November 2005 - Mike Taulty's Blog

AsyncOperationManager.

I learnt something new today that I hadn't seen before in .NET 2.0. I got it from this link here and it is somewhat related to something I posted a long time ago about capturing ExecutionContext back here Essentially, it was this class called AsyncOperationManager which, as far as I can see, helps when you're trying to write a component which might call back (or fire events) into a consumer and that consumer might have a particular context that they're bound to (e.g. the consumer might be a windows forms control which has thread affinity and needs to be called on the thread that it was created on). To play around with this I wrote this little class (note: it's not meant to be bullet proof! it's just an example) that asynchronously reads a file from the disk and notifies a consumer as progress is made in reading that file. public class AsyncFileReadProgressEventArgs : EventArgs { public AsyncFileReadProgressEventArgs( int percentageRead) { this .percentageRead = percentageRead; } private int percentageRead; public...

Published Wed, Nov 30 2005 6:31 AM by mtaulty

WinFX November CTP and IMG files

I just downloaded the WinFX November CTP bits from here In doing so, the SDK came on a .IMG file which I didn't really have a clue what to do with - not a format that I've had to play with before. It turns out that renaming this to .ISO and mounting it with Daemon Tools seems to work just fine - posting this just in case anyone else was confused like I was.

Published Wed, Nov 30 2005 4:48 AM by mtaulty

Laptop.Wipe(); Laptop.Install()

I was out doing a couple of talks on VS 2005 and SQL 2005 and I don't have another one for a little while to do off my own laptop so it gives me time to finally get around to installing the RTM of VS 2005 and SQL 2005 (I've been using RTM versions in VPC images and the Beta 2 bits on my own laptop which also had the September preview of WinFX on it). I've uninstalled just about everything to do with WinFX and then I uninstalled VS and finally SQL 2005. All uninstallations went just fine so that was great. I then went ahead and installed from ISO images (using DAEMON tools to mount the ISO images so that my OS can see them as real DVDs without having to actually burn DVDs). I installed SQL 2005 Developer Edition first. The only "problem" I had was SQL complaining that I had databases in the c:\program files\microsoft sql server\mssql.1\mssql\data folder and that I needed to tidy them up to continue installation. After that, all worked fine. Installation of VS 2005 worked just the same way so that's testament to...

Published Tue, Nov 29 2005 4:23 PM by mtaulty

InfoCard Documents

I picked up a post from somewhere that included the links to these new InfoCard docs that look very useful to me; Guide to Integrating with InfoCard Technical Reference for InfoCard I've updated this post after starting to wade through these documents. The first thing I'd say is that these are written in a way that makes reading a little tricky :-) The one thing that I always forget and have to re-read is WS-Trust and WS-Trust underlies the whole of this document. Also involved are WS-Security, SecureConversation and MetadataExchange but those never throw me as much as WS-Trust always seems to because the name is non-intuitive to me. My simplistic understanding of WS-Trust is that it helps in the scenario where you want to speak to a Service (S) and that service has a security policy which says "I accept a particular type of security token" and you don't happen to have one of those tokens. It helps because the service's policy can redirect you to another Service (TS) which might be able to help you get the kind...

Published Tue, Nov 29 2005 12:56 AM by mtaulty

UK SQL Server Events

The SQL Server User's Group has a couple of great SQL Server events coming up with the fantasic Mr Itzik Ben-Gan author of books such as this one The first event is in Reading at Microsoft on the 29th November and it's on " Advanced Querying and Query Tuning in SQL Server 2000 and 2005 ". The second one is up in Edinburgh on the 1st December and it's on " What's new for the DBA in SQL Server 2005 ". Get yourself registered, they'll be great events.

Published Mon, Nov 21 2005 6:58 AM by mtaulty

Big News (for me): November CTP of WinFX now available

The November CTP of WinFX is now available (start here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E5376297-DA10-4FC3-967D-38C96F767FC4&displaylang=en ) This supports the released version of Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework so it looks like I finally get to rebuild my laptop's main installation with released software. I've got an Indigo talk to give next week so I might have to wait another few days before I can take the risk of uninstalling everything and re-doing it.

Published Sat, Nov 19 2005 1:34 AM by mtaulty

Indigo - Basic Http Profile with SSL in a self-hosted service ("The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a send")

I was playing with Indigo (PDC build) today and trying to get a basic self-hosted (i.e. outside IIS) application to use the wsHttpProfile alongside SSL or "transport" security. This is purely for development, not for any kind of production. I was puzzling to work out which certificate on my machine was being used for the SSL because there doesn't seem to be an option to specify the certificate in the System.ServiceModel config section. This posting ( http://pluralsight.com/blogs/mgudgin/archive/2005/06/01/9694.aspx ) from Gudge helped a lot - talks about using httpcfg.exe in order to get your certificate set up. There are a couple of tantalising comments from people to the original post suggesting that you can shortcut some of the "getting a proper certificate" process for development. This post over here ( http://blogs.msdn.com/adarshk/archive/2004/11/10/255467.aspx ) explains the same "problem" from the point of view of HttpListener which is the Framework 2.0 class for getting HTTP into your app domain. In the...

