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September 2006 - Posts

Vista and Remote Desktop

I tried a Vista->Vista remote desktop today for the first time between my laptop and my desktop and I'm very impressed. I told the mstsc client that I had a 10Mbps+ network and it went ahead and remoted Aero Glass for me and the performance seemed Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 30, 2006 4:13 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Vista's Transactional File System and .NET Code

Originally, the API's that supported Vista's new transactional file system and registry access worked off an implicit model in that you could create a transaction with something like CreateTransaction and once you had that transaction you could use SetCurrentTransaction Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 27, 2006 2:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Microsoft UK Developer Team - Aggregated Blogs

There are 5 folks in my immediate team at Microsoft in the UK. There's me (!) and (alphabetically); Mark Johnston Daniel Moth Mike Ormond Martin Parry Having overcome a rather annoying technical limitation I've finally managed to aggregate the feeds from Read More...
Posted Monday, September 25, 2006 1:59 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Lang.NET Symposium

I'd never heard of the Lang.NET Symposium but it looks like it happened on the July 21st to August 2nd on the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. Anyway, I've missed it and perhaps you did too but what's pretty cool is that the talks look to be recorded on this Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 21, 2006 5:01 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Vista and Speech

A very short screen capture that I made around Windows Vista and its speech recognition facilities. Here's the download link . Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 20, 2006 6:23 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Live Writer Search Plug-In

I find that when I'm writing a blog entry I'm often tabbing backwards and forwards and opening up other windows just to search for URL's (e.g. I can never remember URL's to other people's home pages and so on). So, I wrote a little Live Writer Plug-In Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 19, 2006 5:33 PM by mtaulty | 7 Comments

NY Times Reader Review

There's a review up at Cnet on the New York Times Reader application . This is a WPF application that uses the richness of the PC to display content from the NYT with a better reading experience than you get in a browser. Unfortunately, I've not been Read More...
Posted Friday, September 15, 2006 4:55 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Manchester Event on 30th September

Mr Phil Winstanley (smashing chap and all round ASP.NET maestro) pinged me details of an event (free!) that he's speaking at in Manchester (UK) on the 30th September. The day's a Saturday and the theme is around Ruby and Rails - you can find the agenda Read More...
Posted Friday, September 15, 2006 1:14 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

The Open Specification Promise

I'll admit that I didn't really know that this was up for debate but this posting on the Microsoft.com website; http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx makes it pretty plain that people building implementations of the web services standards Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 14, 2006 10:05 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Research Paper on C# Threads

I hadn't come across this Microsoft Research paper on threading in C# before so I thought I'd mention it here as it's a pretty good read. I seem to remember once hearing a pretty savvy chap say something like; "Threading is complicated. In fact, it's Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 14, 2006 4:55 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Upcoming UK Developer Events

A quick plug. We have a number of upcoming UK Developer Events ( taken from here ) and I just wanted to give them a quick mention to try and encourage UK folks to come along as it's that time of year where people are either coming back from or going to Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 14, 2006 4:01 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Apple Keynote and "iTV"

I saw the Apple video from their press conference yesterday (it's up on the front page of www.apple.com at the time of writing). I liked the look of the new iPod Shuffle - it'd work well for me in the gym as it looks pretty small and it has that nice Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 13, 2006 8:29 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Installing the May LINQ CTP on Vista Rc1

If you're trying to instlal the LINQ CTP from May on Vista Rc1 then you may find that you need to create 2 local groups called; Users Power Users in order to make it work. That's certainly what I had to do - I'm not sure what's gone on with Vista Rc1 Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 13, 2006 2:14 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Communication Foundation: Videos

I've been getting a lot of mail feedback about the Workflow Foundation Videos that are linked to from the NetFx3 site so I thought I'd draw together the WCF videos that I made as well in one place (I can't remember whether I've done this before on a single Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 13, 2006 2:06 AM by mtaulty | 12 Comments

Microsoft Max gets updated for RC1

Max is an application built on .NET Framework V3.0 and uses some slick WPF graphics to provide a rich UI. Unfortunately, I've yet to see the new version as I grabbed the install and eagerly ran it on Vista only to be told that Max only works on Windows Read More...
Posted Monday, September 11, 2006 4:00 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Workflow - State Machines, Storing State

This is in follow up to a mail I got the other day on a similar theme. Most Workflows are likely to have state and StateMachine Workflows are no exception. Workflow Foundation has the idea of a persistence service that can store the state of a particular Read More...
Posted Monday, September 11, 2006 3:42 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

"Atlas" Changes

ScottGu has a posting on "Atlas" changes . Read More...
Posted Monday, September 11, 2006 2:48 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Quadro

Wow Read More...
Posted Monday, September 11, 2006 10:05 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Vista RC1 Media Center, Nvidia 5200FX, TV-Out

I've been having some trouble with my Media Center 2005 in that it keeps not recording programmes that I ask it to. I ask it to record a series. Initially it all looks good but when I revisit the guide later on and look at a show from the series then Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 10, 2006 8:35 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Joel's Field Guide to Developers

Not often that I'd do this but Joel's guide to what developers think about when joining a company lines up so well with my own thought processes that I thought I'd call it out. If you're ever involved in hiring or managing software developers or people Read More...
Posted Friday, September 08, 2006 4:40 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Live Writer Snipping Plugin Tool

I've been using Mike's code-formatting plug-in for Live Writer and it's working great for me so I thought I'd try and put one together myself. I've been finding that on Vista I'm using the Snipping Tool a lot as part of blog posting so I thought I'd drop Read More...
Posted Friday, September 08, 2006 8:58 AM by mtaulty | 7 Comments

Just for fun

Just a tiny thing that I noticed in Vista. There's a slider in the display settings; Now, unusually (I think), if I slide this to the left I seem to get more transparency and if I slide it to the right I get less transparency which is not usually how Read More...
Posted Friday, September 08, 2006 7:51 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Sandbox.NetFx3.com and CardSpace

For the first time (if I remember correctly) I managed to sign in to Sandbox using an Information Card rather than a user name and password. This was from Vista 5600 and the RC of the .NET Framework V3.0. In fact, I joined the community (for the 2nd time Read More...
Posted Friday, September 08, 2006 7:44 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Amazon's Video Download Service

Just came across what Amazon's recently unveiled as; Looks like an interesting one to me. Download video by broadband and either purchase it or "rent" it which gives up to 30 days to begin watching it and then once started you have 24 hours to complete Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 07, 2006 5:53 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

On LCD TVs

I've been watching the prices of LCD TV's for ages now in the expectation that the price will drop and, at some point, I'd pick one up. The problem is that I keep waiting, then waiting and then waiting a little more. Maybe a year to 18 months ago I'd Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 07, 2006 5:16 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

New WF Videos

Matt has kindly added 4 more videos that I made recently on WF to the screencasts area on NetFx3.com. These videos are; Calling Other Workflows Correlation Composite Activities Exposing Web Services I did a bit of counting and I've made 28 of these little Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 07, 2006 4:51 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

.NET Framework V3.0 RC Tools Released

The Visual Studio bits for the .NET Framework V3.0 RC are now available for download . Installing... Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 07, 2006 3:51 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Off topic...

But what the heck - it's time for one of my pet "rant" subjects - the house-price "bubble". It was this set of lecture slides from an RBOS lecture that set me off - there's some very interesting graphs in there but they don't include some of the scary Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 06, 2006 4:55 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Workflow Designer Hosting - Summing Up (for now)

I've been playing with the Workflow designer hosting for a little while, trying to get my head around the MSDN article that got published and I'm feeling reasonably happy with it. I've managed to get my little designer host to the point where it can display Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 06, 2006 9:53 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Expression Designers

There's a new September CTP version of the Expression Interactive Designer ("sparkle") that works with RC1 of the .NET Framework V3.0 and it's downloadable from here . Interactive Designer is about designing WPF based applications. There's also a beta Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 06, 2006 1:18 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Mandatory Integrity Control in Vista

I picked up this post on Vista's new Mandatory Integrity Control feature by way of Steve's blog . The idea of an additional check prior to checking DACLs in Vista was a new concept to me so it makes for a really interesting read - it didn't help in understanding Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 05, 2006 5:25 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Workflow Designer Hosting - Saving

Following on from this post and always with reference to this article ... I've moved along in Workflow versions in that I'm now working on Vista RC1 with the RC of .NET Framework V3.0 on it - it didn't seem to cause any noticeable changes for me in the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 05, 2006 7:14 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

UK Developer Community Day 4 (Developer, Developer, Developer)

The fourth (yes, fourth!) UK Developer Community Day is coming up on the 2nd December, at the Microsoft Campus in Reading (below); If you've not been to one of these before then it's an all day event on a Saturday and it's entirely run by UK developer Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 05, 2006 6:18 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

VS 2005 Workflow Extensions for Fx 3.0 RC1

I managed to come across the Workflow Extensions for Visual Studio 2005 that work with the just released RC1 build of .NET Framework V3.0. Then I realised that they were on the main download page all along and I'd just assumed that they wouldn't be there Read More...
Posted Monday, September 04, 2006 3:48 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

More Vista Security Posts

The Vista Security Blog has a bunch of new posts about RC1 including; Built-in Administrator Account Disabled Vista Security Guide Beta Opportunity Windows Vista Sidebar Security Well worth checking out if you're heading towards an RC1 installation. Read More...
Posted Monday, September 04, 2006 3:17 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Take a few days off...

And all kinds of things happen! Windows Vista RC1 got published along with its accompanying SDK (no tools yet as far as I know). I'm running this build at the time of writing and it's a major improvement over any of the Vista builds that I've used up Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 03, 2006 3:30 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Workflow Designer Hosting - Part 6, Menus

Following on from this post and always with reference to this article ... So far, whilst I've been able to drag Activities from the Toolbox to the design surface and then drag them around on the design surface I've not got any menu functionality so I Read More...
Posted Sunday, September 03, 2006 3:23 PM by mtaulty | 4 Comments