February 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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 in sessions. I enjoyed Dave Wheeler’s keynote talk as it resonated a lot with me with its themes around how the WPF presents a greatly improved experience and platform for building applications over what people are trying to do with AJAX (I hope I’m paraphrasing Dave’s talk ok there). The second keynote was (for me) a bigger highlight. Tim Ewald delivered a great talk on the “state of play” in the web services world and it was really captivating. I’d heard a lot of rumour around the conference that Tim was going to be a bit negative about the Windows Communication Foundation but, in the end, I thought he presented a completely rational view as to what was going on and there was nothing in there that struck me as out of the ordinary...

Published Mon, Feb 27 2006 9:33 AM by mtaulty

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 not in my cryptuiapi.h and I went off and found the PlatformSDK (April 2005 is the latest that I can find) and installed that and didn’t find the function in the headers there either. If I do a quick dumpbin on the cryptui.dll in system32 then I can see that the function’s in there so I guess I could copy the definitions out of the docs and use it that way. I wonder where it is? It’s not particularly vital as I was just using it for “fun” (I think I need to question my value system when CryptUIDlgSelectCertificate comes into my definition of “fun”). My initial search was for a managed wrapper to raise the dialog rather than the unmanaged API so I’ll go back to searching for that. For some strange reason my January 2006...

Published Mon, Feb 20 2006 7:56 AM by mtaulty

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 yourself and FTP them up to the site (sure, it’s not rocket science but convenience is a powerful force :-)). Here’s a picture of BlogJet for testing purposes… I wonder if the picture will show up and whether it’ll be aligned in the middle like I asked? I had some invalid operation dialogs from the editor in trying to post it…

Published Mon, Feb 20 2006 4:00 AM by mtaulty

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 track that particular object in the debugger and it turns out that VS can do it for me automatically. Cool :-) The one thing Dan doesn't mention in the post (as far as I can see) is that the right mouse menu he's talking about appears in the watch window or at least that's the only place I seem to be able to find it with my setup.

Published Mon, Feb 20 2006 3:21 AM by mtaulty

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 Standby/Resume wouldn't work and the box needed resetting every time I used it. I decided it was time for a rebuild. I installed a lot of additional bits onto my MCE box in the early days when I was trying to get it sorted out and I figured that this combined with a change of TV tuner card had probably upset it. It took me about 4 hours yesterday to do the rebuild. Initial install of the OS is easy and then there are the Windows Update cycles to go through which take a while. Beyond that, the difficult bits with Media Center are getting your BIOS settings and s/w settings right so that it'll suspend and resume off the remote control into an S3 suspend state. Dave Glover has an excellent post that covers most of this off so I'd recommend reading that if you're setting...

Published Sun, Feb 19 2006 2:47 AM by mtaulty

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 currently applicable or not (perhaps by enabling/disabling that piece of the UI) and it also dealt with routing the invocation of the command to a piece of code that could handle it (like a View or a Document). When Windows Forms came along I was shocked to find that it didn't have any kind of mechanism that provided the same kind of functionality that MFC had in this area of command routing. You can build one but it's not there in the box which means that controls that you buy and download and so on won't automatically take part in any existing infrastructure. With the WPF the idea of a built in command mechanism is back and it's back with a vengeance. There's a great new article just gone up on the MSDN site that explains at a high level how the WPF command infrastructure...

Published Fri, Feb 17 2006 1:28 AM by mtaulty

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 but I can't find it. I've got about 100 feeds to import and I didn't want to do them manually. Perhaps you can point at an OPML file and just do "subscribe"? So, I wrote a tiny bit of code to import an OPML file. It's very basic but you can always hack at it until it does what you want. It's Windows Forms (V2.0) and it depends on the msfeeds.dll being available for it to reference. Here's the project file . It's been tested on one OPML file in the whole world - mine :-)

Published Wed, Feb 15 2006 8:27 AM by mtaulty

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 valid question given that people like me keep telling developers that the future of the platform is .NET and WinFX and then we're releasing stuff to them that's no so easily consumed by .NET code. As it happens, the feed API is not particularly difficult to interop to. I've got some samples of playing around with it here , here and here .

Published Wed, Feb 15 2006 5:42 AM by mtaulty

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 debugger but the Setter method for my property hadn't been called and then I remembered "Ah, I'm using an attached property". Definitely one to get your head around. Also, a good debugging mechanism for this is needed - I'll see if I can post where to set your breakpoint to get the property changed notifications in the debugger but, until then, the posting is a great place to start.

Published Wed, Feb 15 2006 5:33 AM by mtaulty

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.

Published Wed, Feb 15 2006 5:25 AM by mtaulty

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 channels that come over Freeview (we don't have any kind of paid subscription service coming into the house). I've switched to dual DVB-T tuners from Dvico - the Fusion HDTV dual digital which you can buy in the UK from the GlowLounge . The switch was fairly painless. The dual tuner dvb-t card has an unusual solution in that it wants to make use of a PCI slot and a single USB 2.0 port as well (you can go internal and use a USB header off the motherboard for this or you can just run a USB cable from the back of the card into an external USB port). (There are other solutions - the one I've noticed is the Terratec Cinergy which seems to be quite a bit cheaper but, unfortunately for me, requires PCI Express which I don't have on my Shuttle XPC). When it came to installation...

Published Wed, Feb 15 2006 4:13 AM by mtaulty

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 registration URL is here . If you're local to Reading pop along and see what ASP.NET 2.0 and WSE 3.0 have to offer. If you can't make the session, check out some of the videos on this feed for more about WSE 3.0 .

Published Tue, Feb 14 2006 7:18 AM by mtaulty

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 work reasonably happily at about 10-12 hours a day if there's work to be done so that'd rack up to a gross of around £150,000 per year which is a pretty decent living. Anecdotally, I've had a number of chats with UK folk in the last few weeks that I've met at various events about the benefits/downsides of leaving their permanent jobs to join the contracting community and this story seems to add to that anecdotal evidence that the contracting market is perhaps on the rise.

Published Tue, Feb 14 2006 3:57 AM by mtaulty

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 or perhaps remove bits of functionality that they don't use. It's all very simple stuff that I've done here but I thought I'd share as I know a couple of people have asked me about this kind of thing. I built a simple WPF application (Jan CTP bits) that allows me to add bits of XAML to a blank canvas. It starts off looking like this; As the "Add…" button is clicked, it loads up that XAML entered and adds whatever it finds to the canvas. There is then a "design" mode which will allow the item just added to be moved around; I can add some more UI elements until we come to add a TextBox. The canvas already has a DataContext set on it which contains an ObservableCollection of Customer objects which have properties FirstName, LastName, CustomerNumber. This means...

Published Sun, Feb 12 2006 4:18 PM by mtaulty

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. If you're interested in speaking, visit the website and sign up for a session. I'll be there on the day and I'm already looking forward to it - the last one was great.

Published Sun, Feb 12 2006 11:22 AM by mtaulty