Published Thu, Nov 17 2005 2:43 PM by mtaulty

Post Event Slides: SQL Server 2005 Day at Thames Valley Park

Eric and I did an event 3-4 weeks ago down at Microsoft in Reading which was called something like "SQL Server 2005 for SQL Server 2000 developers". Unfortunately, there's been a number of problems in trying to publish the slide-decks for this event to the public MSDN web site that lives over here and if you visit that site you'd notice that nothing much has been published for a few weeks. We're having some technical hitches over there. Apologies for anyone who's been looking for the slide-decks (I've had a few mails) - whilst the official site gets sorted out I thought I'd post links here so that you can get the slides if you want them. Again, major apologies that this is so late. Here's the slide decks; Eric Nelson - SQL Server Reporting Services Eric Nelson - T-SQL Enhancements Mike Taulty - SQL CLR and XML Integration Mike Taulty - SQL Server Integration Services Apologies again.

Published Tue, Nov 15 2005 3:33 PM by mtaulty

Chairs!

You can decide for yourself whether this is a dev related post or not. I picked up my new chair today. I'm experimenting with one of these; The proper hyperlink is here ( http://www.stokke.com/product.asp?p=Variable&la=EN&na=UK&div=M ) - mine's not in the Pink shown on the picture. I've sat on it for most of the afternoon today and it's very comfortable so far. The idea is that the lack of the back forces you to use your own muscles to keep yourself upright (this combines with the rockers which seem to require you to re-adjust your position). So far, so good. I have hassle with my back (although not as much as I used to) and I'm hoping this will help - it certainly has already stopped me slouching in my chair which I think is probably one of the causes :-)

Published Fri, Nov 11 2005 10:22 AM by mtaulty

Dino Esposito on Atlas

I was just reading this posting ( http://weblogs.asp.net/despos/archive/2005/11/09/430078.aspx ) from Dino Esposito who's been listening to some stuff on the AJAX framework "Atlas" that the ASP.NET guys are building to add on to ASP.NET 2.0. Now, I tend not to get too excited about web form development as (whilst it's very cool) I like to think of the application world in terms of smart clients and web services rather than anything based on HTML but I appreciate that this is a minority view today :-) However, there is one sentence in Dino's write-up that I thought was really a powerful statement and it's this one; "Browser object model to abstract away DOM differences between browsers" :-)

Published Fri, Nov 11 2005 2:31 AM by mtaulty

WSE3.0 RTM Available for Download

A few people have been asking me what the timeframe is like for WSE 3.0 now that .NET Framework 2.0 has RTM'd. It looks like WSE 3.0 has now gone RTM as well - download is here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=018a09fd-3a74-43c5-8ec1-8d789091255d&displaylang=en

Published Thu, Nov 10 2005 4:12 AM by mtaulty

SQL Server 2005 Feature Pack

If you've got SQL Server 2005 then you're going to want to be aware of the Feature Pack that's gone onto the web up here; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=D09C1D60-A13C-4479-9B91-9E8B9D835CDC&displaylang=en

Published Thu, Nov 10 2005 4:05 AM by mtaulty

Visual Studio 2005 UK Launch Slide Decks

If you attended the Visual Studio, SQL and BizTalk launch event in Birmingham on Tuesday then you might be interested in grabbing hold of the slide-decks for the various presentations (I use them to steal pictures generally :-)). They should be up on http://www.microsoft.com/uk/launchtour2005 within a few days.

Published Thu, Nov 10 2005 1:35 AM by mtaulty

"The system cannot execute the specified program" - continued…

Just to follow up on this post: http://mtaulty.com/blog/archive/2005/11/07/8944.aspx where I can't run my application once I've built it with "ClickOnce Security" switched on from VS 2005. I found that using FileMon didn't work for me and using the fusion log viewer didn't work for me either. I even tried WinDbg and it couldn't launch the process - it was very much starting to seem like it was in the NT loader somewhere trying to load the process that the problem was occurring. Finally, I tried to obvious thing and went through all of my event logs and found that it was logging stuff into the system log under the banner of "SideBySide" which is very helpful. What I found was that I'd got an error saying "Syntax error in manifest or policy file". "The manifest file root element must be assembly". Now, having said that I thought that my manifest file root element was assembly and when I checked it, it all seemed to be correct. The errors from my event log read; 1) Syntax error in manifest or policy file "C:\Development...

Published Wed, Nov 9 2005 3:29 AM by mtaulty

Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 Launch

I was at the Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 UK launch at the ICC in Birmingham today where I was doing a session with Gudge and David and the whole event seemed to go very well to me and I had a thoroughly good time. It's a shame that the whole thing was only one day as I saw a bunch of people there but in the rush of getting to sessions and in the press of the crowd it wasn't always easy to stop and have a chat. Hopefully the London events which are repeated across 2 days will provide more of a chance to catch up with people. It's truly great to see VS and SQL out in public form at long last, truly a relief to stop having to fret about CTP's and so on and have released s/w to play with. (Having said that, I'm still on Beta 2 on my laptop until the WinFX bits get updated :-)).

Published Tue, Nov 8 2005 3:37 PM by mtaulty