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 2 because some of my software doesn't run on Vista RC2. Problem is - part way through the installation of XP I came across the problem logged in this KB article; Windows Vista no longer starts after you install an earlier version of the Windows operating system in a dual-boot configuration When I found the KB I was pretty pleased because at least there's a workaround that seems pretty simple but I've yet to get this to work for me. I went through the; Drive:\boot\ Bootsect.exe –NT60 All and that seemed to work but when I get to the bits involving bcdedit.exe I seem to find that no matter what I do bcdedit reports; device unknown no matter how many times I do "bcdedit.exe /set {bootmgr} device partition=C:" I always end up with "device unknown" and the PC...

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"/> and you can go ahead and write .NET code and have it run in the browser (assuming that the browser can load a compatible .NET CLR to run what you wrote). If you take a page containing such a directive and drop it onto your web server and make myassembly.dll available in the same place then this will work subject to CAS restrictions. However, to the best of my knowledge (and from what I found on MSDN) if you just drop a web page like this into your local file system and then bring it up in the browser you'll find that the browser doesn't load your Windows Forms control because it's coming from a file:// URL rather than an http:// URL. It's a shame because you can build a gadget with WPF (using XBAP) and load it up from the local filesystem. Perhaps...

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 John Robbins and nor am I Doug Stewart (if you're into debugging, subscribe to Doug as I don't think there's much in WinDbg and a whole mountain of other topics that he doesn't know about in stunning depth). Anyway, here's the video roll-call. Note - I found that all the "online" links seem to be broken whilst preparing this list - I'll see if I can get them fixed but in the meantime only the "download a zip file to watch offline" is likely to work. Preparation - Building Your Code for Debugging In this session we look at debugging debug and release builds and the role of PDB files in Visual Studio 2005 Click here to watch the video online or here to download a zip file to watch offline Preparation - Building Debug and Tracing into Your Code Maximise your debugging by ensuring that your...

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 that would come with Visual Studio "Orcas" - this has been referred to as "3.5" in some places but no doubt that's not the final name for it. Paul was good enough to point me at a great Channel 9 Video from Jason Zander which looks initially to be about the name change of WinFX to .NET Framework V3.0 but if you run the video to around 13 minutes in then there's a lot more discussion about this "3.5" version of the Framework and how that might work. Jason talks about "red" changes to the Framework and "green" changes to the Framework and if I heard him correctly then the definition is something like; "red" == servicing changes that alter existing assemblies "green" == additive changes that bring new functionality without altering existing assemblies But you...

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 and another HTTP request/response channel from the service back to the client (assuming you have that connectivity) and ties them together to form a duplex channel. So...a client can talk to the service over HTTP and send the service a message and some time later the service can use the CallbackChannel to reply back to the client and that reply will be delivered to an HTTP endpoint back in the client. Naturally, when the client first makes its request to the service it'll be needing to include details of a reply address otherwise this can't work. One of the things that I puzzled over earlier on in the days of the WCF is the absence of an MSMQ duplex binding. Given that MSMQ is a very obviously one-way transport it initially seems an obvious one to include...

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 to read the website properly :-)

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" should trade places and, also, whether there should really be 3 separate HTML-based entries and, also, Office would be another possible inclusion here as it's a client platform that sits on the screens of millions of users every day so it's very much a real platform. This isn't some kind of "official" view, it's just how I think about these pieces.

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 might get shipped as an aid to debugging. For a C/C++ developer, this seems natural in that you have the source for the ATL, the MFC and the C runtime library all shipped with Visual Studio and it's a real aid to debugging but the rumours around the .NET Framework source code turned out to be false and the Framework code does not ship with VS. With .NET, it's not so easy. When you wander into the .NET Framework code the best that you've got is the disassembly that's come out of the JIT and most people don't want to step through disassembly these days. At one time, I used to have an idea that all this could be solved by disassembling a .NET Framework assembly back to IL (or maybe even C# via Reflector) and then rebuilding that IL or C# code with debugging information...

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 persistent Snippets (it'd be nice if all the Snippets weren't in one big XML file but it's still better than XamlPad where I have to keep setting up my Snippets). I had a vague plan to write something like Kaxaml for my own use but now I won't be bothering :-)

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 is some kind of intermediary XML format so that I can generate HTML from it but also, in the future, generate something else including something like XAML. I guess this is more of a problem for an end-user like me than it is for a real owner of content as I'd imagine that those content owners value their content enough not to encode it into one fixed format such as HTML. I guess you could also argue that if I'm storing XHTML then I'm at least a step further along the road to a transformation but I still think a blog engine that stored something intermediary would have been a better bet.

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 security specialist (also, a very nice bloke should you happen to catch up with him at one of his training or conference appearances).

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 that Vista has woken up and the machine is running. This is kind of ok but it's annoying in that I'm away from home quite a lot so I come home to find that the machine has been on for a few days for no reason. Now, I can probably set the machine to shut itself down after a certain period of inactivity but (for me) that's not really the solution because I sometimes leave it on doing long downloads and so I tend to like my machine to be on when I switch it on and to go off when I switch it off and not make decisions on its own in the meantime. I guess that this might be a bug and if it is then I'm hoping that this will be fixed by RTM. The other thing I'd really like to see is some kind of event log message that says "the machine switched itself on because...

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 in and finish my copy of Petzold before these 2 arrive. As an aside on reading technical books - I used to be able to pick them up and pretty much read them like reading a newspaper. I'd get through even a big book in a few sittings. These days, I tend not to do that any more. I tend to pick them up, put them down and it takes a relative eternity for me to get through them. Even with Petzold's new book which is a great book and a very easy read I find that I read a few chapters and then put it down for a while. I'm about half way through it right now. I've been puzzling over why this change has come about. I don't think it's that I've lost interest or enthusiasm in the technology but I feel that these days I'm working at a different point in the lifecycle...

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