Mike Taulty's Blog
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March 2007 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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Mike Taulty's Blog

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  • Linq to NHibernate

    This series of posts is going to be interesting whether you use NHibernate or not as it starts to walk through how you can implement IQueryable on something real (like NHibernate). I didn't understand some of the NHibernate stuff but I was following the LINQ stuff fine and found it valuable because of that. The post walks through taking an NHibernate concept, ISession and getting an IQueryable from it by adding an extension called Linq<T> in much the same way as the framework seems to have an AsQueryable today. It also talks about how the Expression property on that IQueryable is then called followed by CreateQuery. All good stuff :-)
  • What are UK developers interested in hearing about?

    One of the questions that we asked on the feedback forms that we handed out at our recent Roadshow events was; " Which topics are you more interested in hearing about at future events?" I've no idea whether I'm supposed to share this data with you or not but I was looking at this evening and thought I would (I'll probably get shot but, as far as I can see, it's aggregate data and isn't going to identify anybody). This is based on approximately 1200 attendees to the 4 venues other than the Reading venue which we only did Tuesday and haven't got the figures back for yet. Here's the graph; There's no great surprises in there and I'm pleased to say that it largely lines up with what I've always suspected which is that if you want to catch most people you'll talk about; Tools Languages & Frameworks Data Client - Web and/or Windows (and Web is more popular on there right now than Windows by quite a long way) It's not rocket science in that if you're thinking of a dev audience then everyone uses the tools, languages...
  • Adventures in Networking

    I wasted a bunch of time today. I got a new Gigabit networking switch to put between some machines at home. I cabled it up and, as a first pass, I tried copying a big file from one machine to another (both Vista). I got; Machine1 -> Machine2 ( 20 MB/second ) Machine2 -> Machine1 ( 6 MB/second ) I could live with the first figure but the second figure just didn't seem right. I went out and found a LAN performance testing tool off the web (a simple command line utility called iperf) and tried that and it consistently reported; Machine1 -> Machine2 ( ~ 250Mbps ) Machine2 -> Machine1 ( ~ 70Mbps ) So, pretty much the same thing once the "copying" and "disks" are out of the picture. I then decided that this might be improved upon by using the ipV6 stack and, frankly, I wish I'd never bothered. I tried automatic ipV6 addresses and manual ipV6 addresses. In both cases I found that it's a bit tricky to work with ipV6 addresses because you can't do things like; net use d: \\fec0::1\share because IPV6 addresses...
  • WPF/E and ASP.NET Controls

    Via Mike Harsh I came across this post (from Bryant) on using ASP.NET server controls to generate XAML rather than HTML. This reminded me of something that Phil talked about a while ago in his post here (in the context of WPF rather than WPF/E and that perhaps makes more sense because ASP.NET has the controls and so does WPF whereas, right now, WPF/E doesn't have that concept). The difference between the 2 approaches is that Bryant adds new controls (e.g. "GlassButton") whereas Phil adapted the existing controls to spit out XAML. The mixture of all these technologies is only going to get more interesting.
  • XBAP's coming for FireFox?

    "I know nothing" (you knew this already) but I read about it here so it could be true :-)
  • HP nc8430 - Adding a second hard-drive via the multi-bay slot

    Just a word of "warning". I'm 2 days into using my HP nc8430 and it seems like a great machine but I've struggled for 2 days to understand why the supplied second hard drive that looked like it would slot into the multi-bay on the side instead of the DVD drive doesn't slot into that bay. It's because the laptop won't take a second hard drive and it seems the "slot" is a bit redundant in that it's only designed for the DVD drive. This seems a bit odd to me but I've got it from HP that this is the case. So...if you like the look of the nc8430 but you need a lot of disk space then you might be wise to look elsewhere as this machine can only take a single 2.5" drive (capacities on those things at 7200rpm are < 160GB at the time of writing). In my defense, I didn't order it but in defense of the person who did it's taken me 2 support calls and a few emails to get an answer as to whether this drive is meant to fit into the bay or not so it's a long way from simple . Update: I've been told by HP that they don't make...
  • First 64-bit Gremlin - Finding the Mail Applet in 64-bit Vista in the Control Panel

    I was trying to set up a separate email profile for use in demos and I was really struggling on Vista 64-bit. In the control panel, the familiar "email accounts" applet simply isn't there. As you can see - there is no mail betwen Keyboard and Mouse :-( So, I go and use search within the control panel and I type in "Mail" and I don't find anything at all. This foxed me for a few minutes until I came upon; And within there is the familar Mail applet; I think it's a bit bad really that Search didn't find this for me :-( Hopefully if you're stuck in the same place sometime you'll find this post and that's at least a bit of help.
  • Moving to 64-bit Vista

