October 2004 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Media Center 2005

After my recent musings on a Media Center 2005 PC I've decided that I'd rather build one than buy one. The idea is to place this box near the TV so I needed it to be fairly small and fairly quiet. Here's what I've put together so far. It's working pretty well although I don't yet have a TV tuner card so things may go horribly wrong :-) I've gone for a Shuttle SN85G4V2 case with their motherboard (and a nice handy integrated card reader on the front). Into that I've placed; AMD Athlon 64 - the 2800+ in particular. I tried to keep the "spec" down a little here in a hope that this would also keep the heat and the fan noise down a little. 1GB PC3200 RAM. 200GB Seagate Barracuda IDE Hard-drive (7200 rpm) - I went IDE for this as there seem to be some "complexities" around getting one of these motherboards from Shuttle to install a clean copy of Windows from a SATA drive and I didn't want the hassle. ASUS V9520/GeForce FX 5200. I went for this because it doesn't have a fan strapped on it adding to...

Published Fri, Oct 29 2004 11:37 AM by mtaulty

Domain Specific Designers

So Visual Studio won't only come with great designers, there's work underway to let you build your own. See the press announcement here or go check out Gareth's blog if you want to be closer to the source.

Published Fri, Oct 29 2004 7:55 AM by mtaulty

Book a hotel room over at WTF

This entry on WTF has to be seen to be believed.

Published Fri, Oct 29 2004 7:43 AM by mtaulty

Travelling by Segway

There's a bunch of people over here who've given up their work in order to travel across the USA on Segway personal transporters :-) The end idea is to make this into some kind of documentary film - it looks like a fun project to me and what I particularly liked was the photos in the photo blog that are being published - some of those are really nice.

Published Tue, Oct 26 2004 10:10 AM by mtaulty

SQL Server 2005 Web Casts

And following up all the other webcast series that are going around (ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Forms 2.0) here's a set on SQL Server 2005 which shouldn't be missed. http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/2005webcasts

Published Mon, Oct 25 2004 1:28 PM by mtaulty

SQL Server 2005 and MARS

There's a good article over here at MSDN on the Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) feature in SQL Server 2005 and ADO.NET 2.0. What I really liked in there was the section entitled "I Already Have MARS" which is written for the OLEDB programmer who happily sends two commands down what looks like a single connection but ends up with a second connection created for them (AFAIK this surfaces itself in ADO). That sounds fine until (as the author illustrates) that second connection tries to play with the transactional work that the first connection is doing and then it all falls down (although it makes you wonder whether you could have got away with using sp_getbindtoken and sp_bindsession to make that work).

Published Mon, Oct 25 2004 7:28 AM by mtaulty

MCE 2005 Dev and SDK

I happened to come across the Media Center 2005 developer section on MSDN . I haven't looked at this at all before so it's nice to find that writing add-ins for MCE 2005 is done in .NET code and it looks like there's a nice object model for doing it.

Published Mon, Oct 25 2004 6:44 AM by mtaulty

Rebuilding Solutions with VS.NET 2003

This KB article looks interesting to me - it seems to fix the problem you have in VS.NET 2003 where you rebuild the solution and the tool rebuilds everything for you even though nothing has changed. I haven't installed and tried it yet but will do - let me know if it works for you.

Published Mon, Oct 25 2004 2:02 AM by mtaulty

Windows Forms Webcasts

Hot on the heels of the ASP.NET Webcast series comes a Windows Forms .NET webcast series.

Published Mon, Oct 25 2004 1:41 AM by mtaulty

Ahanix Home Theatre PC Cases

I hadn't seen this range of Home Theatre PC cases before - the range that Ahanix has over here . Support ranges from Micro to full ATX motherboards. Some neat designs here.

Published Sun, Oct 24 2004 5:27 PM by mtaulty

Travel Advice "Foreign Office Style"

This is off topic but for no particular reason I was taking a look on the UK Foreign Office web-site at the advice that they give to people planning trips abroad. I found it to be fascinating so I thought I'd share. Here's some examples; The USA You should be aware of the global risk of indiscriminate terrorist attacks, which could be against civilian targets including places frequented by foreigners. Given that terrorist attacks have taken place in public areas, there is a risk that foreign visitors could be caught up if there were other attacks in the future. You should therefore be particularly vigilant in high-profile public places. (See: Security & General Tips and Risk of Terrorism when Travelling Overseas ). We recommend that you also look at relevant US government websites, especially: http://www.fbi.gov , http://www.fema.gov , and http://www.dhs.gov and monitor news reports before and during your trip to the USA. If staying in a hotel, do not leave your door open at any time. Avoid wearing expensive...

Published Sun, Oct 24 2004 4:39 PM by mtaulty

.NET Developer Books

Having just posted something about Fritz Onion's ASP.NET book I thought I'd blog about what books I have under my desk as a developer. I'm a major book fiend so have far too many around the house and typically try to read far too many at a time causing me often to have to back and start again. So, I have a lot of developer books kicking around but if I had to go out tomorrow and re-stock my selection (say the PC blew up and took the books with it) and I wasn't thinking of going and revisiting COM or C++ or something then I'd buy these. Core .NET development; Shared Source CLI Essentials . David Stutz et al. Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming . Jeffrey Richter ADO.NET . David Sceppa Essential ASP.NET . Fritz Onion Windows Forms Programming . Chris Sells Real World XML Web Services . Yasser Shohoud Debugging .NET and Windows Applications . John Robbins Essential XML . Don Box, Aaron Skonnard, John Lam. Essential XML Quick Reference . Aaron Skonnard, Martin Gudgin. Programming Windows Security Keith Brown...

Published Thu, Oct 21 2004 8:46 AM by mtaulty

Fritz Onion on ASP.NET 2.0 and Asynchronous Web Pages

Fritz Onion (who, in my view wrote the very best ASP.NET book for V1.0) has a great post here about doing asynchronous web pages in V2.0 of the framework. Go read it and see how easy it is - it's neat, it's concise and it's simple. The small test result grids that he's got are pretty cool as well - notice that when he did a synchronous page he ended up with 33 (seems a lot!) threads handling his requests whereas when he went down the async route he ended up with just 2 :-)

Published Thu, Oct 21 2004 8:18 AM by mtaulty

NGEN and Cold PC Starts

Interesting post over here http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2004/10/18/244242.aspx on the debate as to whether you should be NGEN'ing your .NET applications or leaving the JIT compiler to JIT it for you and what effect this has on a PC that's just started "from cold". There's a whole bunch of new things around NGEN in V2.0 of the Framework that make it a lot easier to use - I can't find a great link to the features and differences so maybe I'll blog on it at some point in the near future with what I can work out.

Published Thu, Oct 21 2004 7:55 AM by mtaulty

Alienware Media Center PC's for the UK?

I pointed out Alienware's new Media Center PC the other day and I was interested in it enough to chase up with them whether it's likely to make an appearance in the UK. From the response I've had it sounds like the Alienware guys don't have plans to release this box in the UK so it's a US only thing right now which is a real shame. If you're looking for a pre-built Media Center 2005 then maybe Hush is a better place to look?

Published Wed, Oct 20 2004 5:11 AM by mtaulty