January 2008 - Mike Taulty's Blog

Just a quick plug :-) I'm speaking at the "SQLBits" conference in Birmingham on the 1st March. The agenda is up here . The agenda is built by voting from prospective attendees and I found it interesting in that I submitted a few sessions that looked something like; "Entity Framework Tour" "LINQ to SQL" Tour "LINQ to Entities" Tour (this is similar to the first topic but with a very different emphasis) "Understanding LINQ" and what surprised me is that the last session was the one that got picked despite it being the session that I'd say is least directly related to SQL - i.e. you can quite happily have some LINQ without bothering with a relational database. So...if you can make the date and the location then sign up for SQL Bits and I look forward to seeing you at my session if it appeals to you. As an aside, if there's something that you'd like to see included in a session like "Understanding LINQ in .NET Framework V3.5 and Beyond" then feel free to ping me a mail letting me know what it is that you want to see...

Another screencast that I put together - this really goes with the other ones about debugging and comes after someone dropped me a mail asking how to get msvsmon.exe to work. Remote Debugging with MSVSMONEXE.aspx

I made a few more videos; ADO.NET Data Services - Querying with LINQ ADO.NET Data Services - Query Interceptors ADO.NET Data Services - Service Operations to go with these videos . Note, there are some "technical difficulties" at the moment in getting some of those videos to play in the Silverlight player. It's nothing to do with Silverlight AFAIK and I suspect it's everything to do with not being able to get to the MMS stream. Regardless, if you hit a glitch then press F5 and it should work in the end or just go for the "Full Screen" button which actually means "View in Windows Media Player" rather than "Full Screen" :-S

Someone mailed me the other day with a query as to how they can use LINQ to XML in order to change this XML file; <? xml version ="1.0" encoding ="utf-8" ? > < root > < x > < a /> < b /> </ x > < c /> < d /> </ root > into this XML file; <? xml version ="1.0" encoding ="utf-8" ? > < root > < a /> < b /> < c /> < d /> </ root > that is - find the node called "x" and remove it whilst reparenting its child nodes to the parent of the node "x". I ended up with something like; XElement doc = XElement.Load( "data.xml" ); XElement xEl = doc.Element( "x" ); doc.AddFirst(xEl.Descendants()); xEl.Remove(); which is fine (enough) but there's a part of me that would have liked to be able to collapse this down into less code. I managed to get it down to; XElement doc = XElement.Load( "data.xml" ); XElement xEl = doc.Element( "x" ); xEl.ReplaceWith(xEl.Descendants()); which felt a bit better and I can't really think of a way to cut...

My media center PC has a problem. It's a Shuttle PC, I've blogged the specs on this website before but I think the base spec is SN85G4V2 if I remember correctly. It's all fine and Media Center works better with Vista than it did with XP for me so that's a good story too. However, the box has one problem and it always has had since I bought it. The network card (which IIRC is all part of the nForce 3 chipset) is rubbish. I've always had problems with this card. It would never (under XP or Vista) run at 100mbps. It would only run at 10mbps and, even then, I've been suspicious that it was actually running at much, much lower speeds. This has always meant that transfers from the media center to other machines in the house have been problematic (i.e. slow). Also, Nvidia don't support nForce 3 for Vista so you have to use the MS driver. I don't know how good/bad this is but it exhibits the same problems as I had running with the Nvidia drivers under XP so I think I have to blame the card. Because the PC is a shuttle...

This is a bit of a sad tale. I came to my laptop this morning and it said that I had no network connectivity. I did an ipconfig and saw that I had no ipaddress. I did an ipconfig /renew and I got an error saying "no adapter is in a suitable state" (I'm sure you've seen this one in your time). I went to disable the adapter and re-enable it as that usually fixes things. I got a message saying that the adapter couldn't be disabled at the moment. I did a restart. The machine got to the screen that says "Shutting down..." and stuck there for a full 5 minutes. I'd got very bored by that time so I held down the power button to kill the thing. After a reboot it's all fine but that catalogue of problems shouldn't really occur - perhaps the network driver went horribly wrong overnight and nothing could be done to get it to come back to life but it'd be nice if it surfaced itself in a more user-friendly way.

I made a few videos about Data Services. I have plans to make a few more as well but (as always :-)) I've got distracted by something else so, for the meantime; ADO.NET Data Services - Surfacing Data ADO.NET Data Services - Querying with URI's ADO.NET Data Services - A Basic .NET Client ADO.NET Data Services - A Basic AJAX Client ADO.NET Data Services - A Basic Silverlight Client I particularly enjoyed the Silverlight one which I stayed up into the small hours of the morning making. Why? Because of how closely it lines up with what you do in a full .NET application. Once Silverlight grows some controls and databinding in version 2.0 I really see Silverlight+Data Services as being a killer combination.

Just a quick link to make this easier to find; ADO.NET Data Services Silverlight Add-On