October 2005 - Mike Taulty's Blog

.NET 2.0: How far it's come

There's been a lot of discussion recently about how much new technology is on its way from Microsoft and, in particular, how big WinFX is and how much learning a person's got to try and do if they want to get it at least reasonably well structured inside their head. I've heard this a lot in internal discussions and I've also seen it externally in the community in posts such as this one from Clemens which has been referenced a lot ( http://staff.newtelligence.net/clemensv/PermaLink,guid,fdf5f8bf-199c-47c3-8cbb-838fab12f83e.aspx ) and sums up the situation really well. This kind of "overload" idea popped up at an internal meeting yesterday and we had an interesting bit of a discussion that centred on the idea that whilst, yes, there's a tonne of technology coming out of the MS product teams it maybe isn't quite as hard as it used to be to take it onboard and understand it because it all kind of "looks the same". What do I mean by "looks the same"? What I really mean is that it's almost entirely all about .NET I...

Published Fri, Oct 28 2005 4:34 AM by mtaulty

On Developer Presentations: Talk == (Code + Pictures)

I did a couple of talks this week at a SQL event down at Microsoft in Reading, one was on the SQL/CLR integration and the other was a tour around SQL Server Integration Services. We had around 180 or so attendees and I had a lot of fun with the day and the people that came along were sharp and enthusiastic with questions and so on making it a really good day. I delivered it with Eric ( http://blogs.msdn.com/ericnel/default.aspx ) who did a session on the T-SQL enhancements in SQL 2005 and a second one on SQL Server Reporting Services in 2005 (particularly around the new ReportBuilder). I've been on a form of "progression" with the talks that I deliver for the past 12 months or so where I've been very consciously trying to get myself away from relying on PowerPoint slides to jog my memory (which is very poor) as to what I'm meant to be doing next and what salient bits of information I'm supposed to be delivering to the audience. For instance, my SQL/CLR session was really just given as 75 minutes of various bits...

Published Fri, Oct 28 2005 4:12 AM by mtaulty

And Me! And Me! Visual Studio 2005 Has Shipped!

Read the official posting over here; http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2005/10/27/485665.aspx

Published Thu, Oct 27 2005 11:57 AM by mtaulty

PDC Sessions Now Available Online/Offline for Viewing

This is a very cool resource: the sessions from the PDC are available here http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/ for people to watch online/offline. I'll be downloading the ones that I missed and adding them to my external hard drive for those evenings where I'm stuck in a hotel and there's nothing on the TV (welcome to my world ;-)). If you didn't attend PDC then this is a great thing to get access to - there's some top-quality material amongst that set of talks.

Published Wed, Oct 26 2005 4:23 AM by mtaulty

MSDN Nuggets: Windows Communication Foundation

I started building a series of the UK MSDN "Nugget" videos on the Windows Communication Foundation. So far, I've built about 10 or so of these and have topics for perhaps another 6-8 or something like that. They've just started being published to the MSDN site ( http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/nuggets.aspx ) but the better links to use right now (because the page is too long and is slightly broken at the time of writing) would be these two below; Windows Communication Foundation: "Hello World" Windows Communication Foundation: "Type Serialization" As I say, more to come. Do let me know if you think these have technical problems or if you think they're a good or bad idea.

Published Wed, Oct 26 2005 4:07 AM by mtaulty

VBUG: Coventry events - get signed up!

I met up with the guys who run VBUG in Coventry over the weekend and they flagged up a couple of meetings that they've got coming up in the near future which I wanted to share here. These chaps have a great venue and they're a brilliant crowd so if you're in the area see if you can get along. Firstly, there's a security event on the 31st October - check out the link here ( http://www.costall.net/blog.aspx?BID=1128 ). The speaker is Microsoft's very own (and excellent) Steve Lamb who's going to be using the Halloween theme to talk about all those nasty things that go bump in the night on your PC. The second event is on the 14th November and is a Coventry event to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. The hyperlink is here http://www.costall.net/blog.aspx?BID=1129 and, from what I've heard, the format is going to be quite different from a standard event and should prove to be a lot of fun. Register!

Published Mon, Oct 24 2005 1:11 AM by mtaulty

WPF in the browser

I picked up this link ( http://www.valil.com/winfx/ads.html ) to a mini-app that hosts WPF in the browser to show some book details from Amazon. If you have WinFX installed (Sept Preview for me) then the white box will get replaced by some WPF which shows a couple of books and does some animation on them. The thing that I noticed was that the load time's fairly slow right now - on first visit I thought the page was broken until it popped up quite a while after I requested it. On second visit it improved quite a bit but still is about a full 5 seconds before something happens. I imagine those load times will improve and/or we'll have those "Loading…" screens that we're familiar with from Flash.

