January 2008 - Posts

SQLBits - Birmingham, 1st March

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 Read More

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The Same Language As Me

Joel's got a really good point about Microsoft double-speak. Hope I don't get in trouble with my employer for mentioning at my event yesterday that "SQL Server is Delayed" :-) For people who've been following the various SQL CTPs, I can't see this (relatively Read More

Remote Debugging with MSVSMON.EXE

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 Read More

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Vista Squad January Meeting

Just a quick plug for the next meeting of the "Vista Squad". This is happening on the Microsoft Campus in Reading on the 31st January and there are two sessions. One is from James O'Neill who's a member of my wider team and the other is from Ray Booysen Read More

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ADO.NET Data Services - Screecasts

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 Read More

Entity Framework Links (and one other)

Entity Framework Toolkits & Extras How Does The Entity Designer Generate Code? How To Extract CSDL from EDMX Oh...and I also encountered this; http://www.fishticuffs.co.uk/ Which Mike used to slap me around the face with a big fish - try it :-) Read More

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Reparenting nodes in LINQ to XML

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/> Read More

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UK Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 Launch

If you'd like to attend the UK Launch of VS, SQL and Windows Server then the event is now live for you to register yourself here; Launch Registration Site In order to work out whether you want to do that or not, you can check out the agenda from here; Read More

LinkSys USB200M

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 Read More

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Desktop Switching App 2008 ("Old Code is Another Country")

I resurrected an older piece of sofware that I wrote today. A while ago, before I encountered Virtual Desktop Manager and DeskSpace I wanted to write a little tool that'd let me have multiple desktops on Vista. It's nowhere near as good as either of those Read More

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Holding down the power button

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 Read More

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Desktop Icon "Ghosting" bug?

I keep encountering what feels like a bug. Not sure if it's in the DWM or Explorer or the driver or what. I dragged a file called capture.jpg from my desktop into Messenger and I'm left with a "ghost" icon which floats above the desktop and on top of Read More

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ADO.NET Data Services - Screencasts

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 Read More

But I Just Want To Copy A File :-(

I've been staring at this dialog for just over 5 minutes. What the heck does it mean? I'm copying a 23MB file from a local hard-drive to a network shared drive (I blanked out the names above to protect the innocent :-)). I can accept that it's maybe Read More

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ADO.NET Data Services - Silverlight Add-On

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

Debugging with .NET Source Code

ScottGu has a post saying that debugging into the .NET source code is now available and Daniel has already made a video around how to do this which is here. I've just tried it out and can confirm that it works just fine. Here I am inside of SqlConnection.Open() Read More

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"Using ADO.NET Data Services CTP1"

I keep searching the web to find this useful document about Data Services; Using ADO.NET Data Services CTP1 so I'm linking to it here for my own sanity :-) Maybe it's installed as part of the SDK. Maybe it's on another website somewhere but I can never Read More

ADO.NET Data Services - More Sketchy Thoughts on Access Control

One of the things that I briefly mentioned in this post was the idea that because Data Services sits atop of WCF you can plug in a ServiceAuthorizationManager which gets a chance to look at every request before it gets dispatched into your data service. Read More

Looking for a NAS

I've been looking for a simple home NAS box and I'm realising that there's a heck of a lot of choice out there and quite a lot of devices have arrived in the last 6 - 12 months (and at the recent CES). I never thought I'd buy a NAS for home. The primary Read More

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Basic Authentication against non-Windows Accounts in IIS/ASP.NET

Dominick's series of posts; HTTP Basic Authentication against Non-Windows Accounts in IIS/ASP.NET (Part 0 - Intro) HTTP Basic Authentication against Non-Windows Accounts in IIS/ASP.NET (Part 1 - Basic Authentication) HTTP Basic Authentication against Read More

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ADO.NET Data Services - Sketchy Thoughts on Controlling Access

Take some of this with a pinch of salt - just some thoughts I had whilst playing with controlling access to an ADO.NET Data Service, haven't necessarily got it worked out just yet. When you first create an ADO.NET Data Service, one of the things that Read More

ADO.NET Data Services & Authentication -> Basic Auth in IIS 7.

This is one of those posts where I might not have thought the whole thing through but I was thinking about authenticating clients with ADO.NET Data Services. In Data Services, we have the URI of the resource and an XML/JSON response so for authentication Read More

Compaq nc8430, Vista, ATI, Driver, Blue Screen

My laptop is an HP Compaq NC8430. It's got a T7400 running at 2.00GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200 rpm disk in it. It's a nice laptop and one of the better ones that I've had although the screen could definitely be brighter and (like all changes of laptop Read More

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CS Education - Is Learning Java (or .NET) Enough?

I came across this article on Slashdot and found it really interesting. As professional programmers (generally) move away from writing assembler or C/C++ and trend towards writing Java or .NET does it matter if they've never written any assembler or C/C++ Read More

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Blog Links

Whilst digesting some blogs today I came across; Kaxaml - this is looking like a better and better "XAMLPad" replacement by the day. I've tried it before but the new look-and-feel (well, new since I last saw it anyway) is really slick. Bill Gates Last Read More

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ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (4)

Following on from these posts; ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (1) ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (2) ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (3) it's time to look at updates. Using the Entity Framework based Read More

ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (3)

Following on from these posts; ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (1) ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (2) what if I want to delete my newly inserted data? Against the Entity Framework data source I can write something like; Read More

ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (2)

Following on from the previous post, I wanted to look at how we can make our arbitrary data source available for both read and write in the same way that an Entity Framework data source is. As I talked about in this post, this involves implementing IUpdatable Read More

ADO.NET Data Services - Exposing Arbitrary Data (1)

I've been playing over Xmas with exposing arbitrary data from an ADO.NET Data Service and I wanted to try and write it up here although I don't have it 100% nailed down or correct at this point - still some things to figure out. Note that a lot of this Read More

ADO.NET Data Services - Inserting Related Entities

I spent some time with ADO.NET Data Services sitting atop of Entity Framework today trying to insert some related entities and I kept hitting problems that I couldn't figure out. I was looking at the QuickStart here; http://quickstarts.asp.net/3-5-extensions/adonetdataservice/NETClientLibrary.aspx Read More

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ADO.NET Data Services - Tracing Messages from Client to Service

I (very foolishly) spent a few minutes today trying to figure out why applying WCF tracing configuration to a ADO.NET Data Services client (i.e. a proxy generated with webdatagen.exe) wasn't producing me any tracing results. It didn't take too long to Read More

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