September 2008 - Mike Taulty's Blog

I seem to be working my way down Cnet's review of PC speakers . In my office, I have these; which I've had for quite a long time and really like and I just got myself a set of these below to attach to the Media Center ( deliberately trying to avoid ending up with a big sub-woofer under my TV or going back to the 5.1 setup I've had in the past which takes over the whole lounge ); and, so far, they sound very nice ( I went for the 30W rather than the 40W ).

From ScottGu - key thing here is that there are Beta 2->RTM breaking changes so if you have applications on Silverlight 2 Beta 2 then you need to see about moving them over to the RC in order that they'll run when we get to RTM. Also noted - new controls for ComboBox, ProgressBar and PasswordBox and all controls have a better look/feel by default.

One of the very best things about Vista is Media Center. You never really hear people talk about Media Center when they talk about Vista but Media Center is one app that I can easily put hand on heart and say that, for me, in Vista it's 100% better than it was in XP. It runs my TV and it does it really well. It records the TV I ask it to and it does it around 99% of the time I'd say whereas with XP (on the same machine I hasten to add) it was about 65% of the time. It was always coming up with excuses about why it'd failed to record some series or other. So, I thought I'd give my Media Center a bit of a treat and get it a new graphics card. It'd been running with an FX 5200 with (IIRC) 128MB or RAM in it and I'd like to give it a stunning card but; They're noisy. This box is under my TV. They're expensive. So I bought another cheap card - a 6200 seeing that nVidia actually mention the 6 series on their website whereas they long since stopped mentioning the 5 series which made it tricky to find a driver beyond...

I've been quite content up until today to say "I can't write Pixel Shaders" and "I don't know what High Level Shader Language" is. But I thought I'd have a crack at it. Turns out, it just looks like C whereas I expected it to look like assembly. I read a bit from here; http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/06/17/hlsl-pixel-shader-effects-tutorial.aspx which is a great resource for starting and then I decided to give it a whirl. Following this post and downloading the DirectX SDK led me to this masterpiece ;-) sampler2D input : register(s0); float factor : register(c0); float4 main(float2 uv : TEXCOORD) : COLOR { float4 Color = tex2D( input , uv.xy); Color.rgb = Color.rgb * abs(sin(uv.x * 3.14 * factor)) * abs(sin(uv.y * 3.14 * factor)); return (Color); } lined up with this piece of C# brilliance :-) using System; using System.Windows.Media.Effects; using System.Windows; using System.Windows.Media; namespace ShaderEffects { public class MikeEffect : ShaderEffect { private static PixelShader _pixelShader...

There's lots of stuff written around dynamic data elsewhere so I won't duplicate it here. I did a little bit of experimentation with it today rather than just watch Mike walk me through it. My first surprise in springing up dynamic data was this dialog; It looks like I have to choose between a "Dynamic Data" web site and a "Dynamic Data Entities Web Site". That seems a bit odd to me. If you look at what the ADO.NET Data Services folks did in terms of being "data neutral" then you get to; Expose any object graph read-only you like as long as it has a few necessary attributes on it Expose LINQ to SQL data read-only ( again possibly needing a few attributes ) Expose either ( 1 or 2 ) read-write by adding IUpdatable Expose LINQ to Entities data read/write by default. So, there's a pretty nice story around being data source neutral. It makes for a simple demo where you can just take a few CLR types and expose them over REST without having to get into any other data access technology. It looks like Dynamic Data doesn...

In playing with ASP.NET routing, I came across this really weird piece of code in a class called RouteValueDictionary which I can reproduce here; RouteValueDictionary dictionary = new RouteValueDictionary( new { key1 = "value1" , key2 = "value2" , key3 = "value3" }); foreach (var item in dictionary) { Console.WriteLine( "{0} = {1}" , item.Key, item.Value); } I scratched my head over this quite a bit when I first saw it as the usage was as above in that it seemed to be adding a single instance of an anonymous type to a dictionary as a way of populating that dictionary. It had me wondering "So, where's the key coming from and where's the value coming from?" You can probably guess that what the constructor for RouteValueDictionary actually does is to reflect on the object that's passed to it and it turns each property name into a key and each property value into a value in the dictionary. Is it me - or is this a case of anonymous type abuse? Seems really ugly to me but perhaps there was some devious reason for it...

PDC draws nearer and nearer. I have my plane, I have my registration, I'm good to go. The latest countdown video hosted up; here gives some more information as to what's coming and themes this PDC it being the "Software + Services" PDC. One of the challenges with a conference like PDC is how to distribute all the software that is being given out to an attendee. The PDC guys have come up with a cool way of doing that this year in that they're giving each attendee a 160GB external hard-drive with all the bits on it so you don't have to be fumbling around with DVDs and so on that you've lost down the back of the drawer in the office. The session list has been growing and growing up here . I couldn't find a great way to export a session list but my own list looks something like this right now; A Lap Around Building Block Services Architecture of the Building Block Services Live Platform: New Developer Services and APIs Live Platform: Building Mesh Applications Live Platform: Mesh Services Architecture Deep Dive Messaging...