May 2007 - Posts

posted Thursday, May 31, 2007 1:22 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

PowerShell (again)

I'm having another go at moving to PowerShell. Quite a few months ago, I decided it was time to become a bit more modern and switch to PowerShell but I haven't really done it and, a few months on, I'm still running cmd.exe. There's some irony in my resisting Read More
posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007 4:44 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

"All Things Digital"

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? Read More
posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007 4:08 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

DeveloperDay 5 - Agenda and Registration

The agenda for the 5th Developer (DDD!) day which happens on the 30th June at Microsoft in Reading is up at; http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/agendaddd5lineup.asp and the registration page is open up at; http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032342589&Culture=en-GB Read More
posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007 1:43 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Sandboxing the browser

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 :-) Read More
posted Friday, May 25, 2007 7:10 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Links

Couple of interesting posts; Partial Methods I spent quite some time thinking about the difference here between the existing things such as;   [Conditional] attribute   add { } remove {} options for events   DependencyProperties Not 100% Read More
posted Thursday, May 24, 2007 9:58 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

WF in Fx3.5 Beta 1 - Send/Receive Activities and MSMQ

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: Read More
posted Wednesday, May 23, 2007 6:11 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Viewing XPS in Silverlight

Amazing post over here; http://blogs.msdn.com/delay/archive/2007/05/22/lighting-up-the-xml-paper-specification-proof-of-concept-xps-reader-for-silverlight.aspx It's important to realise that there is no support in Silverlight for what this sample is Read More
posted Wednesday, May 23, 2007 2:40 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

First play with the Silverlight Reflector Plug-In

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 :-) Read More
posted Wednesday, May 23, 2007 1:14 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Blog Round-Up

I've been offline for a little while so I did a bit of blog catching up yesterday and this is the set of links that I came across; Examples of using LINQ to SQL with WCF The Silverlight plug-in for Reflector Dave Relyea's Layout Controls for Silverligh Read More
posted Wednesday, May 23, 2007 1:11 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Drobo

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 :-)). Read More
posted Monday, May 21, 2007 7:23 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP)

I spent a small amount of time with PNRP when support for it came out in Vista (it was in XP since SP1 in a different form but Vista seemed to bring p2p to the forefront a bit with applications like "Meeting Space"). I'm revisiting it because Read More
posted Monday, May 21, 2007 6:56 AM by mtaulty :: 50 Comments

Second Steps with ADO.NET Synchronisation Services

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 Read More
posted Monday, May 21, 2007 6:35 AM by mtaulty :: 53 Comments

First Steps with ADO.NET Synchronisation Services

I've had a first attempt at playing with the new ADO.NET synchronisation services this weekend so I thought I'd share here. ADO.NET Synchronisation Services is a technology for helping with those online/offline applications where you need to get data Read More
posted Monday, May 21, 2007 3:06 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

ReadyBoost and Media Center - Stuttering Video :-(

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 Read More
posted Monday, May 21, 2007 3:02 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

SqlCeEngine Looks To Need 32-Bit Code

I'm working offline at the moment as I've moved house and my ADSL hasn't been transferred to my new house. This is proving to be a real pain in that I've got very used to searching for answers to problems rather than having to think about them :-) I'm Read More
posted Friday, May 18, 2007 6:03 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

NetFx 3.5 and "Orcas" Event in Reading on the 24th May

Just wanted to do a bit of shameless self-promotion as we've got an event that we're doing next week down at the Microsoft Campus in Reading and I don't think we've done a lot around the promotion of it so here's my rather feeble attempt :-) Date: 24th Read More
posted Friday, May 18, 2007 2:16 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Thinking in LINQ

For the first time, I'm writing bits of code that are nothing to do with LINQ but I'm using the V3.0 C# compiler and so I'm starting to think "Hey, I could use a bit of LINQ" here. Just a moment ago, I wanted to find any network interface that had an Read More
posted Friday, May 18, 2007 1:38 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

WebHttpBinding and WCF in the Orcas B1 Bits

I struggled a lot with the WebHttpBinding yesterday for WCF in the Orcas B1 bits so I thought that I'd share. I find that if I have a simple project such as;using System; using System.ServiceModel; [ServiceContract] public class Service { [OperationContract] Read More
posted Friday, May 11, 2007 6:44 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

DDD 5 - Session Voting Is Open

Session voting is open for DDD 5 over here http://www.developerday.co.uk/ddd/votesessions.asp  Just from a quick glance, I picked out more than enough sessions to entertain me for a day; IIS7 for ASP.NET Evolutionary Algorithms and the Travelling Read More
posted Friday, May 11, 2007 6:37 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Core CLR Outside of the Browser

Jamie's post about hosting the Silverlight CLR ("Core CLR"?) outside of the browser is interesting. I wonder if that CLR supports some/all of the COM hosting interfaces that the usual CLR does. Read More
posted Friday, May 11, 2007 5:53 AM by mtaulty :: 5 Comments

LINQ to XML Videos

I made a few LINQ to XML videos at the time of making the LINQ to SQL videos so I thought I'd share them all out here. I'll not do the full write up that I did around the other videos, I'll just drop out the titles and anyone that's interested can work Read More
posted Thursday, May 10, 2007 1:14 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Apple Ads

Having got stuck at a mental age of approx 7 years, I went to see Spiderman 3 at the weekend (this stretches back to when I was about 8 and used to be an obsessive Spiderman reader). One of the ads that they showed before the film was a Mac add - I think Read More
posted Thursday, May 10, 2007 12:36 AM by mtaulty :: 20 Comments

LINQ to Video #18

For the initial post, see here. This is the last LINQ to SQL video that I've got at the moment. There's the possibility of exploring new topics (grouping? sorting?) in some future videos but for the minute I've run out of steam :-) Coming next - some Read More
posted Wednesday, May 09, 2007 1:41 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

LINQ to Video #17

For the initial post, see here. Today's Video Title Inheritance Topic LINQ to SQL Publication Date 9th May, 2007 Download Link(best to save, not stream) http://mtaulty.com/videos/nuggets/l2s/17_mt_l2s_inheritance.wmv Description LINQ to Read More
posted Tuesday, May 08, 2007 10:48 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

Silverlight Puzzle

I built one of those "sliding" puzzle games with Silverlight (I remember that there used to be a similar but much more elaborate one with WPF for a while). Image is below; and links to the running sample. The main thing that I wanted to play with here Read More
posted Tuesday, May 08, 2007 2:08 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

LINQ to Video #16

For the initial post, see here. Today's Video Title Calling Custom T-SQL Functions Topic LINQ to SQL Publication Date 8th May, 2007 Download Link(best to save, not stream) http://mtaulty.com/videos/nuggets/l2s/16_mt_l2s_callingcustomfunctions.wmv Read More
posted Sunday, May 06, 2007 10:48 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Insomniac Vista and Multimedia Sharing

For a few weeks, I've been having trouble getting my Vista desktop at home to go to Sleep. It used to go to Sleep. I have the power button configured so that it puts the machine to Sleep and it's been working fine for ages. But then it stopped. I knew Read More
posted Friday, May 04, 2007 5:56 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Sliverlight - Filling Rectangles with "Pieces of Video"

Given my "discovery" of the VideoBrush, I'd been wondering for quite a while how you did that trick where you took a playing video (or maybe an Image) and you "split it up" across a number of different shapes (in my case rectangles) such that the same Read More
posted Friday, May 04, 2007 4:48 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Silverlight and VideoBrush

Did Silverlight always have a VideoBrush? Not sure - I thought I'd looked for it before and hadn't seen it or perhaps I was looking for a VisualBrush and that's what confused me. Anyway, I spotted that the 1.1 Alpha definitely has a VideoBrush so Read More
posted Friday, May 04, 2007 5:12 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

AndersH on LINQ to SQL at MIX

Another MIX session I caught up with on video - watched Anders talking about LINQ. Great talk, I liked that the structure of it wasn't that different from the structure that I usually take to talk about it which made me feel slightly reassured that Read More
posted Friday, May 04, 2007 3:06 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

"It's just RESTing"

Sorry for the title, couldn't resist. I found this; "SOAP is Comatose But Not Officially Dead" followed by this; http://blogs.msdn.com/mikechampion/archive/2005/02/20/376975.aspx and this; http://blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam/archive/2005/02/15/372982.aspx Read More
posted Friday, May 04, 2007 2:52 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

LINQ to SQL and Query Notifications

At an event the other week someone asked me how to deal with Query Notifications (from SQL 2005) when you're using LINQ to SQL and I flagged it as one of those interesting things that I hadn't really thought about. As I always do, I asked the chap to Read More
posted Friday, May 04, 2007 2:06 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

"Vista Squad" Meeting

The guys from the newly formed "Vista Squad" are having their second meeting on the Microsoft Campus on the 24th May. Check out the following for details; http://vistasquad.co.uk/blogs/announcements/archive/2007/05/02/vista-squad-2-0.aspx topics are Read More
posted Friday, May 04, 2007 1:48 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

MIX Session DEV10

I've been watching the DEV10 session from MIX. If you do web development then I think this session is really interesting even if you're not necessarily planning to put Silverlight UI on your site. Why? More options... You can program the HTML DOM from Read More
posted Friday, May 04, 2007 12:56 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

LINQ to Video #15

For the initial post, see here. Today's Video Title Calling Standard T-SQL Functions Topic LINQ to SQL Publication Date 4th May, 2007 Download Link(best to save, not stream) http://mtaulty.com/videos/nuggets/l2s/15_mt_l2s_callingsqlfunctions.wmv Read More
posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 5:10 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Porting some old C# code to Silverlight

For me, the big thing about Silverlight is .NET and it may even get me to the point where I'm happier to try manipulating the HTML DOM from time to time Silverlight lets me do that in a nice way from .NET (I haven't tried yet but I did spy some classes Read More
posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 12:43 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Animating Bezier Curves

Just putting this here as somewhere to put it whilst cleaning up my XamlPad. I was wanting the other week to animate a Bezier curve and I discovered that Blend doesn't do that in this version so I typed it out;  <Page xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" Read More
posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 12:13 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

LINQ to Video #14

For the initial post, see here. Today's Video Title Modifications with Stored Procedures Topic LINQ to SQL Publication Date 3rd May, 2007 Download Link(best to save, not stream) http://mtaulty.com/videos/nuggets/l2s/14_mt_l2s_modifyingwithsprocs.wmv Read More
posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 11:19 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Trying out Silverlight Streaming

I had a go at Silverlight Streaming (http://silverlight.live.com) and it worked pretty well, first time around for me. I just built a little Video Player (it's not quite of the glossy standards you'll find at MIX this week) which I put together using Read More
posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 10:04 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Off Topic - Internet "Code of Conduct"

Had to say that I loved this; http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?128@88.waYfbx4U7Su.1@.775e9244 there's some cracking comments in that set of questions and answers and, in many ways, I found it pretty reassuring. Read More
posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 3:48 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

VB...X ?

A snippet that I missed from the MIX announcements was that hidden away in the Dynamic Language announcements was some stuff to do with the next version of Visual Basic - the best I found so far is here; "What the heck is VBx?" Caught me completely by Read More
posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 3:09 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

IE with Add-Ons Disabled

Here's just a word for running IE7 with add-ons disabled. Seems an awful lot faster to me when I use it that way - on Vista this lives in Start->All Programs->System Tools (not sure why). Give it a try (naturally, it's useless for Silverlight, Flash Read More
posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 2:57 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

WCF, P2P and the "Unreachable Network" exception

I have a demo app that I've been using for a long time to talk about WCF (I published it here once). It's "nice" in that it shows contracts, implementations and, with a minimal bit of re-config, I can show it doing HTTP+SOAP Security, Secure TCP, Read More
posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 2:29 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Pushing Content to Silverlight Streaming

I sat up late last night and had my first experiment with Expression Media Encoder. I'd seen Wayne demo this on the MIX keynote video doing the A/B Compare feature where you can compare your original video with the encoded video in a live preview Read More
posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 2:16 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

LINQ to Video #13

For the initial post, see here. Today's Video Title Querying with Stored Procedures Topic LINQ to SQL Publication Date 2nd May, 2007 Download Link(best to save, not stream) http://mtaulty.com/videos/nuggets/l2s/13_mt_l2s_queryingwithsprocs.wmv Read More
posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 8:29 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Silverlight in a VPC?

My thought process was; I want to keep working with Silverlight. Silverlight tooling is only for "Orcas" I have "Orcas" in a VPC I can't imagine that Silverlight runs well in a VPC. So...I need to install "Orcas" onto my main machine in order to continue Read More
posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 7:57 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

"Orcas" B1 and WCF - doing a bit of POX but not getting on with JSON

I've been struggling with "Orcas" bits lately. I keep thinking that I'll go and try something and it'll be easy and then I keep getting things wrong and time just disappears. WCF learns some new tricks in "Orcas" in that it has "in the box" support for Read More
posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 2:06 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Day of Announcements

With the first day of MIX, it seems like there's been a staggering stream of announcements (all of which probably require a good few days of investigations - why do I find myself increasingly accepting calendar invitations for internal meetings when Read More
posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 1:24 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

LINQ to Video #12

For the initial post, see here. Today's Video Title Deferred Loading Topic LINQ to SQL Publication Date 1st May, 2007 Download Link(best to save, not stream) http://mtaulty.com/videos/nuggets/l2s/12_mt_l2s_deferredloading.wmv Description Read More