March 2004 - Posts

BizTalk 2004 & Pipelines

So I got asked in response to a former posting what the deal was with the "XML receive" pipeline in BizTalk versus the "Pass through" pipeline.   How I see it is this.   A pipeline is just a set of .NET components configured to have Read More

Updated Simple BizTalk 2004 Correlation Sample

  So I did a bad thing in that I posted a sample zip file of how to do correlation in BizTalk 2004 and didn't make it easy enough to work with.   First of all, it's the zip file that is posted here http://mtaulty.com/downloads/correlation.zip Read More

Online/Offline Smart Applications with MSDN Patterns

I've spoken to quite a few people in recent weeks about building Smart clients with .NET and the offline/online block that is available on MSDN ( starting page is here http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag/html/offline.asp ) Read More

Eating my own bird-seed

Just wanted to avoid the "dog-food" reference that usually goes around :-)   I published up a little RSS reader to this site a few weeks ago and I've been using it since. Strange thing is that the debug build I have on my laptop seems Read More

Xbox Live, Wireless networking with LinkSys WGA54G

I've been away working all week and so when I got home yesterday I was pretty keen to pick up the combination box that I'd ordered from Amazon including an Xbox Live starter kit and a LinkSys WGA54G wireless adapter which I was hoping would plug into Read More

Visual Studio 2005 Community Technology Preview March 2004

For those with MSDN subscriber downloads it looks like there's an updated version of VS.NET (from VSLive) posted on the 24th March.   http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/downloads/default.asp Read More

Assertions

  One of my real bug-bears when writing commercial code is around assertions. I love assertions and am probably over-liberal in their use if I'm trying to write code that I would actually ship to someone and expect them to pay for.   Read More

Asus and a Wirless Harddrive

  Another register story here saying that Asus has a WiFi harddrive in the making. I'm not quite sure I get this. Today, I carry around a 20GB hard drive that operates over USB2.0 and when I need to get some extra storage or transfer Read More

Sony and Electronic-Book

Interesting story over on The Register on Sony's "electronic book". It sounds as though it's a single-function device devoting to "e-reading" from the article. Read More

TabletPC preview?

Some info over on TabletPCBuzz.com about what I would call the "Early Adopter" preview of Windows XP Service Pack 2 and its inclusion of the updated edition of the Tablet PC operating system.   Take care which devices you install the Read More

Brain.Reload()

  So, I guess it's a bad sign of your age when you can't remember whether you've blogged something before or not and I guess it's a sad indictment of your character when you can't be bothered to check ;-)   I saw a digital camera in Read More

SOAP and denial-of-service attack

I thought this posting from Sun was interesting as it highlights how sending SOAP envelopes over HTTP to a server can result in a security problem. I'm a huge fan of SOAP and web services in general but I think that there's a general misconception Read More

WSE 2.0 Technology Preview

  I did a talk down at MSN in London yesterday around Web Services Enhancements 2.0 (Technology Preview). The slides and the demos are now up on this website if you wanted to pull them down.   I was producing a simpler demo today Read More

Time to buy a house...

  I thought that this article on CNN was interesting. Given that the kind of work moving offshore is moving "up" every year (i.e. accountancy, IT, etc. right now) and given that it's pretty difficult for someone in the UK on a normal Read More

FeedFerret Installation

Should you happen to download that software, go with the "Everyone" option when the MSI runs. The "Just for me" might not be working :-)     Read More

FeedFerret! Blog Reader

  I've posted a bit of software that I've written and been using for a while as a Blog Reader and poster. It's called FeedFerret :-)   This is all written in managed code and plugs in to Outlook 2003. It gives you a small toolbar which Read More

Orange SPV E200 Smartphone

  Got a new SmartPhone yesterday which is the SPV E200 running the 2003 version of the SmartPhone software. From what I've seen so far this phone is absolutely fantastic. I had the previous SPV which was great for the email, contacts and Read More

Nokia and LifeBlog

  I thought this article about Nokia's plans to let phone users build a "LifeBlog" was interesting - just pointing it out.   Mike Read More

400GB Drive coming from Hitachi

  Blimey, CNet news has a story that Hitachi is putting out a 400GB drive   I put together a talk about WinFS a couple of months ago which I delivered twice. The first time it was fairly dire but, fortunately, it was to internal people Read More

WS-I Web Services Security Interop Guidelines

  I noticed that the WS-I has published a draft around interoperability for web services and security. Haven't read it at the time of writing this but from a quick glance it looks like a really good document to have an awareness of. Read More

Adobe advertising PDF on TV

  Martin just prompted me to remember that I saw what struck me as a pretty bizarre TV advert here in the UK last night (in the middle of a fairly mainstream TV programme). It was a TV advert for Adobe's Portable Document Format presenting Read More

MSDN Show

  The new .NET Show on MSDN TV (link is here) is on Indigo and is really watchable (both for the initial higher level discussion and then the programming model that gets some coverage in the "Enter the Programmer" piece).   The Read More

XML Namespaces

  Dare Obasanjo has a nice post here on his blog about the pain that Developers feel with XML namespaces. I've got up a few times in front of rooms of developers to explain XML 1.0 plus Namespaces (not that I'm a world expert by any Read More

.NET Scorecard on InfoWorld

  There's some interesting stuff in this set of 3 articles (actually, the Scorecard is the interesting bit) over on InfoWorld. I cribbed the link off Don Box's blog so don't be surprised if it shows up in lots of other places as well - I Read More

BizTalk Server 2004 on MSDN Download

Just a quick note - BizTalk Server 2004 is available in MSDN Subscriber Downloads (you might want to make sure you've got a fast connection before you start downloading it). Read More

Dell and Opteron?

  Sorry to be a mouth-piece for The Register today but, as always, chip stories interest me and I was a little bowled over by this one suggesting that Dell (of all Intel-buying people!) might be considering offering AMD Opteron boxes. Read More

IBM spending big $ on developers this year...

  according to this article over on The Register. I wonder what this will translate into in terms of things that people can see, touch and use?     Read More

Take-up of Macromedia's Central

  Cnet has an article on the slow take-up of Central from Macromedia. I find this stuff interesting because it seemed to me that Macromedia has a loyal, strong following amongst its developers and Central is their move to go from beyond Read More