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 Read More

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 Read More

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. Read More

.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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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> {             Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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

"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 Read More

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

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 Read More

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

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

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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

Bendy Displays

The Polymer Vision rollable-displays look very cool indeed. Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More