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January 2006 - Posts

Doing the Sparkle (Expression Interactive Designer) Tutorials

I'm pretty new to Sparkle. I've been aware of it for quite a long time and I've played with various versions along the way but, today, I sat down and went through the tutorials that come with the Jan CTP and I was absolutely blown away by it. It's not Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 7:16 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Monad RSS Provider 8: Tidying Up :-)

Following on from this post , when I've got tired of messing around with my RSS feeds and I want to go back to how things were I can remove feeds and folders. MSH feeds:\Renamed New Feeds\Mike Taulty> cd .. MSH feeds:\Renamed New Feeds> rmdir "Mike Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 2:17 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

Monad RSS Provider 7: Downloading feeds and navigating feed items

Following on from this post , now I've got my new RSS feed created if I want to go and download it I can do a quick; MSH feeds:\Renamed New Feeds> invoke-item "Mike Taulty" and then drop into that folder and do a quick dir to see what items are available Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 2:11 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Monad RSS Provider 6: Making new feeds

Following on from this post , if I want to add a new subscription in my current folder I can either create a new feed object and then create the feed from it or I can create the new feed with defaults (as below) and then alter the various properties on Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 2:05 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Monad RSS provider 5: Making new folders and feeds

Following up on this post , if I want to create new folders for feeds to live in so that I can subscribe to new feeds then I can go ahead and do that; MSH feeds:\Technology\Mike Taulty's Weblog> cd .. MSH feeds:\Technology> cd .. MSH feeds:\> Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 1:45 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Monad RSS provider 4: Viewing a feed

Following up on this post , if I've navigated into a feed I can then go and view a particular item by invoking it (this is a bit hacky in my view as I use the shell to launch the browser at this point :-)); MSH feeds:\Technology\Mike Taulty's Weblog> Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 1:35 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Monad RSS Provider 3: Moving around a little, listing feeds and items

Following up on this post , if I want to navigate around my feed store a little then it feels just like the file system, I chose to make folders and feeds both feel like directories. MSH feeds:\> cd Technology MSH feeds:\Technology> dir | format-list Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 1:30 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Monad RSS Provider 2: Listing root folders

Following up on this post , I can navigate to the root of my RSS store and get a list of top level items (folder/feeds) up there. Note: I'm not 100% sure that I have this exactly right as I'd like to lose the generic Msh stuff listed here but I haven't Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 1:21 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Monad RSS Provider 1: Locating our new provider

Following up on this post , here's how I can see that my new provider is up and active within the Monad shell; ********************** MSH Transcript Start ********************** Transcript started, output file is w:\temp\trans.txt MSH W:\development\monad\RssProvider\RssProvider\bin\Debug> Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 1:13 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Playing with RSS feeds from the Monad Shell

I had a go at writing a command-let provider for the Monad Shell (currently installed by adding WinFX or the WinFX SDK - not exactly sure!) that I'm running on my Vista box. Because it's Vista, there's the new central store for RSS feedds and I thought Read More...
Posted Monday, January 30, 2006 1:04 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Hosting WPF inside Windows Forms

I've been writing demos with WPF over the last couple of days and I knocked together something very simple to show some interoperability between Windows Forms and WPF. I thought I'd share it here as it's (at least to me) illustrative of how smart the Read More...
Posted Sunday, January 29, 2006 1:41 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Full-Fat Office Updates

I got into a bit of a pickle yesterday. I needed a patch to my installation of Office because I wasn't being allowed onto the Corporate Network without it. However, the automatic installation of the patch was failing and I realised why when I went to Read More...
Posted Sunday, January 29, 2006 5:07 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WinFX and the January CTP

Marcus and I did an MSDN evening event last night down at the Microsoft Campus in Reading covering off introductory materials on WinFX. It felt like a good event to me - a fairly packed room of about 100 or so people (the room maxes out at about 120) Read More...
Posted Friday, January 27, 2006 3:47 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Argh! WCF Needs a Message Visualizer for the Debugger

I'm finding that peering inside a WCF Message needs some assistance - grabbing out the headers, their constituent pieces (Actor, MustUnderstand, etc) and then the body whilst hoping that you don't cause a timeout on the client. It needs a VS 2005 Debugger Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 25, 2006 2:54 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Exception handling - what's the best way to do this…

I'm writing some code today that looks a little bit like this; this .title = feed.Title; this .xmlUrl = feed.url; this .pubDate = feed.PubDate; It's basically a copy of a bunch of properties from one object to another. The problem is that each one of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 24, 2006 10:19 AM by mtaulty | 7 Comments

On Workflow

I've spent some late nights recently playing with Windows Workflow Foundation and, after some initial struggles, I'm really starting to enjoy it. It's worth saying that I'm still on the Dec CTP of Workflow rather than the Beta 2 bits so some of these Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 24, 2006 4:06 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

PowerPoint 12

This is an unusual post for me but here goes… I spent a lot of time at the weekend with the beta of PowerPoint 12 editing up some materials. You probably imagine that I'm paid for saying this but I'll say it anyway - it's really, really cool. Sure, there Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 24, 2006 3:42 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

VBUG Reading: Hyperlinks

Some links for Tim and the people from VBUG Reading; Visual Studio 2005 Trial DVDs VS 2005 Labs Office 12 Beta Registration I promised that I'd share the code for my demos so I've zipped that up and placed it on the following link. Note (as always) that Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 19, 2006 10:41 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

The MSDN Events Page and "Action Figures"

I'm looking for a webcast on WinFX and I go to visit the MSDN Events page and I come across this (it's the top item); http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/hero/videos/ I'm sure it'll come across as grumpiness but I really hate this kind of thing - seems to Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 19, 2006 8:30 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Transaction Management Page

I came across this page on another blog site and am dropping it here to "keep and share". It brings together the different transaction bits and pieces in the platform. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 18, 2006 2:17 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Another Day, Another CTP !

The January CTP of WinFX is upon us. I've got some WinFX demos to do next week and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get to this CTP before then but perhaps I will. Ian has this documented so I won't duplicate here but there's a key difference with Read More...
Posted Wednesday, January 18, 2006 1:08 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Importing OPML file into Vista RSS subscriptions

Tying together the previous few posts, I can now go and import my RSS bandit OPML file into Vista's RSS store by using MSH and doing; MSH C:\Users\mtaulty> get-filepath "Import OPML File" "OPML Files (*.opml)|*.opm l|All Files (*.*)|*.*" w:\temp | Read More...
Posted Friday, January 13, 2006 6:38 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Generating RSS Subscriptions from Monad

To take the previous posts a little further I went ahead and wrote another command let which will take an outline from OPML and will create an RSS subscription from it. Again, not sure that this is the "right" thing to do - just playing here; using System; Read More...
Posted Friday, January 13, 2006 6:34 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Consuming an OPML file from Monad

Continuing by "beginner's Monad theme" ( where I am the beginner ) I had a go at consuming an OPML file from Monad. Now, I'm a beginner on so many levels here. Firstly, I don't understand OPML so I went to try and find a spec (think I ended up at www.opml.org Read More...
Posted Friday, January 13, 2006 4:24 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Getting a filename interactively from Monad

I wanted to grab a filename from the user so I wrote another little Monad Cmdlet that did that with the file open dialog, very basic and I'm sure you're not meant to do this from Monad but "it was there" so I did it so that I can go ahead and do something Read More...
Posted Friday, January 13, 2006 4:13 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

RSS APIs from Monad

I took the idea of my previous post a little further by building a quick and easy Monad Cmdlet around the RSS API just to get my list of feeds. A couple of notes - I've only spent 10 minutes with these recenty builds of Monad so this is not likely to Read More...
Posted Friday, January 13, 2006 1:45 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

New Typefaces/Fonts in Vista

I'm not even sure what to call them - are they Typefaces or Fonts. No idea. All I can say is that the new "typefonts" :-) that I've seen in Vista are really, really nice. I switched Visual Studio 2005 to use the new Consolas font as soon as I'd installed Read More...
Posted Friday, January 13, 2006 1:28 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

RSS APIs in Vista?

I've been struggling to find anything at all about the new RSS APIs in Windows Vista. I might have been missing it in the docs but I just didn't find anything. Then I came across msfeeds.dll living in my c:\windows\system32 folder and went ahead and referenced Read More...
Posted Friday, January 13, 2006 1:20 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

UK MSDN Nugget Videos: More Alternate Methods for Viewing

Following up on this post , Mike Ormond has a posting about a new Windows Live gadget that he's written which displays the list of UK MSDN Nugget topics and makes them easier to navigate and/or watch. Go read - for my own Smart Client solution I'll post Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 12, 2006 1:01 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Proportion of the .NET Framework written in .NET code

Richard Grimes has an interesting article over here analysing how much of the .NET Framework versions 1.0, 1.1, 2.0 and WinFX December CTP are actually implemented in terms of .NET code rather than by invocation to unmanaged code. I'm not sure to what Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 12, 2006 12:55 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Passivation?

From looking at this , it seems that the WF guys are using a term passivation to describe what BizTalk Server called dehydration. I've never come across the term passivation before and I thought I'd check it on dictionary.com which came up with; To treat Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 10, 2006 4:07 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

A Bunch of Links :-)

I've been catching up on my RSS reading having given up on it over the Xmas period. In doing so I came across a bunch of cool looking links which I'm posting here in order to "share and save" (i.e. share them with other folk if they've not seen them and Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 10, 2006 3:31 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WCF: Changing Client Credentials

I was playing with a WCF (December CTP) proxy today and trying to change the credentials that are being sent over transport security (https in my case) to the service for authentication. I had code like this; proxy.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.UserName Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 10, 2006 6:51 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Vista and WCF - Services and "Your process does not have access to this namespace"

Because of the way that Windows Vista works with User Account Protection even if you are running on Vista as an Administrator when you come to run a simple WCF service application that listens on, say; http://localhost:8080/myNamespace/myService You may Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 05, 2006 10:26 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Vista

I've started trying to use Windows Vista (Dec CTP) as my main operating system today. There's been a bit of pain but it's not been too bad and I'm up and running with most of what I need. If anyone else is doing the same then (thanks!) it's worth knowing Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 05, 2006 8:05 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WCF: Architecture

Yasser Shohoud (author of the fantastic " Real World XML Web Services " book which I still find useful to this day) has published a nice short article on the architecture of the WCF. Take a look . Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 05, 2006 1:20 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Humax PVR 9200T

I bought a PVR box for my Father over Xmas and it was a dual-Freeview tuner Humax PVR 9200T and we've both been really impressed with it. Here's a picture from the Humax site; My positive impressions; 1) The box is incredibly easy to set up. Switch it Read More...
Posted Thursday, January 05, 2006 1:15 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WinFX Developer Events in the UK

Just a little bit of blatant self-publicity. The New Year for the UK MSDN Events team begins with a couple of WinFX events - if you're new to WinFX or you want to come along and chat a bit about WinFX then these will be right up your street. I'm not yet Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 03, 2006 3:38 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Vista December CTP with WinFX December CTP: Where are my Visual Studio 2005 Project Templates?

When will I ever learn to read the documentation? I've had Windows Vista December CTP installed for a while on my laptop along with VS 2005 RTM and WinFX December CTP. However, I've been scratching my head as to why I didn't get any new WinFX project Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 03, 2006 3:24 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

MSDN Forums for Windows Vista

Happy New Year! I've been finding the MSDN Forums very useful for problems with Windows Vista and the WinFX CTPs. Just blogging the link here so that I can easily find it again. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, January 03, 2006 3:04 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments