a MacBook. Her solution of this problem is quite freaky: take a look at her website.