December 2005 - Mike Taulty's Blog

We've been making and publishing these little MSDN "Nugget" videos in the UK for quite a while and they've been successful for us in the sense that people download them and watch them and when I meet folk at events they often say "Hey, I watched that little video" and they're generally positive about them which is great. We've got to the point where there are around 50+ videos on the web site here and, for me, the website has got a little bit unmanageable in that it's hard to see what's new and what the categories are and, frankly, sometimes things have been categorised incorrectly. I wanted to try and help make the viewing of these videos a little easier so I've typed all the details of these things into a little database and made that available via a number of means; MSDN Nugget Videos on an RSS Feed The first mechanism is a plain reliable RSS Feed. You can consume the feed here; UK MSDN Nugget Topics RSS Feed This is a list of all the topics that we've recorded "Nugget" videos for. This is likely to be a fairly...

Someone pointed out to me that the source code for the WSE 3.0 and WSE 2.0 tracing tools is not really available online. The tool history is documented here so I won't go into it yet again :-) At one point, I created a GotDotNet Workspace for the tracing tool but I couldn't add enough members to the site and it all got a little out of date. So…the source code for anyone that wants it is downloadable from here. There are 2 versions; 1) WSE 2.0 Trace - this is for VS.NET 2003, .NET Framework V1.1 and WSE 2.0 (Sp 3 I think). 2) WSE 3.0 Trace - this is for VS 2005, .NET Framework 2.0 and WSE 3.0 Note - the setup projects are not included as I thought it was unlikely that you'd want to build a setup kit with my name all over it :-) I'm not planning to make any more alterations to these bits. Note: The usual caveats apply to this source code - it's just sample stuff and isn't intended to be fit for any particular purpose.

The download page for the December CTP of WinFX is up here . I was looking around the MSDN subscriber downloads site to see if a corresponding Vista build was also available but it looks like it's not up there just yet although the public news sites have been suggesting that it won't be far away. It looks like Ian has already got it installed :-) and that Cider has now shown up in the Toolset - very cool, I think this will make talking about WPF to developers a lot more "concrete". A quick update from me. I've got a couple of problems at the moment since I installed this. 1) When I got to do an "Add Web Reference" I now get a dialog saying "Some of the required files for Web References are not installed". 2) More subtle. If I build a Windows Forms application and ClickOnce deploy it for the "Internet" zone then I find that the manifest contains permissions from the assembly WindowsBase.DLL. This is part of WinFX and not part of Windows Forms so when the user comes to install the app if they don't have WinFX the...

I've moved on from playing with WCF Transport security and started trying to look at message security. I configured my service like this; < services > < service type = " Implementation " > < endpoint address = " http://localhost:9200/service " contract = " IServe " binding = " wsHttpBinding " bindingConfiguration = " bind " behaviorConfiguration = " behave " /> </ service > </ services > < bindings > < wsHttpBinding > < binding name = " bind " > < security mode = " Message " > < message clientCredentialType = " UserName " /> </ security > </ binding > </ wsHttpBinding > </ bindings > < behaviors > < behavior name = " behave " > < clientCredentials > < serviceCertificate x509FindType = " FindByThumbprint " storeLocation = " LocalMachine " storeName = " My " findValue = " 65f279af32580041360d8a9b397baec0146759a0 " /> </ clientCredentials > </ behavior > </ behaviors > and I built a client...

I'd forgotten that I needed this. One of my pet hates is the way in which I'm typing away in a Word document or an email and some other application leaps to the foreground with a dialog which has a couple of buttons on it and I press the space bar into this new window and take some UI action that I never wanted to take (e.g. if it's the automatic updates dialog I possibly risk restarting the machine). In my view applications shouldn't be allowed to steal focus like this as I think it's a risk that you run destructive actions without realising it. I knew that I used to have a mechanism for stopping this and it was only today that I actually went and searched around to remember that it's the TweakUI PowerToy that lets you stop it happening. Having said that, whilst I was typing this message the "Automatic Updates" dialog just flashed on the screen and stole my focus and I nearly restarted my machine by mistake :-( Maybe the TweakUI thing only works for real apps with a TaskBar Window and not those in the System...

This site might go down for a day or two over the next couple of days as my hoster is going to move the site onto a new server - hopefully the delay won't be for too long. Thx.

Following up on this post I spent a really long time trying to get WCF (Nov CTP) to work with mutual authentication over the basic HTTP profile that I thought I'd try and do a complete write up of what I did in order to share it. In the end ( like most things ) it turns out to be pretty easy to get what I was trying to do to work but I didn't know where I was going wrong and so I spent an awfully long time on it. I'm going to go through this step by step for my setup - note: this is not necessarily the "right" way to do it but it works for me and I want to be able to remember it :-) 1) I'm using a certificate server rather than makecert. I set up a new certificate server in a VPC image and I called it "TestCA" - this is because I tend to dev on XP rather than Server 2003 which often causes me pain. 2) I visited my TestCA certificate server and I requested two certificates both using the "Advanced Request Form". i) "ClientCert". I went for all the defaults on this apart from selecting that I want the private keys...

I was thinking about the WPF and its support for styling and how that corresponded with what a website designer can do with CSS for their website. It was Ian's post over here that got me thinking about it. I had a little play with the Nov CTP of WPF to see what it was like to load styles dynamically at run time. As far as I know, in WPF you can either apply a style to all instances of a certain type of control (e.g. button, listbox, etc.) or a control can elect a named style. Styles can also have inheritance and they seem to be most commonly stuck into resource collections for easy access by the rest of the controls. I used VS 2005 and tried to build a simple window with a button in it like so; < Window x:Class = " ReplacingStyles.Window1 " xmlns = " http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/avalon/2005 " xmlns:x = " http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/xaml/2005 " Title = " ReplacingStyles " > < DockPanel > < Menu DockPanel.Dock = " Top " > < MenuItem Header = " File " > < MenuItem Header =...