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December 2006 - Posts

P2P Collaboration API, PeopleNearMe and WCF NetPeerTcpBinding

Following up on this post I wanted to experiment with having a WCF P2P client which used People Near Me in order to start up a WCF service on another machine and pass that service enough information in order that the service receive the messages that Read More...
Posted Friday, December 29, 2006 5:33 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Playing with P2P Bits on Vista (2)

Following up on this post , I also played a bit with the collaboration API and plugged in to "People Near Me". As far as I can work out, "People Near Me" allows you to advertise yourself (along with a little data) on your subnet in order that you can Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 28, 2006 12:53 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Playing with P2P Bits on Vista

I've been playing a little with the peer to peer bits on Vista (also largely on Windows XP since Service Pack 1). I've not managed to completely work this out in my head properly yet but my understanding at the moment is that you have layers that are Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 27, 2006 4:44 PM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

iTunes and Album Art

I got an iPod Shuffle over Xmas (very handy device for running with as it's solid state, has few buttons and it's tiny) but I was a bit disappointed with using iTunes to set it up. First sore point seemed to be that iTunes won't display my album art (which Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 27, 2006 1:40 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WPF/E Pad is looking pretty cool

Over here: http://www.simplegeek.com/mharsh/wpfepad/ Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 27, 2006 1:30 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Google Search and SOAP

Ouch - looks like Google is moving away from having its Search Engine accessible using a SOAP mechanism (note - I'm just commenting on what I've read here, I know no more about it than what it says on that page and the other links). The thing that worries Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006 12:43 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

ASP.NET, WF and sending data backwards and forwards

I saw some questions on an internal alias about "how to get ASP.NET to talk to Workflows" in terms of sending data backwards and forwards and I thought I'd write up a little bit about that here as I gave a talk at the DevelopMentor Connected Systems Roadshow Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 20, 2006 12:34 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Interesting post...

I hadn't seen this before, sounds like some interesting things coming in the future. For me, it often seems that parallelism has to be the next big "problem" to solve in languages. Read More...
Posted Monday, December 18, 2006 4:38 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WPF/E and "Layering" Content

This gets more interesting by the day (for me, anyway :-)). I wondered what happened if I wanted to "overlay" WPF/E content on top of other content in the browser and the most interesting content I could think of was a map from Virtual Earth. It took Read More...
Posted Friday, December 15, 2006 5:00 PM by mtaulty | 5 Comments

News Links

A few links that I missed in being out of the office for about 24 hours :-) You can't blink these days without missing things; The gap between 2D controls and 3D graphics just narrowed with the WPF 3D bits announced here The AJAX bits just went to RC Read More...
Posted Friday, December 15, 2006 9:27 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Bit more WPF/E Video

I had a little play with dropping a Path (made from some text in Expression Design) over the top of a video and then using mouse drag in order to skew the Path left, right, up and down. It looks like this; and it's here: http://mtaulty.com/wpfe/ex8.html Read More...
Posted Friday, December 15, 2006 8:04 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

WPF/E and Video on Video

This seems to be a technique that I've seen a few times on TV where they play a clip over the top of the same clip but the "background clip" is blurred or maybe darkened in some fashion. Clear as mud? Here's a picture of what I'm trying to do; It was Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 5:30 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

MetaStorm and the Workflow Designer

I was chatting to some guys from MetaStorm yesterday who were working with one of my colleagues down on Campus to build some bits with Workflow Foundation. They showed me some pretty cool demos of what they've been doing with the WF designer and I've Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 5:55 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

Little Workflow Foundation Sample

I built a little sample with WF the other week for an internal group meeting just as a bit of fun to try and illustrate (to people who are not developers) what Workflow Foundation can enable. I thought I'd share the bits here. Essentially, it's a small Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 5:21 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

WPF/E - Playing with Video

I had a quick stab at putting a few MediaElements on a WPF/E control and I was pretty pleased with the sort of performance that it seems to give you. The result is here; In doing this I ended up creating 12 MediaElements in XAML rather than in code (I Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 13, 2006 3:39 AM by mtaulty | 5 Comments

Laptop hard-drives at 300GB by Feb 07

Wow - I'll have 2 please :-) My laptop right now has about 160GB in it across 2 disks and I don't generally run out of space although from time to time I find myself shuffling VPC images around and I don't do things like store my personal stuff on the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 12, 2006 3:27 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Next Year's PDC

