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November 2007 - Posts

LINQ (to XML) and Dictionaries

Someone asked me today about how to go from a piece of XML which contained key/value pairs to a Dictionary<K,V>. This was the best I could come up with; Dim xml = <items> <item key= "one" value= "A" /> <item key= "two" value= "B" Read More...
Posted Friday, November 30, 2007 9:13 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

LINQ to XML and IXPathNavigable

Something I've been pondering. Living over in System.Xml.XPath is an extension method to XNode (from LINQ to XML) called CreateNavigator . So, given something like an XElement ; XElement x = new XElement( "foo" ); I can go ahead and get an XPathNavigator Read More...
Posted Friday, November 30, 2007 5:16 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments
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Parallel Extensions

Yet more news! The parallel extensions for .NET Framework V3.5 now have a Community Tech Preview. You can find the download here to try and Daniel has been busy making videos on this already over here with some notes over here . I've not read up on this Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007 4:22 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Silverlight V2.0

And only yesterday, MikeO were still calling it V1.1 at our Silverlight event in Birmingham. Get the news from ScottGu ! If I read it correctly; Extensible control model Layout support (hopefully that's extensible too :-)) Data binding Control templating Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007 9:30 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Expression Encoder, Silverlight, Windows Live Writer

I've just tried for the first time the killer combination of; Expression Encoder The plug-in for Expression Encoder that lets you encode a video and publish it directly to Silverlight Streaming The plug-in for Windows Live Writer that lets you automatically Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 29, 2007 1:14 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

Finally, the truth is out

Martin sent me this . I guess it's probably "old" by now but I liked it. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 27, 2007 2:08 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Free Silverlight Training at Lynda.com

There's 4.5 hours of free Silverlight training up at Lynda.com. Go here for the materials, the topic list looks pretty comprehensive to me; 1. Understanding Silverlight 2. Discovering Silverlight Experiences 3. Silverlight Tools: Expression and Visual Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 21, 2007 3:26 PM by mtaulty | 6 Comments

3D Desktop Management

Quite a while ago I played with a bit of free software called Yodm3D which provided a 3D virtual desktop manager for Windows and worked on Vista. This is being turned into a commercial product called DeskSpace and I've just installed and tried their trial Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 21, 2007 3:20 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Singularity

I found this research site fascinating although I'm currently struggling to read the whitepaper because the PDF reader keeps crashing on me :-( Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 21, 2007 4:47 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

UK Visual Studio 2008 Resources

An internal MS person today asked the perfectly reasonable question of "Where can I find some resources on Visual Studio 2008?". I know that we've done quite a lot of "stuff" in the UK team and Daniel's recent post is a good place to start . Beyond that, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 21, 2007 4:29 AM by mtaulty | 9 Comments

LINQ and DML

One of the things that I've heard quite a few times (and I heard it again yesterday) is "how come LINQ doesn't define DML?". This is an interesting one for me. Across data sources we have the pretty consistent query expression pattern. from a in b join Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 21, 2007 1:46 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments
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Visual Studio 2008 on MSDN

Ok, so I'm hardly going to break the news here that Visual Studio 2008 is now available for MSDN subscriber downloads. Also, SQL Server 2008 November CTP is now available for download . However, one thing I'd add to all the (very understandable!!) excitement Read More...
Posted Monday, November 19, 2007 1:25 PM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Interactive web pages

I liked this advert (yep, weird thing to say isn't it :-)) that I saw on MSN this morning for "Pirates of the Caribbean"; There's 2 bits of embedded content and the bottom right ship is firing a cannonball towards the ship at the top left. Certainly attracted Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 17, 2007 7:11 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Links

Couple of blog-posts that I came across; Behaviour of variables in LINQ to Entities and, unrelated, but very cool if you've used Expression Encoder and zipped the files yourself for Silverlight Streaming; Silverlight Streaming Plug-In for Expression Encode Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 17, 2007 4:15 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Silverlight Talk in Manchester

Thanks to all the people who came along to our Silverlight talk in Manchester today and a special thanks to putting up with the 3, yes 3, projectors that we had to work our way through before finding a satisfactory solution. I can promise you, we did Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 15, 2007 11:48 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments
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Use MSDN? In the UK? Make sure you're seeing the UK page

I asked this question at an event that we did today on Silverlight in the great city of Manchester (where I live). "Who uses http://msdn.microsoft.com?" Answer: Pretty much everyone "Who has their browser locale set to en-gb so that they see the UK pages Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 15, 2007 11:40 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

Flushing the DNS cache

I kind of wish (client) Windows would flush the DNS cache whenever it sees me drop off a network. I find that typically (because of the poor stability of my router) I am running Admin Console windows and typing; ipconfig /flushdns more than once a day. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 14, 2007 2:20 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

ScottGu on ASP.NET MVC Framework

I've been reading ScottGu's post on the MVC Framework . I found it quite exciting. It seems to work the way I'd want a web framework to work. A couple of things that caught my eye; For a little while, I was a bit concerned about how the controller "talked" Read More...
Posted Wednesday, November 14, 2007 2:00 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

LINQ and SQLCLR

One of the requests/questions that I heard a few times at TechEd Europe was "When can we use LINQ inside of SQL Server?". I must admit that I hadn't really thought about this very much because I tend to think of writing SQL Server procedures, functions, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 13, 2007 6:03 AM by mtaulty | 1 Comments

Drawing a XAML graph from VB

I did a thing at TechEd where I took a set of process data from my machine and turned it into a basic bar chart by writing some LINQ to XML and producing XAML as the output. I say "basic" because the chart was built from a bunch of ProgressBar elements Read More...
Posted Tuesday, November 13, 2007 1:30 AM by mtaulty | 3 Comments

SQL 2008: Where is SqlHierarchyId?

I spent 5 mins looking for the .NET type SqlHierarchyId today so I thought I'd share (it's probably very obvious but not so obvious that I actually knew). It seems to live in; Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.dll which, for me, lives in c:\program files\Microsoft Read More...
Posted Monday, November 12, 2007 7:08 AM by mtaulty | 0 Comments
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TechEd - Belated Follow Up

I got back from TechEd (Europe) on Friday having spent the best part of 6 days at the conference. During that time, I ran a couple of my own sessions; LINQ to XML LINQ to Entities with a repeat of the latter and I also played a minor part in a panel discussion Read More...
Posted Sunday, November 11, 2007 4:21 PM by mtaulty | 0 Comments

TechEd Europe. Follow Up 3.

Just highlighting a couple of previous posts if you're arriving at this website looking for some bits on LINQ to SQL, LINQ to Entities. Collection of LINQ to Entities Posts Collection of LINQ to SQL Videos (slightly out of date but mostly relevant :-)). Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 10, 2007 5:49 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

TechEd Europe - Follow Up 2. Serializing Expressions.

I met a couple of people at TechEd Europe who wanted to do something along the lines of; Have a client which formulates a LINQ (to relational) query, serializes this LINQ query over the network to a remote middle-tier server and then that server executes Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 10, 2007 5:46 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments

TechEd Europe - Follow Up 1. In LINQ, "Where" == "AndWhere"

Someone at TechEd yesterday asked me a great question about LINQ which is something that I've puzzled about before (and I was pretty sure that I'd written it up on this website but I can't find it so hopefully I'm not duplicating myself). Let's say we Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 10, 2007 4:41 AM by mtaulty | 6 Comments

TechEd Europe - LINQ to XML Session Code

I'm just back from TechEd Europe where I did a few sessions around LINQ to XML and LINQ to Entities along with taking a minor part in some panel discussions. Big thanks to all the people who came along to the sessions - hope you enjoyed it and thanks Read More...
Posted Saturday, November 10, 2007 4:12 AM by mtaulty | 7 Comments

End of (home) wireless networking

For a number of years, in a number of houses, with a number of different operating systems running on a number of different kinds of hardware and a number of different routers and wireless cards I've tried to make home Wifi work. And it never really has. Read More...
Posted Thursday, November 01, 2007 4:10 AM by mtaulty | 2 Comments