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October 2006 - Posts

Vista, XP, Dual-Booting

On my laptop I've got Vista and XP installed and they're working fine in a dual-boot configuration. I installed XP first and then Vista. On my desktop at home I installed Vista RC2 and then, for app compatibility reasons, I went off to install XP Service Read More...
Posted Monday, October 30, 2006 4:45 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Vista Gadgets and Windows Forms

I wanted to use Windows Forms to build a Sidebar Gadget for Vista. With Windows Forms, it's always been possible to build a control and then host it inside a web browser by using the object tag as in; <object classid="http:myassembly.dll#mynamespace.mycontrol"/> Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 28, 2006 9:14 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

The Vista Bridge

Find out here what's coming in the "Vista Bridge" samples that wrap up some of the unmanaged Vista API's so that they're more accessible to .NET developers. Read More...
Posted Friday, October 27, 2006 4:36 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Debugging Videos

I'd talked recently about debugging so I thought I'd do one of those "refresher" posts and highlight a bunch of videos that I made a while back about debugging. I think they're still relevant as they're on VS 2005. Note - I'm not John Robbins and nor Read More...
Posted Friday, October 27, 2006 4:15 PM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

.NET Framework 3.0 and "3.5"

One of the nice things about .NET Framework V3.0 is that adding it to a machine with V2.0 doesn't break anything as it just makes additional class libraries available. I'd been trying to find out whether this would be the case for the version of the Framework Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 4:59 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WCF, MSMQ and CompositeDuplex

One of the clever things that the WCF can do for you is to take 2 one-way communication transports and turn them into a logical duplex transport. This crops up with the wsDualHttpBinding which takes one HTTP request/response channel from the client to Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 4:36 PM by mtaulty | 5 Comments

WCF Service Tracing

I used Craig's service tracing tool for the first time today and I have to say that it looks pretty cool but I got nothing out of it and scratched my head for ages before I saw the text that says "this does not support duplex contracts" - that'll teach Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 11:16 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Spectrum of Richness/"Reachness"

I keep finding myself drawing a diagram something like this so I thought I'd drop it here; It comes up in debates about the various client technologies that we've got kicking around at the moment. I think you can argue as to whether Windows Forms and Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 26, 2006 1:27 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

.NET Framework, Source Code and Debugging

Something that I really miss with the .NET Framework is the source code. In the early days of the Framework between the PDC versions coming out in 2000 and the final release there were a number of rumours about the possibility that the Framework source Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 25, 2006 1:10 PM by mtaulty | 5 Comments

Kaxaml

Kaxaml looks to be a nice litted Xaml notepad variant that's better (from what I've seen so far) than the SDK-supplied XamlPad. I'll be using it for demos today and tomorrow so we'll see how I get on. What's better about it? File->Open, File->Save Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 25, 2006 4:17 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Vista Sidebar Gadgets

For me, this is the way to create Gadgets for Vista's Sidebar - I know that in this "Web 2.0" world it's not such a popular view but I prefer my code compiled rather than interpreted :-) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 25, 2006 1:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Storing HTML

How much HTML in the world is stored and how much is generated? I've been thinking about how when I write this blog post, what ultimately gets stored in my back-end database is HTML and I'm less and less keen on that idea as time goes on. What I'd like Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 22, 2006 5:47 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

SecurityBooks.Add()

Following up on the books topic - if you're doing web development with ASP.NET then you'll be needing to add this one to your bookshelf; It's written by Dominick Baier who hangs out over at http://www.leastprivilege.com/ and has that rare role of being Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 21, 2006 4:30 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Windows Vista and Insomnia

My desktop at home is running Vista 5744 and I'm using the "Sleep" mode such that when I press the power button it goes off into sleep. However, I find that Vista is having trouble sleeping and I don't know why. Each morning that I come in to my office, Read More...
Posted Saturday, October 21, 2006 4:19 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

BookShelf.Add() && ReadingHabits.Update()

From looking at the US Amazon site, it seems like the Workflow book has been released. I've been waiting for that one for quite a while and the security book looks like an interesting read too so I added that whilst shopping :-) I guess I need to put Read More...
Posted Friday, October 20, 2006 6:54 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Vista Desktop Optimisation Pack

