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August 2006 - Posts

Peer to Peer Info

More P2P stuff seems to be going out on Noah Horton's blog . I'm reasonably excited about the whole P2P platform these guys are building and I think that it has the possibility to have a very big impact on applications and users over time. You can just Read More...
Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 6:34 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

IE7 Release Candidate Available

Here's the link . I've only just managed to get to the beta 3 bits. It looks like this one will uninstall the previous beta for you so that's a relief - I seemed to do quite a lot of rebooting to get to beta 3. Read More...
Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 2:58 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Workflow Designer Hosting - Part 5, ITypeProvider, ISite, IPropertyValueUIService

Using the code from the previous post , if I go ahead and drag a new Activity to the design surface and then try and do something simple like renaming it from its automatically generated name (there's a service doing that somewhere I'm sure) then I get Read More...
Posted Friday, August 25, 2006 2:52 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

Windows Workflow Designer Hosting - Part 4, Trying to make the Toolbox work

Following on from this post . I struggled a lot with trying to get the toolbox to work. In the end, the code I wrote wasn't difficult code at all, the problem really was more one of knowing what code I was supposed to be writing in the first place. Naturally, Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 24, 2006 6:31 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

Live Contacts?

Interesting and new to me. Windows Live has a Contacts gadget for sharing some information (I haven't yet read how much and what the level of control might be) about your personal contacts with websites. There's an example here: http://dev.live.com/mashups/partystart/ Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 22, 2006 3:57 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Workflow Designer Hosting - Part 3 (Fixing some stuff from Part 2)

Back in part 2 I'd basically managed to get something from the Workflow Designer on the screen and I'd got a property grid but if you'd run the code as it stood so far you'd know that if you tried to drag and drop things around in the designer or even Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 22, 2006 7:21 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

Windows Workflow Foundation - Hosting the Designer Part 2.5

Following on from this previous post a tip that I'd pass on about hosting the designer. I've been finding it a bit confusing to work out which services I need to add in order to affect which functionality. One of the ways in which I've tried to work this Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 22, 2006 6:28 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Windows Workflow Foundation - Hosting the Designer (Part 2)

The cliffhanger of the previous post was that I'd managed to get a simple Workflow definition to load from a XAML file and show up in the designer without too much code but I'd yet to make it do anything at all other than display the Workflow. Taking Read More...
Posted Monday, August 21, 2006 2:02 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

Windows Workflow Foundation - Hosting the Designer

I've been shying away from this. I've heard from a few people that hosting the designer componentry that Windows Workflow Foundation provides is quite tricky and so I've generally been focusing on runtime bits and pieces and keeping my head down and hoping Read More...
Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 10:08 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

ADO.NET Technology Preview

I missed again - a preview of the future work going on with ADO.NET has gone onto the web for download . This includes the Entity Framework and Object Relational Mapping technologies that sit on top of it. It looks like you need to put the LINQ preview Read More...
Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 7:06 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Peer to Peer Networking in Windows Vista

One of the technologies that seems to be raising its profile in Windows Vista is Peer 2 Peer. There are a bunch of Peer to Peer API's that were (as far as I'm aware) first made available as an add-on to Windows XP Service Pack 1 but are present in Sp2 Read More...
Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 6:30 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Been Beta Testing Windows Vista?

Then take a look at the "Scenario Voting" site which lets you provide feedback as to which bits of Vista you're happy/unhappy with, how important they are to you and provide verbatim text as to why you're unhappy. Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 17, 2006 3:29 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Quick Test to see if Live Writer can post a blog picture

Saw both of these films on DVD at the weekend and thought that they were great (this is just me making sure that I can post images) with Live Writer . Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 17, 2006 9:09 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

.Text 0.95, CommunityServer 2.1, Live Writer

I've just been through the slightly painful process of trying to upgrade my Blog from the .Text engine (0.95) to the CommunityServer engine (2.1). The driving force behind this was really that I was finding that less and less tools were working with .Text Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 17, 2006 8:24 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

WCF and InstanceContextMode.Shareable

I'd missed this change to the July WCF; http://blogs.msdn.com/mahjayar/archive/2006/07/08/660176.aspx (probably because I'm not really using it as of yet and have been confined to Beta 2 for a while). Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 17, 2006 2:03 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

C# 3.0, generic methods, anonymous types and inferring types.

I was coming back from a slightly shambolic talk I’d given on C# 3.0 last week and I was thinking about the way that the C# compiler (V2.0 and V3.0) does inference around generic methods and I scribbled down a few notes – might be a few glaring errors Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 16, 2006 6:25 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Mmm. Shuttle X100.

This looks like a nice little box for a Media Centre . Core Duo (not 2), 1Gb of RAM, 250GB disk built in for $999. I notice there's no TV card in there though and they're offering an external USB one so does that mean there's no room for one inside? Looking Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 15, 2006 9:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Vista & Speech Recognition

I'd heard some bad things about Vista and speech recognition and so last week I sat up late at night trying it out and it worked really quite well for me. I ran it through the initial tutorial but didn't do the advanced tutorial so I guess there's still Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 15, 2006 8:42 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Live Writer

I'm not sure that the naming sums it up very well but there's a new freebie blogging tool that's gone up to this site here http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/ I know that Martin 's been using this but I've not managed it yet as I'm in the process Read More...
Posted Monday, August 14, 2006 2:37 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

SmartFTP

I've been doing a bunch of FTP'ing in the last couple of days and (for whatever reason) I'm afraid the Windows Shell just doesn't cut it. I kept uploading a bunch of files (i.e. MB's) over the shell FTP and it keeps failing with various errors and giving Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 12, 2006 7:29 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Workflow Videos on NetFx3.com

The guys at www.netfx3.com have uploaded a bunch of the screencasts I made around Workflow Foundation. They're now also available at; http://wf.netfx3.com/files/folders/screencasts/default.aspx It's the same material as before (I have a few more of these Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 12, 2006 7:24 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Windows Vista 1, Mike 0

I went out to do a talk on C# V3.0 yesterday and, as I hadn't wanted to install the preview compiler onto my Windows XP installation I decided to install it onto my installation of Windows Vista build 5456. (I have a Toshiba M3 laptop with an Nvidia graphics Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 12, 2006 2:59 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Powershell links

I've seen a number of folks blog recently that they're moving to Powershell for their command prompt and I'm about to do the same. I blogged quite a bit on Powershell in the past and built simple command-lets for it and also a provider to navigate the Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 10, 2006 1:40 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Playing with Windows CardSpaces

This was a new one for me. It seems that the Live team has put up an experimental Security Token Service up at; http://sts.labs.live.com/ There's also a blog (with one entry) up here; http://blogs.msdn.com/labssts/ and the getting started guide is here. Read More...
Posted Thursday, August 10, 2006 1:19 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

CNET TV

I hadn't come across this CNET TV offering before; http://www.cnettv.com/?tag=hd_ts I know there's a lot of "web TV" sites hanging around (YouTube and so on) but this one seems to work pretty well to me. It has a nice interface (Flash built - it's not Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 09, 2006 4:46 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Dell 2407 WFP 24" LCD Monitor

A few months ago I took advantage of a discount offer that Dell had on their 24" 2405 LCD monitor. You bought 2 monitors and you got a bunch of cash off and I found a colleague to buy the 2nd monitor. My previous setup at home was that I had my desktop Read More...
Posted Tuesday, August 08, 2006 4:37 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Updating a previous XBAP using web services to B2

In a previous post I built a little WPF XBAP application that ran in the browser and called both MSN Search and Google Search as back end services and aggregated them up. The main reason for this was to look at how you invoke services whilst working within Read More...
Posted Saturday, August 05, 2006 9:21 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Workflow Foundation and writing Activities that run for a while

Writing a Windows Workflow Activity that performs some kind of quick, synchronous operation seems relatively easy. I’ve managed to get away with using my MessageBoxActivity for parts of demos and there’s really not much to it; public partial class MsgBoxActivity Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 02, 2006 5:44 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Switching my Search

I'm recently back from an MS conference where (being honest) I started using Windows Live Search on the public Internet terminals because I was a bit embarrassed to be using Google (like I always have been doing since I gave up all the forerunners that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, August 02, 2006 5:19 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments