February 2007 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Should you use Workflow Foundation?

Just highlighting Paul's great post that he wrote the other week about "What to use Workflow Foundation for". Here's the link . I've met customers that are using Workflow because it's new and cool. I've met customers that are using Workflow in order to keep...

Published Tue, Feb 27 2007 8:58 AM by mtaulty

OpenID

Since the OpenID announcement I've had a few goes at trying to work out what OpenID is. I've been up to the website and I've had a read of the spec a couple of times and each time I just zone out. I simply find that I can't read that spec. How come? I get grumpy...

Published Mon, Feb 26 2007 3:16 AM by mtaulty

DevWeek (not MIX)

I'm travelling down this afternoon and will be there until Thursday PM if anyone fancies a chat (drop me a mail). DevWeek's a great conference in a great location (I like the building a lot :-)) and, this year, it's good to see that the main conference is completely...

Published Mon, Feb 26 2007 2:12 AM by mtaulty

3D Video Player in WPF at ContentPresenter.com

I've called out ContentPresenter before and they've just published a great new video on how to build a 3D video player in WPF. This is using the bits that got posted to CodePlex that allow you to take arbitrary WPF content and use it in a 3D scene, not just...

Published Fri, Feb 23 2007 4:50 AM by mtaulty

Vista Desktop Backgrounds - "Runners Up"

Some cracking desktop backgrounds up here; http://www.flickr.com/photos/darwishh/sets/72157594510047657/detail/?page=1

Published Thu, Feb 22 2007 7:16 AM by mtaulty

C# V3.0 and Dynamic Casting?

In the February CTP of "Orcas" it looks like when you have a piece of code like; static void Main( string [] args) { var v = new { FirstName= "Mike" , LastName= "Taulty" }; } static void Foo( object o) { var w = new { FirstName= "" , LastName= "" }; } then...

Published Thu, Feb 22 2007 7:05 AM by mtaulty

Rightmove and Virtual Earth

Anyone who knows me will know that I've spent far too long pondering over the state of the UK property market and one of the sites that I use a lot (and I mean a lot) is Rightmove Martin did a cracking job of talking about Windows Live at yesterday's Roadshow...

Published Thu, Feb 22 2007 5:10 AM by mtaulty

Using Desktops to Switch Presentation/Demo

Quite often when you're showing stuff to people you've got the 1 laptop and you've got some slides that you want to show and some demo bits and it's a bit painful switching between the 2 (minimising PowerPoint and so on). I wrote a little bit of code that performs...

Published Mon, Feb 19 2007 6:55 AM by mtaulty

Can C# V3.0 Please Have the VB9 XML Syntax?

Here's my online petition. I really like the new VB9 syntax for dealing with XElement and friends in order to construct an XML document. Can we please have that in C# V3.0 as well? :-) Anyone agree? Here's some C# that creates some XML (meant to be RSS but...

Published Fri, Feb 16 2007 4:05 AM by mtaulty

Desktops and the DWM

For some reason, the idea of multiple desktops was bubbling around in my head this morning and I suddenly thought "I wonder how this works with the DWM". There's a post here that explains it; http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/archive/2006/11/09/a-desktop-of-your...

Published Fri, Feb 16 2007 2:35 AM by mtaulty

Grouping in LINQ

Each time I come to it, I find grouping in LINQ a bit odd so I thought I'd drop some code onto this page to try and help me remember it next time around. Using the May CTP, if I've got data; var cars = new [] { new { Make= "BMW" , Model= "1Series" , Colour...

Published Fri, Feb 16 2007 2:16 AM by mtaulty

UK Architect Insight Conference

I mentioned this back in November but the UK Architect Insight Conference is getting nearer. Taken from the official site; You’ll be able to engage in the technology debate with thought-provoking in-depth sessions from customer and partner architects along...

Published Thu, Feb 15 2007 4:40 AM by mtaulty

Nice Movie Playing XBAP

Here - don't know if there's an English language version of this. When I first played a movie with this I got a weird message from the Firewall asking me if I wanted to unblock a port which I found a bit weird for an XBAP running in its sandbox. I wonder what...

Published Wed, Feb 14 2007 4:49 PM by mtaulty

Groove - Web 3.0 :-)

Recently, I've been running Groove in an attempt to co-ordinate with other (internal and external) team members who are working on our MSDN Roadshow. My only comment about Groove is why on Earth haven't I been using this before ? I spend a lot of time trying...

Published Wed, Feb 14 2007 4:34 PM by mtaulty

Vista and UAC

It looks like UAC in Vista is coming under more and more scrutiny. I've seen a lot of links to this post which is technically interesting but doesn't really seem to alter how I was thinking about UAC (i.e. it's an explanation of what I thought I already knew...

Published Wed, Feb 14 2007 4:30 PM by mtaulty