Published Wed, Oct 19 2005 2:32 AM by mtaulty

Windows Vista October CTP Posted

As reviewed (not entirely favourably :-)) on Paul Thurrot's site; http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5231.asp Windows Vista build 5231 has been released as a Community Tech Preview to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Brace yourself for a big download if you're going to visit MSDN and give it a whirl.

Published Mon, Oct 17 2005 11:46 AM by mtaulty

CNET News has one of those nice News Visualiser Apps

I love these kinds of "display related links in a graph" kind of applications; http://news.com.com/2104-1016_3-5896983.html?tag=st.bp Cnet has one that I noticed today, I'm not sure how far it goes but it's centred (on that page) around Microsoft and you can follow the links to other nodes and certainly reach IBM and Sun.

Published Mon, Oct 17 2005 11:44 AM by mtaulty

Recorded session on some bits of ASMX V2.0 and WSE V3.0

I was booked to be down at the London .NET Developer's Group ( http://iancooper.brinkster.net/Pages/UG_Meetings.aspx ) last night to talk a little bit around web services with ASMX V2.0 and WSE 3.0 (I'm still on the Beta rather than the October Preview - need to move soon). This talk didn't happen in the end because the scheduling of the room went wayward and it turned out that two groups had booked the room at the same time and our booking got bounced. So, apologies if you were disappointed by this not happening - if it's any consolation I'd spent a little time on it and had got myself down to the right end of the Country to present it :-) As a consolation prize, I've recorded the session as a screen-capture (or webcast) and it's available from this link here; http://mtaulty.com/downloads/asmxwselddg.wmv It's about 90 minutes long (of course, you can watch at 1.4X or 2.0X the original recorded speed) and the file size runs to about 50MB. Not sure whether my web hosting will be able to cope if a lot of people...

Published Fri, Oct 14 2005 7:33 AM by mtaulty

The Road To WinFX

Two UK guys, Simon and Jonathan have put together a fantastic WinFX resource site over here; http://www.roadtowinfx.com It's well worth you popping over there and having a look at all the great bits that they've managed to pull together and subscribing to their RSS Feed. They've got a really good set of combined resources and a nice "Getting Started" guide which is invaluable right now. The two comments I keep hearing around WinFX right now are; 1) This stuff is great! quickly followed by 2) This stuff is huge! Hopefully as this site grows it'll be one of a number of key resources that'll help to get past that 2nd point :-)

Published Wed, Oct 12 2005 5:16 AM by mtaulty

Developer Day at Microsoft TVP Saturday 22nd October is FULL!

Yep, I'm reliably informed by the woman in the know that the Developer Day at Microsoft TVP in Reading on Saturday the 22nd October is now full. They have over 350 people registered for the day and there are people on the waiting list. A special plea! If you've booked to attend the Developer Day on the 22nd and you already know that you won't be able to make it (hey, stuff happens) then please use the link below and cancel your registration to let someone else in. https://msevents-eu.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-GB&eventid=118761886 I'm still not speaking at this event :-)

Published Tue, Oct 11 2005 1:43 AM by mtaulty

WSE 3.0: October CTP Available

Turn around these days and you miss something. It looks like WSE3.0 has a new preview available here : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6bafe8a6-cdc9-4ae6-9625-e6260ccdef24&displaylang=en I've not had a chance to try it yet - got too much invested in the current preview to move off of it this week :-)

Published Mon, Oct 10 2005 8:08 AM by mtaulty

Man and machine in perfect harmony :-)

I got a new laptop the other week and it's turned out to be very good so far. I've switched from the not very impressive Dell 5150 which I had an awful lot of trouble with - build quality did not seem to be what I would have hoped for - to a Toshiba Tecra M3 which is working very well for me. The specs of the two machines are comparable in terms of RAM and disk (although the Tosh spins at 7200rpm for the disk which seems to make a difference) but they differ slightly in terms of graphics cards - got a 128MB card in the Tosh which (I hope) will do a decent job on Windows Vista and they also differ in terms of processors. My Dell had a hyperthreaded P4 at 3GHz whereas the Tosh is a plain old single core Pentium M at 2.13Ghz. I've noticed very little difference in performance between the two and it's possible that the Tosh is giving me better perf than the Dell did so maybe there's something in that whole story about "pipeline depth" and the P4/Pentium argument over desktop/server software. What do I like most about...

Published Fri, Oct 7 2005 8:08 AM by mtaulty

UK SharePoint User's Group

I got a mail from Nick Swan about a new user group that he's creating for Windows SharePoint Services . I'm a user of SharePoint but I'm not really very deep in terms of what I know about it. I have talked at SharePoint events in the past but it was very much scoped down to developing WebParts for SharePoint and how those things work on your site which was very much a matter of just understanding the programming model for those WebParts. So, if you're in the UK and you're interested in SharePoint then check out Nick's new group and sign up today :-)

Published Thu, Oct 6 2005 10:26 AM by mtaulty