The info on the optimisation pack for Vista looks interesting - particularly the SoftGrid bits for delivery of applications on demand. Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 19, 2006 2:54 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Heated Debate on Workflow ;-)

There's been a bit of a heated debate on Workflow Foundation going on which Paul Andrew captured and provided some responses to here . I don't flag this up to court controversy but, rather, so that people who haven't seen it might follow the debate because Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 19, 2006 3:06 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Ajax based Workflow Designer

I'd missed this Ajax-based Workflow Designer from Jon Flanders - very cool although I've yet to poke into it and have a look at how the bits are coming together here. Read More...
Posted Thursday, October 19, 2006 2:44 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Get yourself down the (.NET 3.0) Clinic

Online learning resources for WPF, WF and WCF . Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 10:28 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WCF and IAuthorizationPolicy

Following up on this previous post I'd been wondering how you make CardSpace work with simple, PrincipalPermission based authorization. To explain what I'm on about, I need to go on a detour. Say you've got a simple contract; [ServiceContract] public Read More...
Posted Wednesday, October 11, 2006 9:50 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Outlook (2003) Mailbox Size Visualiser - Moved to .NET 2.0

I have an Exchange Server that only gives me a pretty small mailbox and I receive a lot of mail and so I'm always getting the "Your mailbox is over its size limit" message. So, I wrote a plug-in for Outlook 2003 which would let me see where all my Mailbox Read More...
Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 4:27 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

MSDN Magazine Articles

There are some nice articles in this month's MSDN Magazine . It's strange as the articles feel quite "introductory" whereas I used to expect more depth from the magazine but perhaps it's a reflection of so much new technology kicking around. Something Read More...
Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 3:17 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Adding printers on Vista 5600

I've got 2 Vista machines on a network. One is sharing a printer and the other refuses to see it. I keep doing "Add Printer" and it keeps failing but there's no real error message as to why it's failing. In the end I realised that it was because I wasn't Read More...
Posted Monday, October 09, 2006 10:51 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

PC.Upgrade()

My desktop PC at home has been a bit noisy of late - through the Summer I ramp the fans up a little inside it to keep it cooler and in the Winter I turn them down a bit again. Whilst poking around inside it I realised that I'd had the core bits in there Read More...
Posted Sunday, October 08, 2006 4:12 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

CardSpaces, RC1 and Web Pages/Web Services

I spent more time than I'd hoped for playing with CardSpaces today on the RC1 bits (on Vista RC1 as it happens) so I thought I'd share where I ended up. Here's what I wanted to achieve (I know, it sounds really simple but it took a while); 1) Simple web Read More...
Posted Friday, October 06, 2006 9:15 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

WinHttpCertCfg.exe

I can never remember the name of this tool for allowing access to certificates from the IIS accounts so I'm blogging it here. I ran it on Vista and it seemed to work ok for me despite the initial warnings that it might not work. (WSE has another tool Read More...
Posted Friday, October 06, 2006 6:41 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

CardSpaces and "this site requires a managed card that you don't have"

I've been playing with the CardSpace samples that are posted up at NetFx3 and I set up a simple example of a web page that wanted a self-issued card with a few claims on it and I kept getting the error; "this site requires a managed card that you don't Read More...
Posted Friday, October 06, 2006 5:54 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

CardSpaces and Pre-Defined Claims

I was trying to find a list of all the pre-defined claims that CardSpaces knows about and I struggled to find it written down anywhere so I ran this bit of code; using System; using System.Reflection; using System.IdentityModel.Claims; using System.IO; Read More...
Posted Friday, October 06, 2006 2:36 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Death of the TCHAR?

The Windows API as it's implemented in all versions of Windows NT is a Unicode API. That means that all the strings that you pass into it are 2-byte character strings and as a C++ programmer you use wchar_t to represent that (there's lots of other definitions Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 03, 2006 4:23 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Ignore this post - it's not here

Technorati Profile Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 03, 2006 1:11 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

"Weak Delegates"

Interesting post over here from Greg Schechter about the idea of a "weak delegate". The CLR has support for weak references but not for "weak delegates" or "weak events" and Greg knocks something up that gives that kind of effect. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, October 03, 2006 1:03 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments