January 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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 often...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 7:16 AM by mtaulty

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 Taulty...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 2:17 AM by mtaulty

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...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 2:11 AM by mtaulty

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 it....

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 2:05 AM by mtaulty

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:\> mkdir...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 1:45 AM by mtaulty

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> invoke...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 1:35 AM by mtaulty

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...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 1:30 AM by mtaulty

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 figured...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 1:21 AM by mtaulty

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...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 1:13 AM by mtaulty

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 I'd...

Published Mon, Jan 30 2006 1:04 AM by mtaulty

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 object...

Published Sun, Jan 29 2006 1:41 PM by mtaulty

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 install...

Published Sun, Jan 29 2006 5:07 AM by mtaulty

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) and people...

Published Fri, Jan 27 2006 3:47 PM by mtaulty

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 Visualizer...

Published Wed, Jan 25 2006 2:54 AM by mtaulty

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 the property...

Published Tue, Jan 24 2006 10:19 AM by mtaulty