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December 2004 - Posts

Media Center 2005 Update

I finally finished my Media Center 2005 machine today. I've posted about this before but I've been waiting for a long time to get hold of a TV card. The final specs of my machine are as below; AMD Athlon 64 - the 2800+ in particular. I tried to keep the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 29, 2004 9:34 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

BizTalk Server Roadmap

Scott Woodgate has posted a link across to the BizTalk Server roadmap document showing where the product is heading for 2006 and beyond. Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 23, 2004 4:52 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Halo 2

I've been playing Halo 2 on the Xbox a little and I managed to finish the single player game a while ago - great game, very cinematic in places (although that could be reflection that a lot of big budget films are starting to feel more like "games" Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 22, 2004 4:49 PM by mtaulty | 53 Comments

IT Jobswatch

I got feedback on my website which pointed me over to this IT Jobswatch web site which tracks job opportunities across different technologies and is really interesting. The site says that it tracks jobs for around 1500 IT skill across about 2000 regions Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 22, 2004 2:20 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

ASus Barebones

New Asus barebones system looks neat Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 22, 2004 9:26 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

The death of the LinkSys WGA54G

I've managed to replace the dreaded LinkSys WGA54G wireless adapter with a US Robotics wireless adapter model 5430. So far, so good. I've managed to re-instate 54Mbps working on my network and I've managed to reinstate a mixed WEP/WPA mode of working Read More...
Posted Friday, December 17, 2004 8:16 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

MSN Toolbar Beta

I downloaded the beta of the MSN Toolbar Suite today. At the moment I've only tried the desktop search feature but it seems to work very well. The initial indexing process (across the entire hard drive and my email) took quite a while but, having completed Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 15, 2004 2:56 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Craig Andera on XML Serialization

Interesting post from Craig Andera on how you can get the XML serializer to represent different data types when you don't know at build time what you're actually going to be returning. It feels a little bit like this to me; typedef struct tagVARIANT VARIANT; Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 15, 2004 6:12 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Putting Code on TV?

This new idea of televising development is really "interesting". I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's "interesting" meaning "good" or "interesting" meaning "weird" ;-) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 14, 2004 11:49 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Suggestions...

Blimey, just typed a whole bunch of seemingly random phrases into Google Suggest and got seemingly cool results from it. Pink Cadillac Web Services Ford Fiesta The Day After Tomorrow There's a FAQ here on how it works. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 14, 2004 11:15 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

The .netcpu

Very interesting stuff http://www.dotnetcpu.com/ Picked it up from this article and from Slashdot who've been mentioning it too. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 14, 2004 10:59 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Demos from Web Developer Day at Microsoft, Reading

I did a session today around using web services in order to extend functionality of an existing ASP.NET Web Application. In doing so, I took the excellent FotoVision sample in VB.NET and extended it to add some additional web services capabilities. Now, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 14, 2004 10:53 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Pass-Phrasing

Great post on using pass- phrases rather than pass- words to log in to your PCs. I used to use lines of songs as my passwords a long time ago, mostly because I remembered them better than anything else. I think I'll go back to it (with a mixture of lower, Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 09, 2004 3:54 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

PDC 2005

This is probably a little bit "old" by now but the date of the Professional Developer's Conference for 2005 has been posted and you can find the details here http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc It's very early days yet but at least that means Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 09, 2004 3:37 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

SQL Server Integration Servies

I was lucky today to get to sit through an introduction to SQL Server Integration Services by Donald Farmer which was a really good session. You might have heard that Integration Services is the new name for what used to be called Data Transformation Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 09, 2004 3:29 PM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

Oracle and CLR?

Interesting article here - Oracle is putting .NET CLR support into its database in a future version. Not quite clear to me whether that's just for stored procedures or whether it's more extensive than that like SQL Server 2005 is. Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 09, 2004 3:01 PM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

Media Center 2005 and .NET Framework

I just spotted that Media Center 2005 has .NET Framework V1.0.3705 rather than V1.1.4322. Now, I know and trust that installing V1.1 onto that box is going to work but has anyone tried it? ;-) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 07, 2004 3:34 PM by mtaulty | 6 Comments

Updated Bluetooth Remote Control for SmartPhone

I've published the updated version of the "PowerPoint" remote control that I wrote for SmartPhone . Morgan contributed a whole bunch of code to this - in particular, what he's done is to make the actions performed by the desktop listener in Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 07, 2004 3:24 PM by mtaulty | 16 Comments

ACL's in .NET 2.0

Nice article in MSDN Magazine about the new ACL support in .NET Framework 2.0 Read More...
Posted Monday, December 06, 2004 2:22 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Go away for a couple of days....

I've been away for a few days and came back to see that a lot of things have happened. Firstly, SQL Server 2005 has new bits available to play with if you're an MSDN Subscriber - there's a new Community Tech Preview to download and you can get the Express Read More...
Posted Monday, December 06, 2004 11:31 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments