Mike Taulty's Blog
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August 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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  • 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 picture the scenarios for chat, voice, video, gaming, etc. that this stuff enables.
  • 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.
  • 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 an error saying "You need to provide an ITypeProvider " so that looks like a sensible thing to try and improve. I got bogged down a lot about ITypeProvider because the original sample uses an instance of the TypeProvider class that's already there in the framework but I was reading this post from Jon Flanders which seemed to suggest that you had to write a custom ITypeProvider to get things to work but that hasn't seemed to be the case for me (so far - I'm sure it'll come back to bite me). ITypeProvider is just a service that the various pieces of componentry that we're plugging together here can use to resolve Types that they don't know about. So, I created an instance of ITypeProvider and added it to my IDesignerHost as a service; private void InitialiseTypeProvider...
  • 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, there's still the sample but I didn't find it very helpful in terms of understanding how the toolbox fits in. Here's what I ended up with in order to get some kind of toolbox with a list of Activities on it that can be dragged and dropped to my design surface. Implement IToolboxService. Implement something graphical that displays a list of Activities and works with the IToolboxService implementation to get things dragged onto the design surface. Some notes on the above. Firstly, most (if not all) of the samples I've seen seem to implement IToolboxService in its entirety and it turns out that there's quite a lot of code in there and I'm not sure whether I want/need to write it. In the framework, there's already an abstract class called ToolboxService which...
  • 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/ which mashes-up (oh yes, I'm learning the lingo) Virtual Earth with Live Contacts to show you where your contacts are. I tried this with some of my contacts and all of them said "Sorry, the contact doesn't have any address information" so there could be a slight flaw in this in that I'm guessing a lot of people are like me in that they've submitted the very bare minimum of information about themselves to Live at the time of registration. Update: Must admit that I thought about this quite a bit yesterday after making this post and what it seems to facilitate seems a bit scary to me. If I understand it right then if Alice has Bob in her contacts list and Bob's contacts details include things like his home address then Alice can send Bob's home address...
  • 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 if you'd simply tried to switch between the different tabs (Workflow/Cancellation/Faults/etc) then that didn't work very well. So far, I've been just creating the "workflow definition" that's supposed to be on the screen somewhat arbitrarily and adding it into the designer through a somewhat odd mechanism and (by using this technique ) I can see that the Designer has been crying out for many things including a DesignerLoader and so I can add one of those things in by deriving something from the WorkflowDesignerLoader base class and adding that as a service. In deriving from WorkflowDesignerLoader, I have to implement three things; class MyWorkflowDesignerLoader : WorkflowDesignerLoader { public override string FileName { get { throw new Exception( "The method or...
  • 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 out is by doing my usual trick of using the; Debug->Exceptions->CLR Exceptions dialog box in Visual Studio so that when any sample I'm running throws an exception I can see what those exceptions are even if they are ultimately caught by the application. With the Workflow Designer hosting this has been quite useful in letting me see that certain services are missing from the configuration.
  • 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 this one step further, I want to add a property grid to my form so that I can display the properties (or at least some of them) of the selected Activity. The form now looks like; I added a SplitContainer and a PropertyGrid to the form. Then, the selections that are made in the designer need to show up in the PropertyGrid so I added a little method to make the grabbing of services easier from the DesignerHost ; private T GetHostService<T>() where T : class { T service = designerHost.GetService( typeof (T)) as T; return (service); } And then at the point where the Form loads, we add an event handler for the SelectionChanged event and that's used to update the property grid to show the right object (s); private void InitialiseSelectionChangedHandler() { ISelectionService...
  • 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 that I'd not get spotted hiding in the corner but you can only hide for so long :-) I've been pouring over the designer hosting for only a few hours and the initial conclusion I've come to is that the designer hosting isn't hard per-se but; The designer can do a lot of things for you. It can do the following and probably a whole bunch more; Display a Workflow Perform commands (copy/paste/zoom/etc) on the items in the Workflow Work to generate properties and fields in classes as the user designs the Workflow Work to generate event handlers in classes as the user designs the Workflow Declaratively bind activity properties to each other Declaratively define rules Work to load/persist workflows/code and rules Provide interaction with the toolbox for dragging-dropping...
  • 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 bits on first before installing the ADO.NET bits. Now I just need to find time to install it and have a look around.......
  • 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 and Vista out of the box. The SDK documentation is online but, frankly, there really don't seem to be any good, plain-English write-ups around exactly what these API's (and their higher-order collaboration friends) can do for you. I think there's also a barrier to entry because of; The P2P stuff is wedded into IPV6 and I guess most people haven't cracked that yet (I certainly haven't). It gets more complex when you read about tunnelling IPV6 over IPV4. The API's are not the easiest thing in the world to call from managed code. About the best material that I can find out there on the web is written by Adrian Moore and he's written a bunch of articles for The Code Project that talk a bit around the "nuts and bolts" of getting some of this stuff to work but, for me...
  • 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.
  • 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 .
  • .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 and it was becoming a bit legacy and, also, it was on .NET Framework V1.1 and the rest of my site is running 2.0. I found that downloading and installing CommunityServer was pretty easy but migration was a bit tricky. There's a tool up here which will do a conversion from .Text to CommunityServer for you. There's a couple of tools around ( this is the main one I found) but they work with earlier versions of CommunityServer so you have to install a V1.x version and then run conversion and then finally upgrade your CommunityServer to a V2.x version. I'd already installed CommunityServer when I found this out so I gave up on it. In the end, I wrote some C# code to do the conversion myself and unpicked the CommunityServer tables as best I could to see what needed...
  • 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).
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