January 2007 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Vlad Studio

This is a test post really but one of my colleagues, Andy, pointed me at http://www.vladstudio.com who have some fantastic desktop backgrounds. Testing that I can post a picture;

Published Wed, Jan 31 2007 12:05 PM by mtaulty

Windows Vista Launch and the British Library Application

If you've got .NET Framework V3.0 then you really should check out the British Library application that was highlighted for the Windows Vista launch in the UK yesterday. In the run up to launch I've seen this application so many times in so many different preview forms that you'd think I'd be fed up with it but it's actually a real joy to use so I spent quite a bit of time playing with it yesterday. You can run it in IE (with FX3.0 installed) if you browse to here: http://ttpdownload.bl.uk/browserapp.xbap and there's more explanation up at The British Library

Published Wed, Jan 31 2007 1:20 AM by mtaulty

Deconstructing LINQ

This post is mostly for my own sanity in that I tried to pull the LINQ bits apart a few months ago and, whilst I didn't get completely there, I got most of it but because I have the memory of a goldfish I can no longer remember it. So, here goes. This is in my own words and almost certainly not complete or probably even halfway correct but it'll perhaps help me again in the future and could possibly help someone else along a bit as well. This is based on the May CTP of LINQ rather than a later one so things have changed a little since then. 1 Object Initialisers Given a class such as; class Person { private string firstName; public string FirstName { get { return firstName; } set { firstName = value ; } } private string lastName; public string LastName { get { return lastName; } set { lastName = value ; } } } Object initialisers allow me to construct an instance in a single line and do exactly what you'd expect in terms of the code that's generated. Person p = new Person() { FirstName= "Fred" , LastName= "Smith...

Published Wed, Jan 31 2007 12:14 AM by mtaulty

Is LINQ for Mortals?

LINQ is very clever. The things that have been added to the languages to support LINQ are amazing but I'm still trying to work out whether (beyond the cleverness) I like LINQ. I spent a long time today trying to write a fairly simple LINQ query. Essentially, I've got two lots of data; var sales = new [] { new { Country= "UK" , Sales=100, ProductId=1 }, new { Country= "US" , Sales=50, ProductId=2 }, new { Country= "UK" , Sales=250, ProductId=1 }, new { Country= "UK" , Sales=1000, ProductId=2 } }; and var products = new [] { new { Id=1, Name= "Cheese" }, new { Id=2, Name= "Fish" } }; and all I'm wanting to do is join these 2 sets of data together on ProductId=Id and then produce a summary set of data which tells me; Country=UK, Product=Cheese, TotalSales=350 Country=UK, Product=Fish, TotalSales=1000 Country=US, Product=Fish, TotalSales=50 (hopefully I added those up right but you get the point regardless). It's very possible that I'm just completely dense but I spent a long time trying to figure out how to get this...

Published Mon, Jan 29 2007 2:32 PM by mtaulty

Vista & Office Launch "Road-Trip" Photos

The photos from last week's Vista and Office Developer Road-Trip are up on FlickR here; http://www.flickr.com/photos/markjo/sets/72157594506232930/ I just wanted to say thanks to all the good folks who hosted us during the week including; Beazley's down in London iMeta down in Southampton NxtGenUK in Coventry (and the Midland Air Museum) ioko 365 in York Manchester Digital Development Agency Bolton University and Net North West Northumbria University A.N. Other Software Company (you know who you are) It was great fun - hope you got some value out of it and enjoyed it.

Published Mon, Jan 29 2007 3:43 AM by mtaulty

Vista MCE Upgrade (2nd attempt)

I had a second attempt at upgrading my media centre to Windows Vista. I got quite a bit closer than I did the last time I tried it but it didn't quite work out. My media centre machine is; Shuttle XPC (SN85G4V2 if I remember rightly - AMD 64-bit chip in it with 1GB RAM) NVidia Fx5200 Graphics Card (I like this because it doesn't have a fan but it does have 128MB RAM) DVico FusionHDTV Dual DVB-T Tuner Card The Vista installation all went fine. When I came to use the machine for the first time, I found that I had a couple of blue-screens in the supplied 5200 graphics driver but on 3rd reboot that seemed to fix itself. Next problem was to find an audio driver but NVidia has one for its NForce 3 chipset on Vista so that was ok. However, playing any of the trial videos in MCE (they have a clip from Apollo 13 for instance) caused the box to blue-screen. I decided to see if NVidia had better support in their drivers for the 5200 but it looks like it's dropped off the bottom of their supported list so no joy there and...

Published Mon, Jan 29 2007 1:51 AM by mtaulty

Off Topic: MikeO Runs the Marathon

My long-standing and long-suffering colleague, Mike Ormond, is running the London Marathon this year in aid of Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. You can find the details over here - it's a pretty ambitious thing to attempt and it's for a good cause so if you have a few £ to spare you can also find links over there to sponsor him. I'm trying something slightly less ambitious this year in that I'm trying to get in to the Great North Run which is only half the distance at 13 miles but still sounds like an awfully long way to me given that I'm currently only comfortably managing to run 7.5kms but I'll get there....maybe.... :-)

Published Sat, Jan 27 2007 4:07 AM by mtaulty

Integrating WCF and WF - Expense Sample

Interesting write-up on integrating WCF and WF up here. It's not often that I download samples (I usually start by reading docs rather than reading code as it works better for me) but I did pull this one down. I liked the way in which the WorkflowRuntime is managed here by adding an extension onto the ServiceHost that manages the WCF side of things - neat. If I followed it correctly then the interaction between WCF and WF is managed by local communication services (there's an interface called IExpenseLocalService ) rather than, say, implementing activities that do the WCF work. Good stuff :-)

Published Sat, Jan 27 2007 3:56 AM by mtaulty

Vista Launch Demo 2: Launch Service

Quite a few people asked if I'd post the code that we were hosting server side to provide the very simple chat service that we used for the Windows Vista UK Developer Launch and so I'm posting it here. Note that this code was never really intended to be shared which means that it represents no kind of best practise whatsoever and also that there aren't really a bunch of instructions around how to use it. However, it's here for download should you want it. In that zip file are the SQL scripts to create the database, tables, security and stored procedures and then there's the actual service code itself along with the contents of the virtual directory that provides the service. The messenger service itself is pretty dumb but it served its purpose in giving people something to call from their client side code.

Published Sat, Jan 27 2007 2:23 AM by mtaulty

Vista Launch Demo 1 : WCF Photo Application

A couple of people have asked me for the photo application that I used at the Windows Vista UK Developer Launch to showcase a few things with WCF. It's a couple of simple WPF applications that act as a client and a service. You can add photographs to the client application and they then show up on the service application too. You can then drag them around on the client and resize them and the service application mirrors this behaviour. The reverse is also true - you can drag things around on the service and it also happens back on the client as long as you're currently using one of the 2-way transports ( because this has endpoints configured for dual HTTP, TCP, MSMQ and PEER ). Here's a picture; This is using a few things from WCF; Duplex communication over HTTP and TCP (i.e. wsDualHttpBinding and the netTcpBinding) Message based security with UserName tokens that are authenticated using an ASP.NET Membership Provider. This is only configured for the HTTP and TCP transports. Simple authorisation using an ASP.NET...

Published Sat, Jan 27 2007 2:18 AM by mtaulty

End of the Road Trip

Back home tonight after a week on the road doing a Vista + Office + Fx 3.0 "mini tour" around some companies and groups in the UK. We had a great time, I really enjoyed it and want to thank everyone that hosted us along the way and everyone that came along and took part. Mark's been documenting the story up here along with photos of the venues and the people that we met. I noticed that The Register had a reasonably positive write up of the main developer launch activity that we undertook which is amazing as I'd not usually expect them to be pretty negative. The main resource site is here for anyone that we met this week (or otherwise) to follow up on. Next stop....the MSDN Roadshow (well, there's a bunch of other stuff I have to do as well but I'll keep that off the blog site) - hope to see you there and it looks like it's pretty full already :-)

Published Fri, Jan 26 2007 3:48 PM by mtaulty

All Quiet...Out on Tour

There'll be no posting up here in the next week or so as I'm out doing this; http://ukvistaofficelaunchtour.spaces.live.com/blog/ January and February are turning out to be very busy and the posting rate up here has perhaps dropped accordingly apart from some of the Vista Peer 2 Peer posts that I put out. In the meantime, I'm playing with Linq and reading Adam Nathan's new WPF book which looks good so far.

Published Sun, Jan 21 2007 2:16 PM by mtaulty

XBAP and Security

Great post here

Published Tue, Jan 16 2007 11:37 AM by mtaulty

Windows Vista & Office 2007 Launch + Tour

The end of the week sees the developer-focused launch of Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System in the UK. The website is here: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/launch2007/dev/default.mspx There's a whole day (Friday 19th) of sessions on Windows Vista and Office 2007 down at the Microsoft Campus in Reading (this has been full for quite a while) but those sessions are also going to be available as videos for download/streaming from the website on the day so you don't have to be there to take part. Then on the Saturday (20th) again in Reading there's a bunch of activity around building code with Office 2007 and Windows Vista with a bit of an exercise to play around with in a "lab" environment. Again, this exercise is also open for people on the web to take part in. Finally, on the Monday (22nd) there's a few of us taking some of this material out to some venues around the country on a bit of a "tour". The details of the tour are here; http://ukvistaofficelaunchtour.spaces.live.com/ and if you fancy seeing...

Published Tue, Jan 16 2007 4:26 AM by mtaulty

January "Orcas" CTP and RAR files.

I left my PC downloading the January CTP of Visual Studio "Orcas" the other day and came back to it around 36 hours later to have pretty much collected all of the bits for both the VPC version of the bits and the locally installable version of the bits. Unfortunately, when I came to run the self-extracting RAR images I found that both of them complained about quite a lot of the .rar files being corrupted. I've had this quite a bit with .rar files - never really got to the bottom of it but I seem to rarely pull down one of these archives without some kind of corruption. On the "Orcas" theme, I also found this page which lets you see the feature list and also to feedback on features that you've experimented with so that might be a useful thing to be aware of. I need a much better download solution for IE - something that sensibly queues in the face of bandwidth limitations (and perhaps the concurrent HTTP limitations) and supports restarting/pausing of downloads. I've tried a few shareware versions but haven't yet...

Published Tue, Jan 16 2007 4:16 AM by mtaulty