June 2006 - Posts

Moving a Managed C++ Project from VS2003 to VS2005

Should you ever see this error from the linker; Error 1 error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol ?.cctor@@$$FYMXXZ Then follow this link to Keith Brown’s post on it – essentially you need to add msvcmrt.lib and msvcrt.lib Read More

Moving to Vista 5456

I moved to the 5456 build of Vista (for my Vista installation, I still have XP as well to fall back on). This is not a build that’s so easy to get hold of if you’re external but there are reviews of it such as at Paul Thurrott’s site Read More

FJAX

This one is a bit bizarre to me - using an ability of the Flash player to build AJAX apps without having to worry about the script code. I'm all for avoiding script but driving the Flash player solely to do this seems a little perverse to me but there Read More

Using Workflow Rules Outside of a Workflow

Came across this sample for using the Workflow Rules engine outside of Workflow (in this case to do validation on a form).   I've had a quick peek through the code at this point but haven't run it as it requires some DB setup but it looks very interesting. Read More

WPF and scrolling text

I was trying to figure out how to scroll some text in a "news ticker" style fashion from left to right across the screen.   I didn't quite get there but I got part way along so I thought I'd share the xaml file for that.   I was trying to stay declarative Read More

WPF and Effects

Just something I came across today that I hadn't seen before although I remember some mention of it at the PDC last year which was the support in WPF for effects such as blur and so on.   I had a very quick play - here's a piece of XAML and here's Read More

More on WinFS

I don't read him very often (not really my cup of tea) but it seems that Robert Scoble is suggesting that WinFS isn't needed and has gone away because no-one needs a hard-drive any more as everything is done in the cloud.   It's funny because if I look Read More

Interesting Article on the Upcoming Core 2 Duo

Link is here: http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/cpu/intel-conroe-2-13-ghz.html Read More

WinFS "Changes"

It looks like the project that was WinFS has disappeared. Check out this blog posting.   From the posting - some of the constituent pieces are going into ADO.NET and others are dropping into mainstream SQL Server but it's hard to see from where Read More

ASP.NET Sandbox Page

There's some interesting things going on over at this page. Read More

Calling FlickR from MFC

Mike got a question about calling web services such as the one offered by FlickR from an MFC application and he was talking to me about it.   This harks back to a post I made the other day about using .NET code from a C++ application.   If I want to call Read More

Windows CardSpaces and Information Cards

From Kim Cameron's blog, I'm really pleased to read that Information Cards stay named as "Information Cards" and that the new term "Windows CardSpaces" only refers to the Windows implementation of an identity selector for Information Cards.   Keith Brown Read More

On "InfoCard" (Windows CardSpaces) and Debugging

I'm working on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Beta 2 of .NET Framework 3.0 and I was wanting to do something with CardSpaces.   I've had this working before but not for a little while and possibly not since I upgraded to Beta 2.   I go to the control panel Read More

Great .NET Framework 3.0 Site

Just a pointer to another great .NET Framework 3.0 resource site from some guys in the UK that Martin met at the Roadshow last week. Read More

The WPF Blog

I really like the posts that are going up on the WPF Blog site and especially this latest XBAP which is really cool. Use the left mouse button to spin the object around and the right mouse button to zoom. The video has yet to play for me but Read More

WPF: Adventures in Virtualisation

I’ve spent a little bit of time playing with virtualisation to try and present a long list of visual items with the WPF and especially when those items are expensive to create – images are a very good example as you don’t want 1000’s Read More

WPF, InkCanvas and Selectability

  I didn't know that the WPF InkCanvas could do so much for you even if you're not actually on a tablet PC. Very cool and here's a piece of XAML;   <InkCanvas EditingMode="Select" xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation' xmlns:x='http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml'> Read More

Whuppuf? Whuckuf? Wuhwuf? WTF?

I got a mention from the Dot Net Solutions guys in this Channel 9 Video as having a slightly novel way to pronounce the three different bits of .NET FX 3.0.   I'm not sure that I can really claim that I "invented" this but I Read More

In The Media Spotlight

Well, it's a little way from being chased down the street by the papparazzi but the friendly-but-worryingly-bonkers chaps Richard and Dave over at the Next Gen User Group managed to finally corner me at the recent DDD 3 event at the Microsoft Campus and Read More

Wow, These Guys Move Quickly…

The name change only happened over the weekend as far as I know and yet there's already a web site up and running;   http://www.netfx3.com/        Read More

Windows Vista & Application Restart/Recovery

Vista has a nice new API around what to do when an application crashes. Yes, it’d be nice if applications never crashed but there’s not many applications that we can honestly say that about. There are two sides to the API. The first Read More

WinFX, .NET and Naming

This post will no doubt cause a whole lot of traffic. I’ve been saying to people for quite a while now “When you think of WinFX you can really think of it as .NET Framework Version 3.0” and now it looks like that’s become Read More

USB drive security

Saw this article referenced from Slashdot and, as usual, it goes to show that you don't need a grid of massive computer power in order to break people's security.   It also made me think about all the conferences I've been to where people give away USB Read More

WCF: TransportWithMessageCredential Security

I got asked for a sample of how to do "TransportWithMessageCredential" security with WCF so I put put a very basic thing together.   The idea of this is that you're using the transport to make sure that message contents are secure but you're using a soap Read More

A day without connectivity

Today I was working from home and my broadband connection broke.   It turned out to be like one of those films in the vein of "North by Northwest" where you know you're innocent but everyone thinks you're guilty.   That is,   1) I hadn't changed any router Read More

Vista and Office Beta Available on the Beta Experience

I'd been going around telling people that Vista Beta 2 was available from "The Beta Experience" only to find that up until very recently only the registration option was actually live with a promise that people would get notified when the bits were available Read More

WCF Webcasts coming up in June

In case you didn't spot these elsewhere, they've already started but it looks like they're being recorded.   The link I found them on was here: http://blogs.msdn.com/drnick/archive/2006/05/31/611195.aspx Read More

Windows Error Reporting

There are some additions to the Windows Error Reporting API’s in Windows Vista – the Problem Center within the OS provides the central place to manage these things and looks like this; You can see that my problematic WER.EXE application Read More

My Glass Keeps Getting Dirty

I’m running Windows Vista B2 on my laptop and, once or twice, I’ve had a minor glitch with the Glass theme. ( I have a Toshiba M3 with an NVidia GeForce Go 6600 with 128MB ) Essentially, from time to time (it’s happened about 3 times Read More

Vista, Desktop Window Manager and Thumbnails

There’s a great post over here about the Desktop Window Manager and its role on Windows Vista I think I’ve referenced it before. One of the things that the DWM can do for you is that it can provide a “representation” or a Read More

Toshiba's 2.5" drive delivers 200GB

I’d like 2 of these in my laptop please: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32173 :-) I was looking at hard-drive prices for the desktop the other day and it looks like it ranges around the 33–37p per Gigabyte mark (hope I got that Read More

Dependency Property Snippet

Visual Studio has a snippet for a property in Visual C# (prop) and I’ve been defining one or two dependency properties lately in demos and I’ve been using a snippet to do it. The other day, someone asked me to share the snippet and so here Read More

Workflows, Persistence and Versioning

One of the key services in Workflow Foundation is the persistence service which provides the capability of persisting your Workflow Instance to some store (either one that you implement or SQL Server through the provided SQL persistence service) when Read More