August 2005 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Web Services Enhancements 3.0: Beta Available

Doing web services on Whidbey with WSE 3.0? The beta is now available for download . Time to update my CTP build to the beta I think - I hope it has more docs than the CTP :-)

Published Fri, Aug 26 2005 8:43 AM by mtaulty

Attending the PDC from the UK? Make friends and play "UK PDC Attendee Bingo!" :-)

I've hacked up a Wiki for folks from the UK who are attending the PDC in 2 weeks time to register their details. Here's the link http://mtaulty.com/FlexWiki

Published Fri, Aug 26 2005 6:05 AM by mtaulty

Do I want the job of "Distributed Transaction Co-ordinator"?

I've recently booked a short break away (I need to stop staring at my laptop screen) and I had the entertaining job of sitting with 2 web browser windows on my screen whilst I tried to do the "old chestnut" of booking a flight and a hotel at the same time. I tend to use Expedia to book flights but directly interact with a hotel's web site to book a room given that Expedia requires you to pay up front for a hotel which then typically shoves you into the worst room that they have (the "Expedia rooms") and you're in an awkward bargaining position in trying to get a better room having parted with your cash. So, I sit with my web browser and I perform the job of the "distributed transaction co-ordinator" or, at least, I try to. I get Expedia with my flight details to the point where I'm ready to click "purchase" and I also get the hotel web site to the same point. This is the "prepare" phase. Unfortunately, I can't actually ask these websites whether they really can "prepare" the transaction. I can only get them to...

Published Fri, Aug 26 2005 2:08 AM by mtaulty

PowerCompress software for Windows Media Center Edition

I spotted this link ( http://powercompress.com/index.asp ) to PowerCompress and their software that claims great compression rates for Media Center 2005. It sounds pretty impressive - I guess it's not too hard to compress the DVR-MS format as it seems to be pretty verbose but it'd be interesting to see how well this is integrated into the Media Center interface and how pain(ful/less) it is to use. There was an MSDN sample ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnxpmce/html/dvr-ms.asp ) posted a while back as to how you can read DVR-MS and transcode it but I found that running that on my MCE box tended to take an eternity so I'd still need a practical solution and this might just offer it. I find that if I record a film from the TV schedule then it occupies GBs of space on the MCE hard-drive whereas if I transcode one of my own DVDs to store it in DivX format on the MCE then it occupies maybe 0.5GB of space or so. The unfortunate thing right now is that PowerCompress don't have a trial...

Published Sun, Aug 21 2005 4:40 AM by mtaulty

UK MSDN Day on SQL 2005 at Reading

Marcus and I did an event down in Reading today on SQL 2005 and we promised that we'd share the demos that we used. The slide decks will be available here in a few working days. The demos are not particularly well packaged for re-use so feel free to take them (in line with the disclaimer on this site) and experiment with them but don't be too surprised if you have to play around a little to get things to work. The zip file is here In that file are four bunches of demo scripts and bits and pieces; 1) The Photo Application 2) The T-SQL enhancements scripts - exception handling etc. 3) The "snapshot isolation" mini app that we used. 4) The various pieces of the "Widget/Gadget" app we used to talk about XML. You'd need SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 to play with these fully - there's a small explanation (and a previous, less re-usable zip file) of the Photo Application here . Marcus has also blogged details of this up here .

Published Wed, Aug 17 2005 2:45 PM by mtaulty

Second UK Developer Developer Developer Day

The second UK Developer, Developer, Developer Day has been announced. This is going to be on Saturday (yes, Saturday - people really liked this last time) the 22nd October and it'll be at the Microsoft Campus down in Reading. The website with all the details is here: http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/default.asp Once again, this is going to be run by the UK developer community for the UK developer community and so there's no Microsoft speakers but there's a dazzling array of topics up here: http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/agenda.asp I'll be attending like last time and I must admit that I did try and sneak myself onto the agenda but I was politely ignored :-) I bet there's some devious way that I can get on there… What if I get someone in off the street to deliver my session and I just provide some hints on what to say? Maybe I can type in someone's code for them in their demos? I type fast :-) Maybe I can…. Maybe…

Published Tue, Aug 16 2005 1:35 AM by mtaulty

WPF: Task Switching in 3D - beginner's sample :-)

I've been playing around a little bit with the Windows Presentation Framework and taking my first baby-steps into the world of 3D that it presents. I haven't found it too bad and even managed to come out with a little bit of hit-testing under my belt but I'm a long way from having it sorted out right now. Whilst I was playing around with 3D I built a very rough-and-ready "replacement" for the ALT-TAB dialog in Windows XP that I thought I'd share as people might take it further and make it halfway decent. At the moment, it looks like this; and it works up to a point. It displays the ALT-TAB options as 3D planes with bitmaps rendered onto them (I was surprised as to how easy this is made by WPF) and it allows you to ALT-TAB your way through them and highlights (by resizing) the current choice that you've made. You can also use the arrow keys (Up/Down) to move the camera towards and away from the bitmaps to give a "zoom" effect. What's wrong with it today? 1) It's too slow. This is not a WPF thing, this is my function...

Published Mon, Aug 15 2005 3:35 PM by mtaulty

Following comments on the Indigo programming model

I've been watching this post and this one and the associated comments about Indigo and its programming model - very interesting stuff. I'm still struggling to get past the bit where someone said "boundaries are explicit" before handing me a tool that creates a proxy class. Erm…… :-)

Published Mon, Aug 15 2005 1:58 AM by mtaulty

VS 2005: Source Server Support?

I reinstalled VS 2005 the other day and as I set up my personal options (for the last time given that I've now exported them properly and stored them) I noticed something in the Tools->Options->Debugging section that I hadn't seen before (might be new, might have missed it). It was a tickbox entitled "Enable Source Server support" which sounded very interesting. Now, I've talked a little bit about working with Symbol Servers in Visual Studio 2005 ( http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=3325539 ) but source servers sound even more attractive. Today I spotted a posting from Matt Pietrek about the source server support ( http://blogs.msdn.com/matt_pietrek/archive/2005/08/10/449946.aspx ) which jogged my memory about seeing it. I need to have a play with this - sounds like an essential feature for your development team setup. There's a bit more background on how this plays in WinDbg over here but I've yet to experiment with VS 2005. I'll do so and report back here at a later point.

Published Fri, Aug 12 2005 2:56 AM by mtaulty

Avalon: Ian Griffiths has a couple of great posts

I've been playing with the WPF CTP and then the subsequent beta for a little while now and I've been running it on Windows XP. One of the things that I struggled quite a bit with was the support for Video. I can get video to play but there's some quirkiness in the beta in that sometimes things don't play quite right. One of the things that I was really curious about was the compositing of video (e.g. I can composite basic controls like buttons on top of video and that seems to work ok). With the arrival of the Vista beta I wanted to experiment with how the Longhorn Display Driver Model drivers change the way that video is rendered and whether you can do some more fancy compositing with video. For instance, wanting to put video on video seems like an obvious thing to want to try but I can't get that to work on XP. The absence of LDDM drivers for my laptop mean that I haven't really been able to play with this as of yet but it looks like IanG in this post ( http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2005/08/01/vistatransparency...

Published Fri, Aug 12 2005 2:41 AM by mtaulty

August CTP: Changes to Nullable coming

Wow - this one pretty much went by me. As I'm sure most people will have spotted, .NET FX 2.0 has a new generic type called Nullable<T> which does what you would do if you wanted to represent a Nullable reference type (i.e. store the reference type and store a flag indicating nullability). However, this blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2005/08/11/450640.aspx shows that this is being changed when the August CTP comes out to make this less of a framework feature and more of a runtime feature. Required reading!

Published Fri, Aug 12 2005 2:26 AM by mtaulty

Avalon: 3D "for the rest of us"

I'm not a 3D graphics person and never have been so I've been banging my head a little against the wall trying to understand 3D in "Avalon" (WCP now I guess). There's a couple of great articles over here http://blogs.msdn.com/danlehen/archive/2004/07/19/188075.aspx written by a danlehen which really help in making sense of it. Some of it looks similar to the SDK docs but there's a little bit more in the way of example to help you get your head arount it. For me, the piece I was really missing was the idea of "world coordinates". I'd got the idea that we had an origin of 0,0,0 and that's "middle of the screen" rather than "top left of the screen" and that was fine but I was struggling to work out what the dimensions of that space are and the posting helped a lot by saying "Hey, it's infinite in every direction". What a relief! :-)

Published Tue, Aug 9 2005 1:28 AM by mtaulty

Comments back on

Following Martin's advice ( http://martinparry.com/cooboogler/archive/2005/08/07/3603.aspx ) I've turned blog comments back on for this site so you can comment away once again. Hopefully, using that additional ASP.NET control on the comments page will stop the scenario where I have to come in and delete 1000's of spam comments :-)

Published Tue, Aug 9 2005 1:04 AM by mtaulty

First XAPP App

I've managed to get my top notch web hoster ( www.webhost4life.com ) to add the necessary MIME type mappings to their web server in order that I can deploy "Avalon" XAPP apps. My fantastic calculator app (!) is now at http://mtaulty.com/xapps/expresscalc.xapp Not the world's most exciting app but it's a start :-)

Published Sun, Aug 7 2005 3:27 PM by mtaulty

Playing with Virtual Earth

I've been playing with Virtual Earth a little bit like most other people probably have over the last week or so since it was launched. Note: This is just a sample application that I was playing with for my own fun. Take care to read the terms and conditions for the Virtual Earth service before you go making use of their content for any purpose beyond playing around with it for personal use. I was interested that the programmability for Virtual Earth ( http://www.viavirtualearth.com ) seems to be largely aimed at people building Javascript applications in the browser. There's a library that you can reference from the website and then that gives you a "control" that you can embed in your browser applications. Taking a different tack, I wanted to try and write some code that would let me make use of Virtual Earth from a Windows Forms application rather than just from a browser and so I had a little bit of an attempt at it. I've not spent a tonne of time on it as I started to realise that if I wanted to...

Published Mon, Aug 1 2005 3:49 PM by mtaulty