October 2006 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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 Pack...

Published Mon, Oct 30 2006 4:45 PM by mtaulty

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...

Published Sat, Oct 28 2006 9:14 AM by mtaulty

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.

Published Fri, Oct 27 2006 4:36 PM by mtaulty

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...

Published Fri, Oct 27 2006 4:15 PM by mtaulty

.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...

Published Thu, Oct 26 2006 4:59 PM by mtaulty

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 the service...

Published Thu, Oct 26 2006 4:36 PM by mtaulty

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 me not...

Published Thu, Oct 26 2006 11:16 AM by mtaulty

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 "WPF/E...

Published Thu, Oct 26 2006 1:27 AM by mtaulty

.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 code...

Published Wed, Oct 25 2006 1:10 PM by mtaulty

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 and...

Published Wed, Oct 25 2006 4:17 AM by mtaulty

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 :-)

Published Wed, Oct 25 2006 1:27 AM by mtaulty

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 to store...

Published Sun, Oct 22 2006 5:47 AM by mtaulty

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 a real...

Published Sat, Oct 21 2006 4:30 AM by mtaulty

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, I find...

Published Sat, Oct 21 2006 4:19 AM by mtaulty

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 some effort...

Published Fri, Oct 20 2006 6:54 AM by mtaulty