Mike Taulty's Blog
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April 2005 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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Mike Taulty's Blog

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  • VS 2005 Filtering IntelliSense by Code Permissions

    Wow. I wasn't aware of this feature in VS 2005 and it sounds very useful to me.
  • Mixing and matching .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0

    This question http://blogs.msdn.com/junfeng/archive/2004/07/14/181938.aspx about whether a .NET Framework 1.1 application can host a .NET Framework V2.0 assembly (and vice versa) is going to get asked a lot as we head towards the .NET Framework 2.0 release.
  • Media Center Fun & Games

    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...
  • Hack Attack

    This http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22838 sounds like an urban myth to me but it's a good enough one that it made me laugh.
  • UK .NET Community Developer Day

    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
  • 4 into 1 does go

    After dual-core, comes quad-core. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22822
  • InPhase Storage Media

    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.
  • Google Maps updated to include the UK

    The Google maps http://maps.google.co.uk/ service has been extended to include the UK. I've typed in some postcodes and it seems to work pretty well. I've asked it for driving directions and that looks pretty good too and zooming in and scrolling works pretty well too. All in all it's an impressive display of what you can do within a web browser if you're a script guru. I'm guessing that the satellite imagery will show up soon for the UK as well and then I'll be able to see where I am :-)
  • Yet Another C-Sharp Comment (YACC)

    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...
  • Indigo: Layered Channels and Channel Factories

    I've been trying to experiment a little bit with the "layered" approach to channels in Indigo. Once again, this is just my playing around so take with a large pinch of salt and you certainly don't have to build apps this way in Indigo (the higher level API's are absolutely the place to start and almost certainly the place to stay, I'm just playing). Anyway, playing with the layered API's. In most messaging technologies you come across a "pipeline" of some sort. A pipeline's usually some set of configured components that perhaps run in a particular order to add/remove information to/from a message as it flows in/out of a system. Indigo seems to have this kind of concept for its channels. You can build a "channel stack" where at the bottom you have a transport channel (e.g. HTTP or TCP) and then you can put another channel on top of that that implements (e.g.) security and when you send through the secure channel it layers on top of the transport channel. In creating these layered channels...
  • Post Events from the UK Technical Roadshow

    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 .
  • Indigo: Compelling part of WinFX?

    Just pointing out this posting: Is Indigo compelling or boring It's an interesting one and I think I'm pretty much in agreement. My dream around Indigo from what I've seen so far is that "down the line" the distributed technology decision for the MS platform will be a "no-brainer" in that you'll select Indigo and design your application with it. At some later point you'll deploy your app and configure what kind of transport you want, what kind of security you want and so on. What's the main advantage? For me, it's the reduction in the complexity . Today, you need to have so much stuff in your head to make a decision about how to build a distributed application on the MS platform. There's a whole host of technologies from things like socket programming, dcom programming, enterprise services, remoting, asmx web services, wse web services, message queue programming all the way up to things like BizTalk adapters and pipelines and SQL Server Service Broker queues. I don't want all that stuff in...
  • Windows Forms Applications & Memory Usage

    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...
  • Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and SQL Server 2005 April CTP

    Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 is available for download. See here http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/get/ if you're an MSDN subscriber and want a full edition (note that you can get Standard, Professional and Team System editions this time around). See here http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/ if you're not an MSDN subscriber or you want one of the Express editions. There's an accompanying, updated version of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (the April CTP) which you can get from here http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/sql/default.aspx The big difference with Beta 2 is that it comes along with a "Go Live" license ( http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/golive/ ) which covers Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2, .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 and SQL Server 2005 Express April CTP (see the link for the details) and there's a FAQ here http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/golive/faq/ If you're in the UK or the wider European region then check out the "Beta Experience" http://www.microsoft.com/emea/msdn/betaexperience...
  • PDC 2005: What do you want to see there?

    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.
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