The PDC for 2007 is already announced - it's back in Los Angeles again and runs from 2nd to 5th October. Hopefully an announcement this early will allow you (and me) to mention it to the people setting next year's budgets :-) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 12, 2006 3:25 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Playing with WPF/E

Following on from this post , I got a bit nearer to replicating my simple XBAP application that displays a few pictures with something similar in WPF/E. It's not quite right yet but the bits are; http://mtaulty.com/wpfe/ex4.html Some more work to do (the Read More...
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006 4:38 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

WPF/E and Animations (again*again)

Following on from this post another thing I was trying to achieve was to animate a Rectangle's height to a certain size and then back again. This seemed simple enough in that I have a "grow" animation that grows the Rectangle when the canvas loads and Read More...
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006 3:41 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

WPF/E CTP and Animations (again)

I've been trying to rebuild this example here that I built as a WPF XBAP; http://mtaulty.com/pictures.xbap using WPF/E and I haven't quite got there yet although I'm not a million miles away. One of the things that I wanted to do was to have 3 rectangles Read More...
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006 3:18 PM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

WPF/E CTP and Getting XAML From Your WebServer

Just a tiny thing - I struggled a bit in getting the WPF/E control to display a XAML file from my web site until I realised that my website didn't like returning files with a .XAML extension so I've just been using a .XML extension instead. Sounds like Read More...
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006 2:43 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WPF/E CTP and Animations

Something to be aware of on the WPF/E CTP - if you want to control your animations interactively then (as far as I can tell) you need to do so from script. If I've got a bit of XAML such as; < Rectangle x:Name ="myRect" Width ="96" Height ="96" Canvas Read More...
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006 2:42 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Fancy having MS visit your company to talk Vista/Fx3 and Office Dev in January?

We (the UK Microsoft developer community team) came up with this idea that after the Vista & Office Developer Event on the 19th and 20th we could take the whole thing on the road for a week and try to visit companies that couldn't make it to the actual Read More...
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006 2:12 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

"WPF/E" and Naming

I imagine that it might change at some point but I think the naming of "WPF/E" is confusing at the moment as a number of customers that I talk to come along expecting all of the Windows Presentation Foundation to be made available cross-browser and cross-platform Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 06, 2006 2:59 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Flash on the Beach

I was down at Flash on the Beach in Brighton yesterday doing some talking to designers/developers that visited the Microsoft Expression stand. I was an really interesting day and Jon Harris did a great talk about the Expression suite of products that Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 06, 2006 2:19 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

More "WPF/E" Bits

Just a bunch of links to some cool "WPF/E" bits; Flash and "WPF/E" side-by-side again "WPF/E" and Vector drawings Using "WPF/E" to embed video into blog postings Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 06, 2006 2:03 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Flash and WPF/E Communication

This has to be the first of many. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 05, 2006 9:22 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Exciting Design Bits

There's some very interesting new bits up at the Design web site. Firstly, there's a bunch of updates to the Expression tools - there's so many announcements here including; Expression Design was formerly known as Expression Graphic Designer Expression Read More...
Posted Monday, December 04, 2006 10:49 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

"Essential Workflow Foundation"

I was talking to Benjamin at the Developer Day and we were both agreeing at what a great book Dharma Shukla and Bob Schmidt have written in "Essential Windows Workflow Foundation ". I've read my copy and I'm about to start re-reading it because I think Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 03, 2006 1:58 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

DDD IV

I was at the Developer Day IV event on Saturday down at the Microsoft Campus in Reading. I've been to all of these and I enjoyed this one a lot, possibly more than the 3rd one because that was one where I was attached to a "demonstration stand" for the Read More...
Posted Sunday, December 03, 2006 1:52 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

WF and Versioning

I wrote about this before but I thought I'd post some more with a bit of code that I knocked together. One of the questions which always comes up with WF is about versioning of Workflows. I think that there's at least 3 aspects to this and there's probably Read More...
Posted Friday, December 01, 2006 3:22 AM by mtaulty | 4 Comments

SQL Server Events in Edinburgh

The SQL Server User Group has an event running at the Microsoft Edinburgh Office on the 6th December. The focus of the event is on using SQL Profiler to identify performance problems and also how to use the XML data type in SQL 2005. Both of those are Read More...
Posted Friday, December 01, 2006 3:14 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments