September 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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 pretty good - tried the Flip3D thing and it wasn't quite as smooth as it'd be locally but I was surprised that it worked at all :-)

Published Sat, Sep 30 2006 4:13 AM by mtaulty

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 to set this as an "ambient" transaction and any registry or file API's just automatically picked it up and became transactional "automatically". Around beta 2 (I think) but certainly by the time of Rc1 this has changed in that transactions are not picked up automatically. You can read about the changes in Jim Johnson's blog post on the subject but essentially a lot of API's got duplicate versions for creating transactional handles. So, CreateFile now has a transactional version of CreateFileTransacted . I think it's a shame that the API's changed but I guess that there's a very good reason for it. One of the reasons why it's a shame is that previously if you had some .NET code like (pseudo-code); NativeMethods.CreateTransaction(); NativeMethods...

Published Wed, Sep 27 2006 2:27 AM by mtaulty

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 the 5 of us and put them onto a single RSS feed which you can pick up here; http://mtaulty.com/CommunityServer/roller/rss.ashx Let me know if you have problems with the feed. If I can figure out how to do it with Community Server then I might set up some more aggregated feeds for people in my wider group and also perhaps the feeds that I subscribe to from folks in the UK.

Published Mon, Sep 25 2006 1:59 AM by mtaulty

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 page here; http://www.langnetsymposium.com/speakers.asp (look for the "video" link after each talk title). I've just downloaded them all myself but they seem to stream really well off the site. Talks that caught my interest (which I haven't watched yet); Dynamically Typed Languages on the Java Platform Dealing with Ruby on the CLR Whatever the Miguel de Icaza Talk was About (no title on site) Spec#: Why Every Language Should (Will) Have Contracts Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and C# 3.0 Type-safe, scalable, efficient scripting on .NET and beyond Visual Basic 9 Windows PowerShell PageXML: An XML based domain specific language for developing web applications C21.1: Versioning in the TwentyFirst Century On Integration of the Classbox Concept in the .NET Framework...

Published Thu, Sep 21 2006 5:01 AM by mtaulty

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 .

Published Wed, Sep 20 2006 6:23 AM by mtaulty

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 to help with searching. There might be others out there already, didn't check :-) The download is here . If you take the 2 files in the zip file and drop them into your equivalent of; C:\Program Files\Windows Live Writer\PlugIns then the next time that you run Live Writer you should see a new option to Insert Live Search Result... When you click on that option, you'll get a dialog that looks like this; and when you enter a search term and click Search you'll get (hopefully) up to 10 results back (I figured that you don't want to be overwhelmed here with lots of extra search results); and then you just double-click a result to insert it into your document or click Cancel to not do that. The search is provided by Windows Live Search via its SOAP API in order to do...

Published Tue, Sep 19 2006 5:33 PM by mtaulty

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 able to try it yet as there doesn't seem to be a download link but there are pictures of the app on the website. It's an interesting review because, whilst the author seems to like the application, the second half of the review seems to be centered around the ideas that; 1) Rss Readers and web sites should free content creators from building dedicated applications. 2) Users don't want to run different apps for different content. I must admit that I don't really get that part of the review. On (1) it seems to me that sites are constantly building dedicated applications to differentiate themselves by presenting their content in the best way possible. Take Cnet's own new TV service which looks like a dedicated application to me. Now, that application happens to run inside...

Published Fri, Sep 15 2006 4:55 PM by mtaulty

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 here . It looks pretty cool to me and I could certainly learn a lot as right now my experience to Ruby is to flick through a book in a book-shop and that's more than the experience that I have of Rails :-) So...if you happen to be up North then register on the website. I'll be there if I'm allowed out by "she who must be obeyed".

Published Fri, Sep 15 2006 1:14 AM by mtaulty

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 listed on the site don't have anything to fear from MS for doing so (subject of course to the legal wording that's up there - I even learnt a new word, " estoppel", in that legal speak). There's some very positive statements from the non-Microsoft world about the way in which this has been done so it sounds like good news all round.

Published Thu, Sep 14 2006 10:05 AM by mtaulty

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 just slightly more complicated than you think it is". at the time I thought that he was over-stating it but, since, I've come to agree.

Published Thu, Sep 14 2006 4:55 AM by mtaulty

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 their Summer holidays and so on and just getting back into the swing of work. This month; The Web : Designing and Developing Compelling Sites and Applications - Reading, 19 Sep 2006 Windows Vista Developer Features Beyond .NET - Edinburgh, 20 Sep 2006 Developers security features of Visual Studio 2005, VSTS and SQL Server 2005 - London, 21 Sep 2006 MSDN Roadshow - Reading, 26 Sep 2006 Next month; Windows Vista Developer Features Beyond .NET - Reading, 03 Oct 2006 Windows Vista Security Features for Developers (a.m.) - Reading, 10 Oct 2006 Windows Vista Security Features for Developers (p.m.) - Reading, 10 Oct 2006 Introduction to .NET Framework 3.0 for Developers - Edinburgh, 11 Oct 2006 Office 2007 Developer Features – Server - London, 11 Oct 2006 Office 2007 Developer...

Published Thu, Sep 14 2006 4:01 AM by mtaulty

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 clip already on it (it needs to be fairly strong though to survive the gym where I'm always dropping the mp3 player I currently use in the gym). The movie announcement didn't really get me too excited but I was interested in the bit at the end where they previewed that box that sits under the TV and connects back to your Mac. Codename is "iTV". This "iTV" seems to sit somewhere between an XBox Extender and a Media Center. Its limitations for me would be; It needs another computer. That is, it's a 2 box solution and I'd rather just have one box if possible. For me, the problem of saying "You have one small box near the TV and another one hidden in a back-office" is that it's right pain to then go fix that box that lives in the back-office when you're just trying to...

Published Wed, Sep 13 2006 8:29 AM by mtaulty

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 in that all of my standard groups now have a _ploc extension on them so; Administrators_ploc and I've no idea why I'm afraid (tried searching around on it but found no reference as to why this was) so it was a case of "hack at it and see if you can make it work" rather than trying to understand it.

Published Wed, Sep 13 2006 2:14 AM by mtaulty

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 post but if I have then I can't find it). Generally, these WCF videos are slightly out of date with respect to the current Rc1 bits but the principles should all still pretty much apply. Update ( December, 2009) - I know people still come across this post because they mail me and tell me :-) Two things to bear in mind - one is that I've done my best to locate all the videos desipte the MSDN folks moving their hyperlinks around on me :-) The second is that these videos were made on a beta/preview and things changed after they were made so bear that in mind if you're watching them. Here's the run-down; Windows Communication Foundation:" Hello World" The Windows Communication Foundation is a new framework for building distributed...

Published Wed, Sep 13 2006 2:06 AM by mtaulty

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 XP Service Pack 2 :-) I guess the guys at Max are trying to keep the size of their test matrix down. I tried launching the setup.exe through the Vista "Program Compatibility Wizard" but, unforunately, that Wizard doesn't seem to have a setting that says "When this application asks what OS it is on tell it that it is on Windows XP Service Pack 2 rather than Vista". To me, that'd be a useful option because I've often ran setup programs that say "This program only works on Windows Version X.Y" when you've got a version later than "X.Y" and you'd like to give the setup a whirl :-)

Published Mon, Sep 11 2006 4:00 PM by mtaulty