April 2005 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Wow. I wasn't aware of this feature in VS 2005 and it sounds very useful to me.

I got home late last night to find the TV in disarray. The Media Center was displaying an error saying something like; "DVD Decoder Error. The DVD decoder has either malfunctioned or is not installed. Please re-start Media Center or the computer or both" You can imagine how well that was going down with someone who just wanted to watch TV. Lots of rebooting had already gone on but to no avail. I spent a couple of hours on this. What the error actually meant was; "Your trial version of the NVidia DVD Decoder has now expired, you need to buy a copy before you can view any video". but it took me a little while to work out that was what was really going on (nothing in the event log, not much else to go off). I found a useful utility up here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=DE1491AC-0AB6-4990-943D-627E6ADE9FCB&displaylang=en which will show you which DVD Decoder you're currently using. I went to buy the Nvidia DVD Decoder and, unfortunately, their online web store has...

Another link to publicise the UK Developer Day which is an event we're hosting at the Microsoft Campus on Saturday (!) the 14th May. It's an entirely community led event and the details of it are very well laid out on the website that you can get to by following the link below; http://www.developerday.co.uk

Ok, so I don't understand it properly but if this is correct then InPhase http://www.inphase-technologies.com/ has made a big breakthrough on recording media. These guys are hoping to get 300GB on a single storage disk from 2006 and trying to get up to 1.6TB by 2009. The mind boggles.

There's a lot of stuff flying around about VB and .NET at the moment and a new one came across my mailbox today: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/CSharpVersusVB.asp This article argues that essentially there's a "VB Culture" and a "C# Culture" and that, generally, speaking VB programmers are rubbish and C# programmers are great. I'm not sure whether it's just been posted to get on people's nerves but where do people get this stuff? My experience of developers (whatever language you might pick off the shelf) was that there were good developers and poor developers and you couldn't look at the language they were writing software in to decide whether they were good or not. This was the case back when people wrote assembly, then when they wrote C and then when they wrote C++ and so on. Good developers and bad developers. Interested developers and not-so-interested developers. etc. The interesting thing about this whole Visual Basic argument is that it seems to me that the .NET Framework and...

If you attended the Microsoft Technical Roadshow in Edinburgh last week then the materials from the event have been posted here; http://www.microsoft.com/uk/resources/techroadshow/postevents/default.mspx If you didn't then maybe I'll see you at Birmingham, Harrogate or London. The registration page is here http://www.microsoft.co.uk/events/RegisterMulti.aspx?event=TechnicalRoadshow2005 .

This is probably a daft post but I've been thinking about this post over here http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/04/coming-net-world-im-scared.html which looks at a comparison between a simple .NET Windows Forms applications and a comparable native application in terms of the amount of processor cycles expended to get the application onto the screen and the number of privates bytes (i.e. pages not sharable with other applications) that each consume. There's been work done on this in the .NET Framework V2.0 and there are points to be argued about start-up costs of applications, today's incredible hardware and programmer productivity but the comments on the blog post set me to wondering about .NET applications. How come, when we write two ASP.NET applications we tend to host them in a single process and separate them out by application domain boundaries? How come we don't do this when we write Windows Forms applications for the desktop? What would the benefit be (for code-sharing given that, by default, a number...

Microsoft's big developer shinding, the Professional Developer's Conference is 4-5 months away (check out the site here http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/ - it even has its own little RSS Feed to subscribe to). If you're interested in influencing what happens at the conference then check out this posting here http://blogs.msdn.com/jmazner/archive/2005/04/07/406324.aspx to feedback on what you'd like to see.