February 2008 - Posts

posted Friday, February 29, 2008 3:25 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

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 Read More

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posted Wednesday, February 27, 2008 2:47 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

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 Read More
posted Monday, February 25, 2008 3:34 AM by mtaulty :: 4 Comments

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; Read More

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posted Friday, February 22, 2008 4:51 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More

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posted Friday, February 22, 2008 6:35 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More
posted Thursday, February 21, 2008 5:00 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More

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posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 10:41 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

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. Read More

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posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 10:21 AM by mtaulty :: 1 Comments

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 Read More

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posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 9:54 AM by mtaulty :: 5 Comments

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 Read More

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posted Wednesday, February 20, 2008 7:14 AM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

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> Read More

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posted Sunday, February 17, 2008 6:30 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More

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posted Thursday, February 14, 2008 8:08 AM by mtaulty :: 4 Comments

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 Read More
posted Monday, February 11, 2008 6:43 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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 Read More

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posted Sunday, February 10, 2008 10:36 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

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. Read More

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posted Sunday, February 10, 2008 10:35 PM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Download that .NET Source Code

Via Guy, how to pro-actively download some .NET source code for your debugging sessions. Read More

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posted Friday, February 08, 2008 5:00 PM by mtaulty :: 3 Comments

ADO.NET Entity Framework - QueryViews, Inline Functions in SSDL

I have a mail from Tim on the EF team that I've had for a little while. I'd asked a question about mapping and he'd given me an answer saying something like "Oh, you could always do X, Y, Z" and I'd left this mail in my inbox for a while because I've Read More
posted Friday, February 08, 2008 2:19 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Fire :-)

Following on from this I've had a couple of incidents now where I've closed the lid on my laptop ( which is set to Sleep when I close the lid ). I've then dropped it into my bag only to find ( say ) 20 minutes later that there's a lot of heat coming Read More

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posted Friday, February 08, 2008 2:14 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Ouch

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posted Friday, February 08, 2008 2:03 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Securing the Trains

I'm sitting in the Virgin Trains lounge at London Euston station and there's a guy at a terminal in front of me on the phone. In a very loud voice he shouts out; "And what is the user id for me to log in here?" followed by "And what is the password" Read More

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posted Tuesday, February 05, 2008 4:29 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Comic Viewer

For obscure reasons, I came across the comic viewer; http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/comicviewer/default.html associated with the launch site of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008. Now, I'm not a huge fan of the "heroes" Read More

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posted Tuesday, February 05, 2008 1:29 AM by mtaulty :: 0 Comments

Outlook 2007 Search

Hmm. I have an email with the title "Breaking News" in my deleted items folder. I go to that folder and search for the words "Breaking News". Outlook does not find the email. :-( Read More

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