December 2004 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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 "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 the noise. I figured (from reading around a lot) that it was sufficient to do the job for Media Center and, so far, it seems fine. NEC ND-3500A Dual Layer DVD/RW (an OEM'd version of it) NVidia DVD Decoder - you'll need a decoder if you want to play DVDs as, just like Windows XP, you...

Published Wed, Dec 29 2004 9:34 AM by mtaulty

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.

Published Thu, Dec 23 2004 4:52 PM by mtaulty

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" but that's another story). So, I've gone onto XBox Live to try out the Halo 2 stuff on there and I've played a few games. Problem is, the people you come up against on XBox Live seem to fall into a category of "professional gamer". Now, admittedly, I'm pretty poor but each game I play lasts about 2 mintues during which I lose 10-0 :-) Initially, it's funny but then it's dull. I'm trying to find a weapon to use whilst the other guy is hiding in all kinds of nooks and crannies on the map with a small arsenal at his disposal. I wonder if they could have a "junior league" for people who only have the odd hour here and there to devote to it? The rating system seems to have me pitched way above my limited abilities :-)

Published Wed, Dec 22 2004 4:49 PM by mtaulty

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 - the information around how it works is detailed here I found it most interesting to switch the focus down to "Application Development" and have a play with those figures. According to the list .NET is now the top most sought after skill coming in at 8.20% with an average salary of £40,000. Hmmm. I've made a mental note about that :-) The next top few skills are XML, J2EE, HTML, ASP.NET. Ah, hang on - that's .NET again, isn't it? I guess there's a certain level of aggregation that you could do with some of the figures. Apparently, the top paying skill (at £100,000) comes out as "WS-I". In fact, if you know something about WS-I, WSDL, XML Messaging, UDDI (not too hard) then it looks like you'll be in the money as long as you can...

Published Wed, Dec 22 2004 2:20 PM by mtaulty

ASus Barebones

New Asus barebones system looks neat

Published Wed, Dec 22 2004 9:26 AM by mtaulty

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 (I've only got one wireless card that seems to support WPA). All seems well. Setup of the US Robotics device was very easy and it seems to work - I've finally managed to copy across the 1GB file I was trying to copy across the LinkSys (it kept failing in that it somehow seems to stop sending/receiving data after about 5-10 minutes. It also does this on Xbox Live games). The USR copied it first time, I've got a constant Ping going against the USR to see if it dies at all but, so far, it's giving the appearance of being a device that works :-)

Published Fri, Dec 17 2004 8:16 AM by mtaulty

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 that indexing, my experimental searches through the toolbar are working very well indeed. I think that ultimately these tools will be a big leap forward in that they seem to offer the possibility of just giving a machine something to store and getting it brought back in response to a query rather than having to build your own hierarchical model that lets you later find back the things you've dropped on the disk. I also like the fact that this little textbox will accept commands such as "=cmd" so it provides a one-stop shop for; Launching web site Launching network shares Launching applications Finding stuff Smart :-)

Published Wed, Dec 15 2004 2:56 PM by mtaulty

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; typedef struct tagVARIANT VARIANTARG; struct tagVARIANT { union { struct __tagVARIANT { VARTYPE vt; WORD wReserved1; WORD wReserved2; WORD wReserved3; union { LONGLONG llVal; LONG lVal; BYTE bVal; SHORT iVal; FLOAT fltVal; DOUBLE dblVal; etc.

Published Wed, Dec 15 2004 6:12 AM by mtaulty

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" ;-)

Published Tue, Dec 14 2004 11:49 AM by mtaulty

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.

Published Tue, Dec 14 2004 11:15 AM by mtaulty

The .netcpu

Very interesting stuff http://www.dotnetcpu.com/ Picked it up from this article and from Slashdot who've been mentioning it too.

Published Tue, Dec 14 2004 10:59 AM by mtaulty

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, FotoVision is mainly a Smart Client sample but it does also have a web site and some web service support. In the interests of making a demo I removed the web services that were already there and added some of my own. In building the web services I showed how we can use FotoVision's FileManager class in order to build simple web services that upload and download photographs and get details of albums. I used the Web Services Enhancements 2.0 Service Pack 2 in order to work with file attachments and in order to "secure" the web services (through a UsernameToken) so lock down access against just anybody. I ran out of time in my session but the idea was to show that we can also use the Smart Client Offline block in order to provide online/offline use of the...

Published Tue, Dec 14 2004 10:53 AM by mtaulty

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, upper casing and punctuation thrown in).

Published Thu, Dec 9 2004 3:54 PM by mtaulty

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 that you (and me) have a good span of time to work out how to convince the powers-that-be that we need to be there in September 2005 :-)

Published Thu, Dec 9 2004 3:37 PM by mtaulty

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 Services in SQL Server 2005. If you have heard that then you need to start over because Integration Services is way beyond that. Integration Services is a brand new Extract, Transform and Load tool that ships in SQL 2005. It provides functionality (like DTS before it) for moving data from one place to another with rich capabilities for manipulating that data in-flight. Integration Services has a really great development environment hosted in a Visual Studio shell with cool capabilities in terms of building workflows and pipelines out of a rich set of pre-built or custom components (written in managede or unmanaged code). The facilities for deploying, debugging and monitoring the packages that you can develop with Integration Services are really powerful and the workflow...

Published Thu, Dec 9 2004 3:29 PM by mtaulty