    I've managed to get myself a new laptop. On our recent Roadshow, one delegate actually wrote about my session "Someone should buy this guy a new laptop" and I've never agreed more. It wouldn't be appropriate to have a go at the vendor that made my previous laptop but, without mentioning any names, I'd have to say that it's a piece of kit that I've really come to loathe over time. In the past, I've always felt a bit of nostalgia whenever I come to part with a laptop (they become like "old friends" :-)) but this time around I'd gladly fling the old machine into the nearest canal. To be fair, I think that manufacturer does make decent kit and this was a "one off" and I was just unlucky to have that particular model. Regardless...I've got new kit and this is an HP NC8430 and I've only been running it for a day but, already, I'm about 1000% happier than I've been in a long time. Specs of the kit; Core 2 Duo T7400 Processor at 2.16Ghz 4GB RAM 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 Graphics Some disk (haven't quite got that...
  • BPEL Activities for WF

    Via Paul's blog post here; BPEL for Windows Workflow Foundation March Community Technology Preview is released You can now get a preview of the BPEL activities for WF. I've had a number of people over time ask me "How does WF line up with/against BPEL" so those folks should be interested in seeing this start to come out.
  • The .NET Developer Network

    Guy is putting together a new, free user group in the Bristol area that he's called the .NET Developer Network ( dot-net-dev-net :-) ). I've know Guy for quite a long time and I've seen him speak at various events and he's a great speaker and he's also pops up as the author of the .NET Internationalization book and at the "4 Chaps from Blighty" website. I'm doing a talk down at the new user group on the 23rd April (evening slot). The talk will be a 2-parter on LINQ with the first part talking about the various language features that gets us to "LINQ to objects" and the second part being about where that can then go with LINQ to X (XML/SQL/DataSet/Entities) etc. Hope to see you there - click here for more details .
  • System.NET in "Orcas"

    I'm writing this from a train where I'd run out of things to do and it suddenly occurred to me to have a look at my "Orcas" VPC and see whether the System.Net namespace expanded to include any of the Peer to Peer capabilities for XP (Service Pack 1 onwards IIRC) and Vista (Vista has quite a bit more because it has "People Near Me"). And... It has :-) I haven't had a chance to try this yet as I'm on a train without any networks but it looks like we have; System.Net.PeerToPeer "Interesting" sounding classes are; Cloud, CloudCollection, PeerName, PeerNameResolver. System.Net.PeerToPeer.Collaboration "Interesting" sounding classes are; ContactManager, Peer, PeerApplication, PeerCollaboration, PeerContact. It's all looking pretty cool to me and I'm glad that the shoddy wrappers that I wrote won't be necessary any more once we get to Framework V3.5. If I get the opportunity in the next few days I'll see if I can write something with these API's although I'm not sure whether I'll be able to get 2 Virtual PC's (I only...
  • First, Do No Harm

    <rant> I came home to find my PC that was running XP when I left the house sitting there running Vista. When I left the house, the PC had a bunch of unsaved work on the screen including a particularly useful Virtual PC image. What happened is that whilst I was away, Windows Update decided that it would install some updates and then it decided that (of its own volition) it would go ahead and reboot my PC in order to apply them (presumably because I wasn't there to tell it "NOOOO! Don't ever do that!"). Vista is my default OS on that PC so when I get back, Vista has booted. When I reboot back into XP, it says "Oh, whilst you were away I've rebooted the OS to apply an update". I find this kind of thing infuriating . Where's the button that says "Don't ever, ever, ever do that on my PC no matter what - it's my PC and I'll decide when to reboot it". If there is such a button then why the heck isn't it the default setting?!?! If you're someone who builds software - never, ever, ever reboot the user's PC without...
  • Streaming with "LINQ to XML"

    I found this post on the struggle that the XML team has had to try and get streaming to work intuitively with the LINQ pattern and the new API's in System.Xml.Linq really interesting.
  • DreamScene

    I had a bit of a play with DreamScene following the "Content Pack" coming out . I quite like this stuff - it looks pretty cool. My only "problem" is that on my laptop playing one of these DreamScene videos takes about 25-30% of my CPU which isn't going to be acceptable. I'm not sure if this can be dropped at all when DreamScene comes out of preview but I'd guess if I lose more than (say) 5% CPU then I'm not going to use it. I liked that when I unplugged the laptop the video froze - that's reassuring :-)
  • Live Search Gadget

    Really like this gadget for searching Live and also this one for searching MSDN . This is how I want the web to work with my machine. I want a nice local UI with a back-end web-service. I don't want (usually) to spark up a browser just to do this stuff.
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