March 2007 - Posts

posted Thursday, March 29, 2007 1:07 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More
posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007 3:26 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

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 Read More
posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007 9:41 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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  Read More
posted Tuesday, March 27, 2007 1:48 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More
posted Tuesday, March 27, 2007 2:42 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

XBAP's coming for FireFox?

"I know nothing" (you knew this already) but I read about it here so it could be true :-) Read More
posted Friday, March 23, 2007 7:17 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

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 Read More
posted Friday, March 23, 2007 3:25 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More
posted Friday, March 23, 2007 3:18 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

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 Read More
posted Thursday, March 22, 2007 4:12 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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" Read More
posted Thursday, March 22, 2007 3:12 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More
posted Wednesday, March 21, 2007 3:52 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More
posted Monday, March 19, 2007 11:56 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

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 Read More
posted Monday, March 19, 2007 2:46 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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. Read More
posted Friday, March 16, 2007 4:20 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More
posted Friday, March 16, 2007 4:09 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More
posted Friday, March 16, 2007 3:59 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Windows Vista Magazine in WPF Viewer

Via Richard, this is a pretty cool example of a WPF Viewer for the official Windows Vista magazine. It obviously shares heritage with the British Library application. The only thing that I noticed in this is that if I'm zooming into those documents then Read More
posted Friday, March 16, 2007 3:29 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Samples in Blend RC

Because I'm such an advanced design guru (ok, ok, I know it's never going to happen ;-)) I'd turned off the start page in Expression Blend quite a long time ago and, consequently, when I installed the RC I hadn't realised that we'd shipped a whole new Read More
posted Friday, March 16, 2007 3:01 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Deconstructing LINQ to SQL (Part 2)

Following up on this previous post, I wanted to play a bit more with how this works for LINQ to SQL. If I've got classes such as these (probably from the code generation tools but I typed this one in myself); [Table(Name="Customers")] class Customer Read More
posted Friday, March 16, 2007 2:56 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Deconstructing LINQ to SQL (Part 1)

I had the dubious pleasure :-) of driving Daniel back from the MSDN Roadshow in Harrogate to his hotel in Manchester and in the car on the way back we were chatting about LINQ and one of the things he was saying was that he "wanted to know how LINQ Read More
posted Thursday, March 15, 2007 8:30 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Blog Post for Technorati (Martin made me do it)

Technorati Profile Read More
posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007 11:42 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Yet Another Nugget Video Player

I haven't built one of these for a while so I thought I'd build yet another player for our videos as an xbap now that Fx 3.0 is released and a bit more prevalent than it was the last time I built one of these. You can access the player by clicking on Read More
posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007 3:38 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Expression Blend at Release Candidate Status

Download from here Read More
posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007 2:19 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Microsoft London Roadshow Geek Dinner

If you're coming along to the London MSDN Roadshow then you might be interested in coming along to the Geek Dinner that Zi is organising. The details are here; http://www.zimakki.com/wiki/21st%20March%20Geek%20Dinner.ashx Unfortunately, I can't make Read More
posted Wednesday, March 14, 2007 2:18 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

MSDN Roadshow Feedback

We're currently doing our UK Roadshow and, so far, we've been to; Nottingham Glasgow Harrogate and we've got London and Reading to go. At each venue we hand out paper-based delegate feedback forms with lots of boxes for people to tick in order to rate Read More
posted Tuesday, March 13, 2007 2:10 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Microsoft London Roadshow Geek Dinner

If you're coming along to the London MSDN Roadshow then you might be interested in coming along to the Geek Dinner that Zi is organising. The details are here; http://www.zimakki.com/wiki/21st%20March%20Geek%20Dinner.ashx Unfortunately, I can't make it Read More
posted Tuesday, March 06, 2007 4:10 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Self Reflecting Code

Something about the way in which the DataContext class in Linq to SQL works has been nagging at me for a while. It's not a criticism, it's just something that sticks out to me as an interesting way of doing things. If I derive a class from DataContext Read More
posted Tuesday, March 06, 2007 3:35 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Automatic Properties

Daniel points out automatic properties in C# V3.0 - finally C# starts to get those C++/CLI features :-) Read More
posted Saturday, March 03, 2007 5:05 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Stored Procedures in the March CTP

A couple more "tit-bits" that dropped out whilst playing with the March CTP. It seems that unlike in this previous post which was based on much earlier CTP's I can now have something like; [StoredProcedure(Name = "dbo.GetCustomersByCountry")] Read More
posted Saturday, March 03, 2007 4:08 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

"Orcas" March CTP - IEnumerable<T> to DataTable

In the May CTP which I played with previously I could take an arbitrary resultset and force it into a DataTable. There was an extension method called something like ToDataTable which did this for you. I can't find one of these in the MarchCTP so I built Read More
posted Saturday, March 03, 2007 3:45 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Finding Extension Methods

I was struggling to find the Field extension method in the March "Orcas" CTP and so I wrote a bit of code that would print out extension methods from assemblies it loads. It's very basic but I'll share here in case anyone wants it or takes the idea and Read More
posted Friday, March 02, 2007 11:43 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

"Orcas" March CTP

I've been playing just a little today with the "Orcas" March CTP and, specifically, trying to update some of my LINQ to SQL bits to this later version. I don't know how many of the changes that I'm seeing are to do with the March CTP or how many were Read More
posted Thursday, March 01, 2007 3:38 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

DevWeek Session Follow Up

This year's DevWeek finished for me today. I had a good time, met up with a number of people and went to some excellent sessions. DevWeek is a one-off for me in that I'm not aware of a comparable conference in the UK that's Microsoft focused, runs over Read More
posted Thursday, March 01, 2007 2:41 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

"Orcas" March CTP

The March CTP of Visual Studio "Orcas" is now available for download (VPC here, installable bits here). I haven't had a chance to download any of this yet or look at it but it feels like there's a lot more in this CTP than in the previous ones so I'll Read More