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March 2005 - Posts

Indigo: Switching encoding on channels

In my previous posts about Indigo messaging making use of channels; A slightly different "hello world" for Indigo Layers of Indigo Indigo- Moving on from IInputChannel to IRequestChannel I went with the default encoding of the messages that Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 2:25 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Indigo: Moving on from IInputChannel to IRequestChannel

In my previous Indigo post , I made use of a simple IOutputChannel for sending a message and IInputChannel for receiving one. Naturally, there are other message exchange patterns (MEPs) and there's modelling for these in other channel interfaces which Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 2:11 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Layers of Indigo

In trying to understand the Indigo CTP, the sketch that's resonating best with me right now is the one below which I've stolen from a slide-deck and shows how the technology is layered . An application can make use of any or a mixture of the layers. At Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 2:08 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

.NET BCL Team Blog

This is old but I wasn't aware of it. The .NET Framework Base Class Library (BCL) team has a blog site over here; http://blogs.msdn.com/bclteam It looks like pretty good stuff to me - only had a chance to skim through the most recent posts but there's Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 10:49 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 & x64 OS editions

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 released yesterday. There's a press-release here http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-30winservsp1pr.asp that you can follow. Hidden down at the bottom of that is a mention of the fact that the versions Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 31, 2005 10:08 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

A slightly different "hello world" for Indigo

I've started playing with Indigo a little bit. Clemens Vasters has three great posts on the basics of Indigo so I'm not going to reiterate those here but will link to them; A Weekend With Indigo. Part 1- Simple Messaging A Weekend With Indigo. Part 2- Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2005 3:40 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Indigo, Proxies and Generic Types

There's something that the Indigo team seem to be doing with their proxies and generic types that I hadn't really thought about previously. The pattern looks something like this; class b<T> { public b() { } protected T _member = default(T); } interface Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2005 6:44 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Aaron Skonnard on ASMX V2.0

Aaron Skonnard has written a great article on the new ASMX web service features that you can expect to find in Visual Studio 2005 beta 2 when it comes out. The highlights from this for me; The improved XML editing support (yes, the XML editor gets snippets Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 30, 2005 12:53 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Sample ASP.NET 2.0 Membership Provider

In ASP.NET 2.0 we have the provider model where storage for the different API sets (e.g. Membership, Profile, Navigation, etc.) is pluggable in that you write a provider for your particular store if we don't ship one that you want to use. I got asked Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 24, 2005 1:25 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

Shuttle Media Center at CEBIT

Wow, it looks like Shuttle had a very smart preview of a new form factor they're doing for a media center PC at CeBIT this year. There's a reasonably decent picture here http://eu.shuttle.com/en/resourceimage.aspx?raid=12464 - looks just like a Video Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 22, 2005 2:37 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Web Services on MSDN Nuggets

A new set of "Web Services" MSDN Nuggets have started to drop out on the UK MSDN Site . MSDN Nuggets are 10-15 minute demonstration clips of how to get stuff done with the .NET Framework each one exploring a particular topic with little/no presentation Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 22, 2005 4:00 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Announcing a Unique UK .NET Developer Event

The fantabulous Mr Mike Pelton has turned up the activity level on his blog site and has posted some information about the "Developer...Developer...Developer" event that's being hosted at Microsoft UK on Saturday (yes, Saturday) the 14th May. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 22, 2005 3:52 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Whidbey ASP.NET and Windows SharePoint Services WebParts

There's an important post over here Keep Writing SharePoint Web Parts Until (at least) 2006 about the interoperability that you can expect to get between Whidbey ASP.NET 2.0 WebParts and Windows SharePoint Services WebParts. Read More...
Posted Monday, March 21, 2005 3:10 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

MSDN Subscription Changes & VS 2005 Pricing/Licensing Details Announced

MSDN subscriptions are changing with the forthcoming release of VS2005 and the licensing/pricing for VS 2005 has been announced. There's a press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-21vs2005pr.asp but the meat of the information Read More...
Posted Monday, March 21, 2005 11:15 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Displaying my blog site in FireFox

I got some feedback from Oliver Sturm that my blog site displayed horribly in FireFox so I grabbed myself a copy tonight and took a look and he's definitely right (thanks for sending me the pictures, Oliver). So...the blog site has a new theme (the .Text Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 20, 2005 3:13 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

My Boss Is Blogging

My boss is blogging. I work for the excellent Mike Ormond and you can find his blog over here . Hopefully, me calling him "excellent" moves me a step further away from being fired this year ;-) The only downside is that I've noticed that Mike Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 20, 2005 2:47 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Whidbey and 64-bit Compiler Options

There's something that's been nagging me for weeks about Visual Studio Whidbey and .NET Framework 2.0 and it relates to the 64-bit support that's built in for the two Intel 64-bit solutions and the AMD 64-bit solution. You can see it in a new command Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 20, 2005 2:40 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

VS 2005 Hyperlinks

I just wanted to post some links around Visual Studio 2005. There's a whole lot of new bits in VS2005 which you might partition across; What's New in the IDE and the Languages Visual Basic - What's New in IDE and Languages? Visual C# - What's new in IDE Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005 4:57 PM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

SuperSite Article on Windows Longhorn

The SuperSite for Windows has an update article on Windows Longhorn status . I've no idea as to how (in)accurate this is which means that it was an interesting read for me. Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005 3:23 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

"Ajax"

I keep hearing about "Ajax" and it's not the cleaning product that I remember from childhood . There's a really well written description of Ajax up here at the Adaptive Path website - essentially Ajax is about getting a better web browsing technique Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005 1:27 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Indigo and Avalon March CTP's available

Wahey! According to this page up at the MSDN site the Indigo and Avalon Community Technology Previews have been posted to the MSDN site for MSDN subscribers. Go Download and don't forget the docs . Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 17, 2005 1:17 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Failed To Create AppDomain

I was playing around with Visual Studio Whidbey last night and had been altering my CAS security policy. I tested what I wanted and forgot all about it. This morning, I came to play with some of my ASP.NET demo projects and found that when I ran up the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 16, 2005 3:31 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Indigo CTP Docs Available

You've got to imagine that this will get flagged up a lot over the next few days but the documentation for the Indigo Community Tech Preview have gone up onto the MSDN site. You've still got to wait for the code, mind :-) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 16, 2005 1:46 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Building Managed Apps? Take the survey

Are you building an application on the .NET Framework? The product team would like to be aware of you - take a look at the survey on the Wiki here . Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 15, 2005 1:57 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Update On SQL Server 2005 (UK MSDN Flash Article)

This is an "Update on SQL Server 2005" article that I wrote for the MSDN Flash in the UK that went out today. Publishing it here in case there's a gap between people who view this site and people who view the UK MSDN Flash; It’s been around Read More...
Posted Monday, March 14, 2005 3:36 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Bluetooth ray gun :-)

There's an interesting article over on Tom's Hardware about how you can build a "gun" which can track Bluetooth devices from almost a mile away . Ok, it looks silly but what you might be able to do with it is fairly interesting. From the same Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 09, 2005 4:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Chat to the Windows Installer Product Team

The one thing that I found in software product development that almost nobody ever wants to talk about is the installation program. It's rare to find an opportunity to talk about Windows Installer and so I'm highlighting the following chat with the product Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 08, 2005 9:17 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Outlook Mailbox Size Visualiser

I've written a little bit of code that I wanted to share. It's a plug-in for Outlook 2003 which helps you see where your email storage has gone. If you're anything like me in your usage of Outlook then you're constantly getting emails from your Exchange Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 08, 2005 6:59 AM by mtaulty | 14 Comments

Tying Some Links Together

Just a few quick links back to previous items on my blog site.I get a few hits around a small number of things; 1) The WSE 2.0 Tracing Tool. 2) The bluetooth remote control for PowerPoint from a SmartPhone 3) The stuff about the LinkSys wireless router. Read More...
Posted Friday, March 04, 2005 5:40 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

SQL Server 2005: February Community Technical Preview Released

The February Community Tech Preview of SQL Server 2005 has gone public. You can find details and download the Express edition here and I believe that you can get the full versions from MSDN Subscriber downloads (I must admit that my subscription randomly Read More...
Posted Friday, March 04, 2005 9:01 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Martin on Extending Common Dialogs

Martin's just published an MSDN article around how you can write managed code to extend the standard selection dialogs in order to add things like preview panels and so on. Almost every ISV wants to do this kind of thing and it's limiting that the standard Read More...
Posted Friday, March 04, 2005 8:48 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Media Center and DVR-MS

Morgan's pointed out this article on MSDN to me about the DVR-MS format that Windows Media Center uses for storing TV your recorded content. I haven't read it yet, just scanned it (noticed a reference to the Running Object Table in there which I haven't Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 03, 2005 5:50 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Processor Performance Top 5

Really good blog post over here by Rico Mariani about trying to be performant at the processor level in thinking about cache misses, translation look-aside buffers and so on. Great read. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 02, 2005 4:24 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Bendy Displays

The Polymer Vision rollable-displays look very cool indeed. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 02, 2005 10:00 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

WSE2.0, TCP transports and Socket Options

Steve pointed out something to me about WSE2.0 and the TCP transport. Apparently you can encounter a "An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions" error if you're a non admin user trying to run up a SOAP Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 02, 2005 7:33 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Cables just have to be easier than this...

The painful world of wireless networking continues. I have an SMC Barricade wireless router. At the moment, I'm finding that around 5-10 times a day this box seems to just die and I have to go switch it off, wait a while and switch it back on and then Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 02, 2005 6:55 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WindowsForms and the Idle Loop

When you're writing Windows Forms applications it's always nice to be able to keep the UI responsive in order to avoid frustrating the user. I seem to remember reading a UI study ages back which said that if the UI hangs for about 1/10th of a second the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 02, 2005 1:31 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Rant: House Prices

<rant> From time to time, I have a housing rant and today's the day :-) The single biggest headache for me right now is the price of housing in the UK. This is mainly because I made a big mistake around 5 years ago and dropped out of the housing Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2005 3:47 PM by mtaulty | 5 Comments

MSDN Magazine has some great articles

Ok, I've just blogged a couple of posts about interesting MSDN articles only to realise that there's a tonne of them out there so here's a few combined. The latest issue of the MSDN Magazine has some seriously top-notch articles in it. Makes you wish Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2005 3:35 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

John Robbins on .NET V2.0 and SOS.DLL

Another interesting MSDN Magazine article - this time John Robbins on debugging with SOS.DLL in V2.0 of the .NET Framework. I've got an intro to doing this kind of debugging with V1.1 here and here and here . Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2005 2:39 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WSE2.0 Messaging and Serialization

There are some interesting bits in this MSDN Magazine Article written by Chris Dix about WSE 2.0 web services and taking control of your XML. Chris calls out IXmlElement and OpenElement as routes to custom XML for SOAP messages - must admit that I'd not Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2005 2:35 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

MSN Remote Record for Media Center 2005

I missed this one. Owners of Media Center 2005 can now schedule programmes to be recorded on their machine when they're not necessarily-so-near the machine :-) Take a look at the MSN Remote Record Service - I've yet to try this but I'll give it a whirl Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2005 8:07 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

WSE 2.0 Service Pack 3

If you're doing work with the Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 2.0 then you need to go and download the latest service pack. That service pack is Sp3 and it's available from MSDN for download . From the readme file that accompanies the release it sounds Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 01, 2005 12:57 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments