August 2007 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Just a bit of a "plug". The chaps from Black Marble are being kind enough to host MSDN events in Leeds and I'm going there on the 20th September with Martin to talk about .NET Framework V3.0 and .NET Framework V3.5. You can find details of the event here - hope to see you there.

System.AddIn in Framework V3.5 is about building hosts that load plug-in Add-Ins with functionality around discovery, isolation and lifetime management. It also tries to deal with the thorny problem of versioning one or both ends of the host<->addin relationship. I didn't know too much about the thorny details of this so I thought I'd forward the links I used to learn a little more about it (read in the following order); MSDN Magazine Article 1 MSDN Magazine Article 2 Approaches to Discovery How Discovery Works (I wish MS folks would write more articles like this. That is, my view is that I just want to know "What code did you just build into your framework piece and how does it do what it does?". If you tell me that then I can figure the rest). Architecture This I found interesting only for the statement "The host and add-in only ever depend on one component (the view) which itself has no dependencies elsewhere on the system. This means that the host and add-in are completely unaware of each other and the...

I'm fairly poor at 3D. I was optimistic when WPF came along because I felt it might suddenly turn me into "3D guy" but it didn't (it was, perhaps, asking a lot :-)). I can just about sit down and produce a mesh that defines a plane or (once) I managed to define a cube and everytime I get to the TextureCoordinates bit I have to go back to first principles. So...I'm never going to be your source of WPF 3D information but I did have a quick look at ContainerUIElement3D, ModelUIElement3D and Viewport2DVisual3D today so I thought I'd share. This is the only information that I really found about this topic right now . All other hits from Google (yes, I know) seemed to be repro's of that article. There's nothing AFAICT in the MSDN docs for Beta 2 so I really struggled to figure anything out. In my own layman's terms; ContainerUIElement3D - you can put 3D content in here. If you do, this element can do things for like handling input, firing events and so on without you having to do lots of hit-testing yourself. ModelUIElement3D...

How would you get the Entity Framework to map inserts, updates, deletes through a stored procedure layer rather than dynamically asking the underlying provider to generate INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE statements? I was about to write some code when I came across this post (again :-)) so I spent the time reading all of that which is a really good description instead of opening VS :-)

I've been missing the ability to use Outlook in order to send/receive Live Mail for quite a while. You used to be able to do that at one time and then I think the service changed so that you couldn't. Regardless, it's back and I'm really pleased to see it back because, for me, the web UI of Live Mail (whilst very nice) just isn't anything like as useful as the local UI of Outlook. Here's the download (works with 2003, 2007); http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7aad7e6a-931e-438a-950c-5e9ea66322d4&displaylang=en

In Beta 1 of Fx3.5, the WorkflowServiceHost had a simple property on it called Runtime that got you to the WorkflowRuntime . Easy :-) I was just trying to move some code from B1 to B2 and realised that this property had gone and, fortunately, found this post over here; http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2061771&SiteID=1 which explains where to get it should you need it; WorkflowRuntime workflowRuntime = ((WorkflowRuntimeBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors.Find<WorkflowRuntimeBehavior>()).WorkflowRuntime; It's a bit more lengthy than; host.Runtime but at least you can still get there :-)

If we're going to be updating or deleting records in the database then we probably care about concurrency. What happens if we've got code like this; static void Main( string [] args) { using (NorthwindContext ctx = new NorthwindContext( "Name=NorthwindEntities" )) { Shippers s = ctx.Shippers.Where( "it.shipperid = 13" ).First(); s.Phone = "123" ; Console.WriteLine( "ready to make an update - go update the table to cause a concurrency problem" ); Console.ReadLine(); ctx.SaveChanges( true ); } } And, in the middle of this piece of code at the point where I've got that Console.ReadLine() I go off and update the record where shipperid=13 in order to change its phone number to a different value. What does the Entity Framework do in that situation? Nothing :-) The update simply goes through to the table. So, is there no concurrency protection in the Entity Framework? Yep, there is - you just have to turn it on. If I go an modify my .CSDL file for the Shippers EntityType to read; < EntityType Name ="Shippers" >...

Following on from the previous post I wanted to apply a similar approach with updating data. If I go and grab the first Shippers record from my store; using (NorthwindContext ctx = new NorthwindContext( "Name=NorthwindEntities" )) { Shippers single = ctx.Shippers.First(); DumpObjectStateManager(ctx.ObjectStateManager); single.Phone = "Unlisted" ; DumpObjectStateManager(ctx.ObjectStateManager); } Then dumping that ObjectStateManager twice shows that its aware of what's going on here; Dumping Object State Manager Dumping objects in state [Detached] Dumping objects in state [Unchanged] Entity from entity set [Shippers], key [<Key=ShipperID,Value=1>] Dumping objects in state [Added] Dumping objects in state [Deleted] Dumping objects in state [Modified] Dumping Object State Manager Dumping objects in state [Detached] Dumping objects in state [Unchanged] Dumping objects in state [Added] Dumping objects in state [Deleted] Dumping objects in state [Modified] Entity from entity set [Shippers], key [<Key=ShipperID...