January 2007 - Posts

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; Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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, Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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 Read More

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. Read More

Learnings on the PeerGroupXXX API

I've been "playing" some more with the functions that begin with PeerGroup in the Windows SDK. I've done some of this recently with some posts but I've spent a little more time on it now and I've learnt some bits about these functions that I hadn't appreciated Read More

Dominick & CardSpace

Dominick's got some bits for integrating CardSpace into existing ASP.NET web sites over here - worth investigating. Read More

ContentPresenter.com

Sign up here if you're interested in picking up what I imagine will be some cool WPF tutorial videos. The chap publishing them is the owner of the WPF blog which has been a great source of demos so I expect the videos will be good too. Read More

Vista Gripes

A couple of things I'm struggling with on Vista. The first is the "file based backup"... I've done the "whole machine backup" thing on my work laptop and that seems pretty cool but on my home machine I've been doing file backups to a 2nd hard-drive. I Read More

Network Location Awareness

I had a little play with the new Network Awareness API in Vista so I thought I'd share here in case it helps anyone in the future. This is a COM based API (INetworkListManager, INetwork, INetworkConnection, INetworkEvents and more) that allows you to Read More

Restore Previous Versions & Shadow Copies

Wow, for the first time today I'd made a mess of a file I needed and was a bit cross until I realised I could do "Restore Previous Versions" in Vista and it'd give me my file back. Saved me about an hour. Disk space is cheap. Ultimately - good result! Read More