Welcome to Mike Taulty's Weblog Sign in | Join | Help

October 2004 - Posts

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 Read More...
Posted Friday, October 29, 2004 11:37 AM by mtaulty | 10 Comments

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. Read More...
Posted Friday, October 29, 2004 7:55 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Book a hotel room over at WTF

This entry on WTF has to be seen to be believed. Read More...
Posted Friday, October 29, 2004 7:43 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

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 Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 26, 2004 10:10 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

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 Read More...
Posted Monday, October 25, 2004 1:28 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

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 Read More...
Posted Monday, October 25, 2004 7:28 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

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. Read More...
Posted Monday, October 25, 2004 6:44 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

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 Read More...
Posted Monday, October 25, 2004 2:02 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Forms Webcasts

Hot on the heels of the ASP.NET Webcast series comes a Windows Forms .NET webcast series. Read More...
Posted Monday, October 25, 2004 1:41 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

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. Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 24, 2004 5:27 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

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 Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 24, 2004 4:39 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

.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 Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 21, 2004 8:46 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

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 Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 21, 2004 8:18 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

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 Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 21, 2004 7:55 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

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 Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 20, 2004 5:11 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

Monad Video on Channel 9

I've seen a lot of people pushing this video but I thought I'd just add to the noise on this. If you're interested in what's happening with command line shells for Windows (based on what .NET provides) then you should go and take a look at this short Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 20, 2004 4:32 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Virtual PC Service Pack 1

If you're working with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and particularly if you're running VPC images built of Windows XP Service Pack 2 then I'd strongly recommend Service Pack 1 for Virtual PC. I applied Service Pack 1 today and then visited my Windows XP Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 14, 2004 1:43 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

VB6 Migration

I had an interesting day today. My Inspiron laptop seemed to be working reasonably well. I've found that if I don't "move" it (or knock into it) then it stays up and running and I worked on it all day yesterday without problems. Hence...I thought Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 14, 2004 1:42 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Media Center 2005

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 shipped yesterday and it leaves me in a quandry. I'd like to get hold of a PC that performs the functionality of MCE 2005 but I can't decide whether this should be a dedicated PC (which operates like a regular consumer Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 13, 2004 6:02 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

System.XML Changes after .NET 2.0 Beta 1

If you're playing with System.Xml in the betas of V2.0 of .NET then you need to take a look at this great post by Dare Obasanjo about changes that are coming in the head towards beta 2. I'll not repeat the post :-) The items that caught my eye are; Addition Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 13, 2004 5:48 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

WS-Management Published

Another WS-* :-) The WS-Management specification has been published. You can grab a PDF version from here . It's interesting to see that this specification is co-authored by AMD, Intel, Dell, Microsoft and Sun. The specification defines some concepts Read More...
Posted Friday, October 08, 2004 4:31 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

MapPoint Development

There's a nice "roadmap" style document here at MSDN about MapPoint development including using the facilities of the MapPoint Location Server. Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 07, 2004 3:06 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

ASP.NET Webcast Series

Interested in ASP.NET? Follow this link to a web site where you'll find details of the ASP.NET Webcast Series. From the 18th October you'll be able to attend the webcasts offered from this site. The description claims that there'll be 40 hours of talks Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 07, 2004 3:03 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Dell TrueMobile 1300 WiFi Card

Another quick note on Dell Inspiron 5150's. For quite a while I've had varying levels of success with the Dell TrueMobile 1300 WiFi card that's installed in this box. Often it seems to struggle to get/keep a wireless network connection when the wireless Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 07, 2004 2:45 PM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

Halo 2 Finished

Wow. This link which I came across on Microsoft Watch says that Halo 2 is finished. I guess that November sorted then :-) Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 07, 2004 1:49 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Volatile Transactions

One of the features of the .NET Framework V2.0 that keeps going around in my head is the volatile transaction support in the System.Transactions namespace. There's a good introduction to System.Transactions over at Angel Saenz-Badillos blog and if you've Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 07, 2004 12:20 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Don't touch my laptop!

Well, I worked out what's wrong with my Dell Inspiron 5150. Well, kind of anyway. As long as it sits perfectly still and isn't knocked or moved in any way then it runs fine. If you move it, you lose it in that it turns itself off. The easiest way to do Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 07, 2004 12:19 AM by mtaulty | 15 Comments

Blog Moving

I've noticed a lot of people moving blog sites around lately. It kind of makes me think that there's a need for a service that underpins blogs and adds a level of indirection between the blogger's name and the location of their blog-site. Call it BlogDirectory Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 07, 2004 12:19 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Windows Error Reporting for ISV's

This looks pretty cool to me . It looks like an ISV producing an application for Windows can now use the same Windows Error Reporting mechanism in order to log crashes in their application to Microsoft who'll then package them up and feed them back to Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 06, 2004 11:09 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

ASP.NET Security Bulletin Published

Running ASP.NET web sites? You need to read this security item published yesterday http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/aspnet.mspx Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 06, 2004 12:36 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

My Inspiron Laptopn is Dying?

Uh-oh. Twice this evening my Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop has just partially shut itself off for no reason. The screen goes black and, weirdly, the DVD drive keeps spinning itself up then down then up...and so on. It's one of those where you end up holding Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 05, 2004 3:55 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments