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November 2006 - Posts

ObjectiveView Article on C# 2.0/3.0

Quite a while back I wrote what started out as a "little article" on C# V2.0 and V3.0 for ObjectiveView magazine. If you take a look you'll see that it grew quite a lot as it went along and got published here (PDF). This is nothing earth-shattering in Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 29, 2006 10:20 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

MSDN Roadshows in 2007

We're doing some developer and IT Pro technology "Roadshows" again in early 2007 and the dates have now been published and registration is open on the web site. Here's the details on dates and registration URLs; MSDN Developer Events; Nottingham - 21st Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 29, 2006 9:42 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

SWF and XAML Side By Side

Loved this demo up at the WPF Blog that uses the SWF2XAML converter that Mike Swanson published recently. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 29, 2006 9:11 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

DevelopMentor Connected Systems Roadshow

I did a slot today on Workflow Foundation with ASP.NET at the DevelopMentor Connected Systems Roadshow on the Microsoft Campus. This was part of a larger day of content that Dominick was doing around ASP.NET in general. The materials from the talk are Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 29, 2006 8:42 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Workflow Foundation == Lego

Just something random that popped into my head today - programming with Workflow Foundation is like building things with Lego. It's the way in which Activities expose properties that just snap together with other Activities and it's somehow very satisfying Read More...
Posted Friday, November 24, 2006 3:26 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WF - "CallExternalMethod", "HandleExternalEvent"

I sat in on a workshop on WF yesterday that David was running. One of the interesting discussions that came up was around the "CallExternalMethod"/"HandleExternalEvent" Activities. The idea of these Activities is that you can build a Workflow which makes Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 23, 2006 5:51 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

MSDN Article on Creating Custom WF Activities

Nice article over on MSDN about creating activities for WF. I've done a few WF talks this week and I think one of the things that people struggle with is the section entitled Asynchronous and Event-Based Activities. That is - how do you have activities Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 22, 2006 4:32 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Workflow Foundation in an XBAP

Paul's got a post over here about running WF foundation in an XBAP. The upshot is that WF (like WCF proxies) won't run in a partial trust environment so if you're going to run WF in an XBAP then you need to alter the security policy to give your particular Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 22, 2006 4:20 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Interesting little article on non-SQL injections

Over here (pulled straight from the front page of slashdot today). Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 22, 2006 3:48 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Upgrading from Vista RC2 to Vista RTM

I was reading that Daniel moved to Vista RTM and he mentioned that you can't go from RC2 to RTM. Now, on my laptop, I wiped the installation and started again with RTM but on my desktop at home I had RC2 and I thought I'd give it a whirl with the RTM Read More...
Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 4:51 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

PowerShell Released

I was talking to some chaps the other day about PowerShell and I realised that I didn't really know where it was up to only to find that they'd gone and released it :-) Here's the link - PowerShell V1.0 for Windows XP, Server 2003 and Vista. Time to move Read More...
Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 4:47 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Joe Stegman on WPF/E

Joe Stegman's WPF/E blog is sparking into life again . Read More...
Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 4:43 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

More VB9 Videos...

After these VB9 Videos come some more and a new RSS Feed which lists all videos across all topics. VB9 - XML Support VB9 becomes the best .NET language for creating and manipulating XML with XML features built natively in the language. In this session, Read More...
Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 3:25 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Workflow Designer & IGlyphProvider

I was trying to build a very simplified version of the Workflow Monitor sample which ships in the WF SDK - I find that it does quite a lot to get to grips with so I just wanted something simple which would query my tracking database for running workflows Read More...
Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 2:37 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Playing with Sparkle, WPF

I saw this piece of UI over at http://www.samsung.com that's done in Flash and it seemed effective so I thought that I'd have a go with WPF and Sparkle to see if I could reproduce it. Essentially, there are 3 small rectangles over a background image and Read More...
Posted Friday, November 17, 2006 2:34 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Architect Insight Conference

Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 16, 2006 1:34 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Workflow Foundation - Performance Whitepaper

There's a whitepaper been published to MSDN about the performance characteristics of Windows Workflow Foundation. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at this the other week and it looked pretty good to me. Here's the link; http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa973808.aspx Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 12, 2006 4:04 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

PhotoSynth

A preview of PhotoSynth has gone live up at http://labs.live.com/photosynth That's one seriously cool piece of software - I've had a wander around St. Mark's square this morning and a little look around some lake in Canada. You can almost feel the "smarts" Read More...
Posted Friday, November 10, 2006 1:37 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Build an AddOn for IE, win $2500 and get to go to MIX07

Interesting competition over here about building an add-on to IE7 and winning yourself some cash and a trip to MIX07 (it does seem to be open to UK applicants in so far as I can tell). I've never built an AddOn for IE although I've been thinking about Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 3:32 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Vista and the Feedback Loop

I've not written this down before but I saw this post and it really rings home for me in that I think one of the real wins in Vista might turn out to be a tight feedback loop that's possible because of; Windows Error Reporting (and the extra information Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 7:58 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Nugget RSS Feeds and RSS Enclosures

I added RSS enclosures to the feeds for videos that hang off http://www.mtaulty.com/services/NuggetFeeds.ashx?query=topics I should have done this ages ago. I have read (haven't seen it yet) that IE7 is quite smart in how it tries to grab contents from Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 7:14 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Virtual TechEd - Anders Hejlsberg

There's a cool video on the Virtual TechEd where Paul's talking to Anders about LINQ, dynamic typing and a few bits and pieces. I found his comment about the "pendulum swinging between static and dynamic languages" spot-on as I think that's certainly Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 09, 2006 1:52 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

(Fx3.Release() && Office.Release() && Vista.Release())

Paul says that Windows Vista has RTM'd and I believe him :-) That's quite some week in terms of the amount of released code that's gone out of the door. Enjoy! (I've no idea where you'd go to actually get the bits yet but I'm sure they'll be made available Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 08, 2006 11:18 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

MIX07 - April 30th 2007, Las Vegas

Web page is here http://visitmix.com/ or Subscribe to the RSS feed for notifications. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 07, 2006 1:46 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

RTM Time!

After the "Office 2007" announcement, the .NET Framework V3.0 has RTM'd and it's on the web for Windows XP and Server 2003. You can hear Paul and Paul talking about the RTM announcement in this video here from TechEd Europe. I hope I'm linking to the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 07, 2006 1:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Virtual Earth 3D

Virtual Earth has got an update today by the looks of things and has an interesting 3D mode in beta. When you first select 3D mode you're prompted to install some software - I think there were 6 or more clicks to wade through on my Vista Rc1 installation Read More...
Posted Monday, November 06, 2006 4:54 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Workflow and ASP.NET Web Services

With the Workflow Foundation, there's a wizard in Visual Studio 2005 that does a "publish as a web service" and I've had quite a bit of mail about this so I thought it might be worth unpicking what seems to go on when you use the Wizard. Let's say I've Read More...
Posted Monday, November 06, 2006 4:22 PM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

VB9 Videos

I made some MSDN Videos on VB9 - I've got a few more kicking around but this is the start of it (I'll update the post at a later point with the others when I've finished them). It's easy to be snooty about VB but I'm largely agnostic towards it although Read More...
Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 5:58 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Free Vista and Office

The developer launch for Vista and Office is scheduled to happen at the Microsoft Campus in Reading on the 19th and 20th of January. It's a mix of online and offline activities and Ian has the details over here on his blog including some info on how participants Read More...
Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 5:49 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Virtual TechEd

Good to see that my colleague Paul is becoming a TV star over here :-) TechEd for developers runs in Barcelona next week. I've been a bit embarrassed in that I'd have liked to be there and most people I've met over the past few months have said something Read More...
Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 5:43 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Developer Day IV - Registration Open & Filling Fast

That's a genuine "filling fast" rather than a phony one designed to drum up interest so if you want to be at the 4th Developer Day on the MS Campus, Reading on Saturday the 2nd December then you need to register ASAP. Read More...
Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 5:34 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Display Resolution Gadget for Vista

This is possibly more useful to me than it might be to anyone else because I find that I'm quite often changing my display resolution in order to present or to record the screen and I find that in Vista it's a couple more mouse clicks away than I want Read More...
Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 5:27 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Licensing.Fix()

Good news on the Vista licensing front . Read More...
Posted Friday, November 03, 2006 7:14 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

SQL Server Compact Edition

SQLCE goes back to being SQLCE with a different meaning for "CE". I see this as a positive decision. I think the idea of calling a product "SQL Server Everywhere" when the engine isn't actually the SQL Server engine and there's already a product called Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 02, 2006 3:19 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Changing nature of desktop/web apps

Interesting article over on Read/Write Web about desktop/web convergence. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 01, 2006 3:11 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments