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February 2006 - Posts

DevWeek 2006

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Last week was DevWeek 2006 and I attended and gave a couple of sessions. I had a really good time and enjoyed all the sessions that I attended although I spent as much time hanging around the conference as I did Read More...
Posted Monday, February 27, 2006 9:33 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

The Mysterious CryptUIDlgSelectCertificate API

My MSDN Library (January 2006) talks about the function CryptUIDlgSelectCertificate being available on Windows XP, Server 2003 and “Longhorn” OSes (client and server). However, I can’t find it in any header file anywhere. It’s Read More...
Posted Monday, February 20, 2006 7:56 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Testing out BlogJet

I’m trying out BlogJet for posting to this blog versus the InfoPath form that I’ve been using previously. So far, so good. The primary feature I want is automatic FTP of pictures that I drop into posts as it’s a pain having to take pictures Read More...
Posted Monday, February 20, 2006 4:00 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

VS 2005 Debugging: Make Object ID

I'd never seen this one before so I thought I'd share it here. Dan Crevier has a posting on a neat little VS 2005 debugging feature . I'd not be able to count the number of times when I've hacked a class to include some kind of "object id" so that I can Read More...
Posted Monday, February 20, 2006 3:21 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

MediaCenter.Rebuild()

Ok, so I lied in this posting over here about my Media Center and adding a new TV card to it. Initially, it seemed like everything was going well but I found after a few hours of use that the TV was stuttering and that recorded TV was doing the same and Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 19, 2006 2:47 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

MSDN Article on WPF Command Routing

I spent a few years writing MFC code towards the end of the 1990's. One of my favourite things about the MFC was that it had a framework built into it for dealing with commands that the user executed. That framework dealt with whether the command was Read More...
Posted Friday, February 17, 2006 1:28 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

IE 7 and OPML importing

I went and installed the IE 7 Beta 2 Preview on my XP OS as I had been using it on Vista and was enjoying it more than IE 6. I then realised that I'd like to get my RSS feeds into it which again caused me to look for an OPML import - maybe it's there Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006 8:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

RSS API's Again

It's interesting to see the amount of feedback that this post about the RSS API's with IE 7 is getting. The majority of the follow up posts that I can see are asking "How come it's a COM API and where's the .NET Wrapper for it". I think this is a really Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006 5:42 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Doing Workflow? Doing WPF? Those properties are not just .NET properties any more!

I think the whole subject of "attached properties" in the context of WPF and WF is one that's yet to bite most people and so this post is really important. I realised I'd lost the plot when I saw that my property value in my Workflow was changing in the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006 5:33 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Some WPF Name Changes Coming - Heading Towards "Ship Mode"?

Just passing on this post that I noticed - with the Feb CTP of the WPF (which must be coming "real soon now") the namespaces are changing which will break all the XAML samples that are out there. Follow the link for the details. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006 5:25 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Fusion HDTV Dual Tuner DVB-T Card for MCE 2005

I upgraded my tuners in my media center last night. I'd been running with dual analogue tuners from Hauppauge - the PVR MCE 500 and I'd been getting pretty good picture quality from it but I wanted to switch to digital and I also wanted to get the extra Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006 4:13 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Microsoft Security Event: Thames Valley Park, Reading 8th March

There's an evening event happening at the Microsoft Campus on the 8th March around security with ASP.NET 2.0 for both web forms and web services and that then branches off for a discussion around Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 security as well. The Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 14, 2006 7:18 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

UK IT contracting market on the rise?

I saw a small article in yesterday's Independent newspaper here in the UK that the UK IT Contracting market had got back to the point where contractors in the City can expect to achieve £50 an hour for the first time since 2001. Long term, I guess I can Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 14, 2006 3:57 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Dynamic UI with WPF

I've been playing around a little bit with having "dynamic" UI in the WPF. When I say "dynamc" UI what I really mean is the possibility of a UI which the user of an application can potentially change on the fly in order to add some new bits of functionality Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 12, 2006 4:18 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

UK Developer Day 3 Web Site Up and Running (Saturday 3rd June, 2006)

The website is up and running for the 3rd UK Developer Day at the Microsoft Campus on the 3rd June . This is a Community event organised by developers in the UK for developers in the UK and sessions are all put together and delivered by community speakers. Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 12, 2006 11:22 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Workflow and Instancing

I've been playing around a little with Workflow instancing so I thought I'd share here. I'm still playing around with things so have a lot more to learn at this point. I was thinking of a situation where you have N items of work to do and you want those Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 11, 2006 6:53 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Hosting WCF and WF Together

I've had a couple of people ask me for a sample I've used of hosting WF and WCF in the same simple Windows Forms application so I thought I'd post it here. I built two simple applications. The first allows you to type in an "Order Id" (it's just any old Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 11, 2006 5:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Interesting post on WCF and Manual Addressing

I found this post around request/reply messaging and setting your addressing headers manually to be really interesting. It feels quite a bit like what happens behind the scenes if you go ahead and use the CallbackContract in order to make responses be Read More...
Posted Friday, February 10, 2006 3:50 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

"Initializing Toolbox…" - "Visual Studio is Busy"

I had a problem with Visual Studio on Windows Vista today. I was finding that Visual Studio was sitting there for an eternity with a message "Initializing Toolbox…" and it was sitting with the CPU at 100% and it was taking an eternity (in reality, never Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 07, 2006 4:33 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

IE7 RSS API's Get Some Documentation

MSDN has been updated to include some details on the RSS API's that come with IE7. The hyperlink is here . From the looks of it, it seems that there are some API's in there that are (COM) custom interface based rather than IDispatch based. I played around Read More...
Posted Monday, February 06, 2006 5:07 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

VBUG Manchester: WPF Demos

I did a talk on WinFX last night for the VBUG group up in Manchester run by Phil Winstanley . It had good attendance and it felt like people were pretty keen to see the WinFX stuff. Someone asked if I could share the demos that I used for WPF (mostly Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 02, 2006 1:28 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Workflow Foundation Beta 2 and Local Service Communication

This is probably a FAQ somewhere but just in case it bites someone else. I spent quite a while today trying to move a piece of code over from pre-beta 2 of Workflow Foundation to the beta 2 bits. It's a simple enough example to show how the Workflow Host Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 01, 2006 2:09 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments