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February 2008 - Mike Taulty's Blog

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  • New Bits at Windows Live

    I'd missed this announcement over at Windows Live - it's quite a long one but the interesting bits for me were; New Windows Live Messenger API. This is a Javascript library rather than (say) a .NET library but it allows you to build Messenger capabilities straight into your own pages. I've tried the demos but I've not read the API docs yet - I'd be curious to see how difficult it is to call that API from .NET code. Silverlight Streaming ups its limit to 10GB and also offers both a WebDAV API along with transcoding capabilities - cool. Silvleright Streaming is about my favourite service from the Live guys. It sounds like data-based services will line up around AtomPub just like ADO.NET Data Services does so that might be pretty cool in terms of re-using the client side bits of ADO.NET Data Services. And some more announcements around delegated authentication, tooling and so on. Check it out - I've just gone off to browse the Messenger API and it is looking like it's heavily wedded into script :-( It'd be great...
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  • UK MSDN Roadshow - April and May. Cardiff, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow.

    The registration site for the UK MSDN Developer Roadshows is now open. You can find the web site here; http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/bb905504.aspx?id=328 although it had a few broken hyperlinks when I visited it but the actual registration links seemed to work ok. The agenda for the Roadshow this year looks something like this; Data with ADO.NET Entity Framework & Data Services Web UI with ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Web UI with Silverlight 2 Getting the most from the VSTS Toolbox So this is all technology that comes after Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework V3.5 tempered with a session about building better code today with Visual Studio Team System. Hope to see you there - if you fancy it, register soon as it usually fills up quite quickly once the registration process is live.

  • Fancy a Job?

    Our ( UK, Microsoft ) team has an opening. You can read the job description up here; http://members.microsoft.com/careers/international/default.aspx?loc=UKD&lang=EN&job=90281478&newapp=0 Essentially, you'd be an addition to the 3 of us below; That's me, MikeO and Daniel . I'll not add to the job-spec here as it's pretty descriptive so good luck with it if you decide to put in an application.
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  • ScottGu on Silverlight 2

    Out comes some more Silverlight 2 info; http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/22/first-look-at-silverlight-2.aspx this is a tutorial over quite a few pages but it's well worth a read. If you've spent time reading Petzold, Sells/Griffiths, Nathan and you've done some work in Expression Blend then I think you're very well prepared for exploring Silverlight 2 :-)
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  • Lacie 2Big Network 1TB NAS

    Following up on this , I went and bought one of these Lacie 2Big 1TB NAS boxes. So far, so "ok" :-) It's a reasonably nice looking box and feels well made. Setup is pretty easy although switching it from "one big disk" to "two mirrored disks" took an awfully long time for it to complete (i.e. 2 - 3 hours but I guess you only do it once). Beyond that, it's all pretty easy to get going. It's also a little noisier than I would have liked it to be but I think that putting it under the desk rather than on top of it will soon solve that one :-) The only problem I have with it right now is that performance doesn't seem to be right. I've got; Gigabit switch Vista laptop Vista desktop iMac NAS all hanging off of that switch. I did some copying around of a big file ( 1.5GB or so ). So far, between the Vista Desktop and the iMac I can get about 60MB/sec from one place to the other. Good enough for me. However, Vista<->NAS and Mac<->NAS results in speeds that are 10MB/sec or less. I don't seem to be able to get...

  • LINQ to XSD is Back :-)

    A new version of the LINQ to XSD preview that works with Visual Studio 2008. Get the details from here . If you're not so sure on what LINQ to XSD is all about it's essentially for the people who see some LINQ to XML code and say; "But how come the LINQ to XML code has all those ugly strings and casts in it? Can't that be worked out if I have a schema?" That's kind of what LINQ to XSD does for you. Now, if you're a VB programmer then it's a slightly different story as you don't get faced directly with all those ugly casts anyway in LINQ to XML and the tooling also has some clever XSD tricks up its sleeve for VB.
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  • Vista Sp1 on MSDN

    Mike has it over here; http://blogs.msdn.com/mikeormond/archive/2008/02/18/vista-sp1-on-msdn-subscriber-downloads.aspx Makes perfect sense to me - if we have the Vista Sp1 bits kicking around then we should make them available ASAP. I installed Sp1 yesterday. So far it seems fine - the performance feels a bit snappier and I'm not seeing processes spinning up and burning my CPU. Related to that, I also seem to see better battery life from my laptop. Fingers crossed! :-)
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  • Upcoming Enhancements to .NET 3.5 Client Framework

    In case you didn't see it already, ScottGu has a post about updates coming to the .NET Framework V3.5 for people building client applications; http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/19/net-3-5-client-product-roadmap.aspx For me I was quite excited about; Hardware accelerated WPF bitmap effects WPF DataGrid and Ribbon controls :-) and, naturally, the setup improvements.
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  • Simple Process Launching Service

    Just sharing a piece of code. I'm sure this isn't quite perfect but someone wanted a Windows Service which would run up some processes with the option to restart them if they exited. I think the Windows Task Scheduler will do some of this but I don't think it does all of it. The service is driven by its configuration file which is simply; < configuration > < configSections > < section name ="processLauncherConfig" type ="ProcLauncher.ProcessLauncherConfig, ProcLauncher" /> </ configSections > < processLauncherConfig xmlns ="urn:proclauncher-com" > < processes > < process executable ="consoleapplication11.exe" restart ="true" killOnStop ="true" > < arguments > < argument value ="one" /> < argument value ="two" /> </ arguments > </ process > </ processes > </ processLauncherConfig > </ configuration > With that in place, I've just got a bit of service code; using System; using System.Configuration; using System.Diagnostics;...
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  • Configuration Section Designer

    I picked this up from Dominick's post the other week but I'd not tried it myself until today. I wanted to create my own little config file section that looks something like this; < processLauncherConfig xmlns ="urn:my-config" > < processes > < process executable ="c:\temp\foo.exe" restart ="true" > < arguments > < argument value ="one" /> < argument value ="two" /> </ arguments > </ process > < process executable ="c:\temp\foo.exe" restart ="false" /> </ processes > </ processLauncherConfig > So, pretty simple thing to want to do but it's painful having to write the code for this whereas the Configuration Section Designer lets me do it graphically and does a nice job of generating artifacts for me. This was my first experiment with it. I made a quick console application then added into it a new Configuration Section; I then get a design surface, a bunch of files in my project; and also some toolbox items to drag to the designer; The basic structure...
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  • RacAgent burning CPU on Vista

    This morning, I had the RacAgent (reliability agent) burning CPU for about 30+ minutes. Killed it once or twice and it came back and ran away with the CPU again. I followed the posting up here; http://guy.dotnet-expertise.com/PermaLink,guid,e7b62d65-9567-408f-8c21-5963fb7b227e.aspx to disable it permanently from within the Task Scheduler. I'll possibly switch it back on when I get Sp1 to see if that helps.
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  • Mike's ADO.NET Entity Framework Mapping Table

    One of the things that's been really bothering me for quite a while now is the aspect of mapping in the Entity Framework. Technical things can trouble me. I like to get them into my head, understood and then I can move on. I have a very, very bad memory and the only way I can remember anything is by understanding how it works and then I find it relatively easy to piece back together at a later point. One of the big things about Entity Framework versus (say) [LINQ to SQL] is that you have this Conceptual->Logical mapping layer that abstracts you away from the logical level. The thing that's been bothering me is essentially - what can that mapping layer do for you? Now, I know it can do specific things (e.g. table-per-type inheritance) but what I'd really like is a definitive list of exactly what you can do with the mapping layer. I thought I'd start trying to build something here deliberately starting with the simple and moving towards the slightly more complex. 1) Renaming an Entity Type I can take an entity...

  • VBX and the DLR

    Ok, so I admit to being a bit dumb but even in jet-lagged mode a penny suddenly dropped for me today when I saw a small demo around VBX and the DLR. I hadn't really appreciated how easy it might be to host the DLR, hand it some scriptable objects and then ask it to run script language code against them. That is, I hadn't appreciated how easy it might be to make VBX a language that an application hosts for application customisations. Interesting stuff...of course, other people already knew all this :-) and Paul's post over here has a lot of info and Roger had interesting commentary on this quite a while back . I need to spend some time looking at the DLR.
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  • Workflow Questions

    Are you a workflow guru? To be honest, I'd be suspicious of anyone going around describing themselves as a "guru" but I did manage to string some sort of answers to the questions being asked here.
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  • Download that .NET Source Code

    Via Guy, how to pro-actively download some .NET source code for your debugging sessions .
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(C) Mike Taulty, 2010. All rights reserved. The information in this weblog is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my opinion. Inappropriate comments will be deleted at the authors discretion. All code samples are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.
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