June 2007 - Posts

posted Friday, June 22, 2007 4:37 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Vista and "Local Only" Network Access

I still occasionally (i.e. it's not as frequent as in the betas) have a problem where Vista won't connect to my wireless network. I had it today. I have my Vista desktop and my Vista laptop. Both are on my wireless network. The desktop goes to sleep. Read More
posted Friday, June 22, 2007 2:48 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Grrr. Windows Update

I get this screen; and then I get this screen; I think this is pretty poor to be honest; No cancel button whilst "Checking for updates..." No visual indication (other than an animated progress bar) of what on Earth is going on whilst it's actually Read More
posted Friday, June 22, 2007 1:41 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

blog.Suspend()

This blog is going to be a little quiet for a few weeks whilst I'm out on holiday. Once the old batteries have been recharged I'm hoping to start doing some things with the Entity Framework as I feel like it's looming on the horizon and demanding attention Read More
posted Friday, June 22, 2007 1:13 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Expression Blend Tutorials

I watched the Blend tutorials from http://www.lynda.com the other day - they're free and they're really good. There weren't that many things in there that I didn't already know about Blend but I just found the style and the structure a pleasure to watch. Read More
posted Friday, June 22, 2007 1:11 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

MIXUK

"That Internet thing will never take off". But...just in case it does....it might be a good idea to be at MIXUK later in the year to see what's going on in the world of web technologies. Ian's post will get you started in getting signed up for further Read More
posted Thursday, June 21, 2007 11:14 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Print to XPS

Fairly obvious one this but I'm finding "Print to XPS" particulaly useful for saving web pages offline (especially those kinds of web pages where I've booked a ticket and I want to keep some kind of record). It's a lot more useful (to me) than saving Read More
posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007 2:36 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Alienware Barebones

Wow, I see Alienware are offering their really quite nifty case as a "barebones". I'd like to dress up my existing desktop in one of these and was just about to do it when I realised that they're quite pricey for a case (albeit with a 700W PSU in Read More
posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007 2:35 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Presentation Tips

Couple of (pretty specific) presentation tips. Use A Desktop Manager I've started doing this and it's working pretty well for me. In some places you might be lucky enough to have both a "Slide" and a "Demo" machine (or maybe more than 1 demo machine) Read More
posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007 2:17 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Why's the LINQ Query Expression Pattern "Backwards"?

I was chatting to MikeO today and he was saying "How come the LINQ query expression syntax is backwards". That is, why is it; from c in <Something> select c.<Property> rather than; select c.<Property> from c in <Something> Read More
posted Tuesday, June 19, 2007 6:34 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Paging Data in LINQ to SQL

I saw a question over here about "How do I implement paging of data in LINQ to SQL". For me, this is one of the nice things about LINQ to SQL so I thought I'd drop it into a post (it's pretty intuitive). We can do something like; NorthwindDataContext Read More
posted Monday, June 18, 2007 9:12 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Ian Posts a Video about Silverlight Streaming

I've only had the one little play around with Silverlight Streaming but I noticed that IanM has made a video on using it. Mine was a custom app whereas Ian is taking the results from Expression Media Encoder straight up to Silverlight Streaming as Read More
posted Monday, June 18, 2007 9:04 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Want LINQ to (Anything But) SQL?

Then, this should be of interest; Database Vendors Discuss the Entity Framework and LINQ at TechEd Read More
posted Monday, June 18, 2007 5:08 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

More Dynamic Queries

Took this slightly further (which you could definitely describe as making it worse :-)) by adding a limited form of an OrElse;namespace MyExtensions { public enum Operand { Equal, NotEqual, LessThan, LessThanEqual, GreaterThan, Read More
posted Monday, June 18, 2007 4:12 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Bit More on Dynamic Queries

I took this a little bit further and ended up with;namespace MyExtensions { public enum Operand { Equal, NotEqual, LessThan, LessThanEqual, GreaterThan, GreaterThanEqual } public static class Extensions Read More
posted Friday, June 15, 2007 11:43 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

LINQ and Dynamic Queries

After quite a few LINQ talks, people have asked me about dynamic queries and I always feel a bit of a headache coming on as it's an order of magnitude harder than what I've been talking about. Now, when people ask for dynamic queries they're not talking Read More
posted Monday, June 11, 2007 1:09 PM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

End of the Road(show)

Today saw the last delivery of our UK Technical (Developer) Roadshow down in London. This was our 7th delivery and, once again, this was pretty much a full house of (I'd guess) about 200 people which would mean (again guess) that we've probably been out Read More
posted Sunday, June 10, 2007 8:18 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Ian C on TDD and LINQ to SQL

Ian's written a cracking blog post over here on the beginnings of applying test driven development to LINQ to SQL. Read More
posted Friday, June 08, 2007 10:40 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

Simple LINQ and an HTTP Handler

All that messing with WCF and POX and so on left me feeling a bit battered and bruised so I thought I'd have a bash at an Http Handler using LINQ as a bit of a rest. Really quite enjoyed doing this;public class DataHandler : IHttpHandler { Read More
posted Friday, June 08, 2007 10:14 AM by mtaulty :: 2 Comments

Workflow, HTTP GET and POX

I was thinking about how the new WCF support enables people to pretty easily invoke a workflow so I thought I'd have a stab at putting something together that offered a Workflow over HTTP GET and returned POX. Say I want to build a Workflow that exposes Read More
posted Friday, June 08, 2007 9:05 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

VS 2008/"Orcas" Beta 1 and WCF POX Endpoints in IIS over HTTP GET

Ok, so the title of the post probably rules out a lot of people but if you are playing with the WCF bits in "Orcas" beta 1 and you're trying to do POX over HTTP GET and you're trying to host in IIS then you might see some pain around an exception Read More
posted Thursday, June 07, 2007 4:05 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Wahey, Windows Mobile Device Scores a Direct Hit

The BBC video of the HTC "Touch" up here; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6722629.stm makes it look pretty cool - that's a pretty sexy UI they've got on there - really good to see this stuff getting more "rich". I wonder how hard it was to build? Read More
posted Thursday, June 07, 2007 4:02 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Video Problems

If you've had any trouble downloading/viewing videos from this site (LINQ to XML, LINQ to SQL and so on) then don't forget that they're also available up here; http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/events/nuggets.aspx We're in the process of improving that Read More
posted Wednesday, June 06, 2007 4:07 PM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

LINQ (to XSD)

One of the things that I've done in introducing LINQ at various talks that I've given over the past 12 months or so is to talk about how LINQ is meant to get us nearer to data. I tend to put up a slide of how we do data access today and I usually drone Read More
posted Wednesday, June 06, 2007 3:22 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

PhotoSynth for "How We Built Britain"

Via Dave Oliver's Blog, I really like this. I've not actually seen the programme at this point but I just had a good fly around Ely Cathedral which I've never visited. I saw a trailer for the programme this evening and spotted a really curious "triangular" Read More
posted Wednesday, June 06, 2007 2:58 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

CAcropolisDocument* pDoc = (CAcropolisDocument*)this.GetDocument();

Is Acropolis MFC for the 21st century? I've watched the introductory video and that's all I know about it right now but it did feel a bit like returning to MFC (note - that's not meant to be pejorative, I quite liked MFC). Either way - nice to hear a Read More
posted Wednesday, June 06, 2007 4:15 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

LINQ to SQL & Deferred Loading

Chris asked me via mail how you can avoid doing deferred loading in LINQ to SQL and I realised that I hadn't really explained this too well in the video that I made on it :-) So, here's a bit more. Imagine that I've got mapping for enough of the Northwind Read More
posted Wednesday, June 06, 2007 2:06 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Open XML SDK

Via MikeO the announcement of the Open XML SDK sounds like a very positive move forward; Brian Jones- Open XML Formats Haven't played with it just yet but, to me, some kind of OM needs layering on top of the core XML format because otherwise it Read More
posted Sunday, June 03, 2007 3:05 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Client Application Services in &quot;Orcas&quot;

I spent my first few minutes experimenting with the new Client Application Services in "Orcas" today - found it pretty interesting. First off, I built a simple web page that lets me get some product based data from the Northwind database. This uses both Read More
posted Friday, June 01, 2007 4:43 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Vista Media Center - Playing DVDs from Hard Drive

There's a great thread over on the Green Button here; http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/172691.aspx  which explains how to get VIDEO_TS files copied from a (purchased!) DVD onto your hard-drive and get Vista's Media Center to display the "DVD Read More
posted Friday, June 01, 2007 7:35 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Some more Silverlight bits

I took the previous little puzzle example (TODO) that I built with Silverlight and changed it in a couple of ways. To try and see how many rectangles I could fill with a video like I'd done in that sample before the performance got too bad (whilst Read More