May 2007 - Mike Taulty's Blog

I'm hopeful that some interesting videos will pop up here http://video.allthingsd.com/ today especially if there's that shared "Gates & Jobs" discussion - you'd assume that this would be good stuff?

I spotted this story on The Register about Google purchasing GreenBorder. I'd never heard of them before but this idea around the "sandboxed" web browsing experience has been kicking around in my head for a while - interesting stuff :-)

I wrote some bits previously about the new Send/Receive Activities that build WCF support directly into Workflow Foundation for Framework V3.5. Imagine a scenario where we've got; Client calls into "a Workflow" hosted over WCF (ReceiveActivity). Note: What I mean here really is that the client sends a message to a WCF endpoint, the WorkflowServiceHost infrastructure picks up the message, creates a new instance of a Workflow and delivers the message into a ReceiveActivity in that instance which has its "CanCreateInstance" property set to "true". Workflow does some processing and responds (that might be the response message of the ReceiveActivity iteself but it could be also be done via a One-Way SendActivity) Client calls back into the same Workflow (ReceiveActivity). When the service responds in step 1.1 it needs a way of sending some identifying data to the client such that when the client calls back at step 2 that reply message is routed to the right Workflow Instance and, potentially, the right waiting ReceiveActivity...

Just downloaded the Silverlight Reflector plug-in . That's a really neat bit of kit, I pointed at my video puzzle and, straight away, I got; i.e. I got straight away; HTML Javascript Disassembled C# code. Fantastic :-)

Via Phil , this looks like the storage box I've been waiting for (all they need now is one that takes 8 disks and/or the ability to chain them together - maybe they already have that as they seem to have everything else :-)).

Following up on this post where I just got started with Sync Services , if I want to do more than just an occasional snapshot of data from server to client then I need to do a bit more work. If I want to do incremental downloads of data from my server to my client then (depending on what I want) I need do probably; Have a way of spotting what inserts have happened at the server Have a way of spotting what updates have happened at the server Have a way of spotting what deletes have happened at the server Sync Services doesn't do this for you - you need to do it so I took a very simplistic approach to this and took my original table; create table fruitSales ( id int identity not null primary key , fruit nchar (20) not null , quantity int not null , price money not null ) and added a couple of columns to it so that I can detect inserts and updates; alter table fruitSales add insDate datetime not null default getutcdate(), modDate datetime not null default getutcdate() with a couple of triggers to try and keep those...

My Media Center machine (running Vista) is a little old but it's been holding up pretty well. I only use this box for Media Center as it sits under the TV. The graphics card is old (Fx5200), the processor is old (Athlon 2800+ IIRC) and I guess the bus speeds and memory speeds are getting a little rusty these days as well. However, it works pretty well so I'm not buying another one right now :-) I've tried to configure Vista down as much as I can on the machine by switching off services that I don't think I need (e.g. Search). It's a pity Media Center doesn't have a button that says; "Make my system a Media Center Only System" which might set Media Center to run at boot and also disable all services that you don't need on a dedicated Media Center box. I remember spending a long time once on MCE 2005 trying to switch off what I thought were "unnecessary" services only to give up having spent hours trying to fathom out how I'd broken Media Center only to find out that it was because I'd disabled COM+ having failed...