-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
There has been a post on the forums recently mentioning an issue with looping and file handles being leaked in Integration Services.
The post can be found here http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=277765&SiteID=1
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
There has been a post on the forums recently mentioning an issue with looping and file handles being leaked in Integration Services.
The post can be found here http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=277765&SiteID=1
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Today I stumbled across something similar to the following chunk of c# code.
19 private static void DoStuff(object o)
20 {
21 [...]
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Congrats to Phil and the other folks for getting Subtext 1.0 out, Subtext is the OSS version of .Text. It's great to see MbUnit helping drive a fellow OSS project tests too.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt reiterates the firm's belief that it will continue to enjoy strong revenue growth.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Worth a listen is a podcast recording by the Exchange Team who explain more about their decision to go 64-bit only. Link is here.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Learn how the Learning Gateway delivers a secure, Web-based learning portal featuring SharePoint Portal Server and Class Server to connect parents, teachers, and administrators. The result? An integrated framework that turns student data into knowledge, knowledge into action, and action into success.
Webcast Registration (March 24)
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Telerik have prepared a set of resources to help you understand what is AJAX, what benefits it offers, what's difficult in AJAX development and how telerik's unique approach to AJAX can help you simplify AJAX development.
http://www.telerik.com/ajax
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
A useful resource to keeping your kids safe while using the Internet...
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
A while back my boss, John devados, gave a keynote at VS live on some of the architectural work we are doing pulling togther the Web and the Enterprise that we are calling Edge Architecture. James Fawcette has an interesting article about the same thing on the FTP Online Enterprise Architect site which gives a very good overview of the motivation of our work.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Better late than never, I noticed a couple of days ago there's a GoLive license now for Indigo and a release on my MSDN that works under the RTM of .NET 2.0! It's actually a public release too, so go download it.
Congratulations to Don Box's team for getting it out the door.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
My webserver in the states has been hammering the processor for the last 405 hours - all SQL Express hitting 100%.
The other instances of SQL Server were idling, so I don't know what it was getting up to, as it certainly wasn't dealing with any serious load!
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
If you're on a non-Windows box and you want Ruby to talk to SQL Server, you'll probably
be following instructions like these
over at the Rails wiki.
If, however, you keep getting this error back:
[iODBC] [Driver Manager]Specified driver could not be loaded
You might need to check this
article. It tells you to set your Driver in /etc/odbc.ini to the path of the library
you want (/usr/lib/odbc/libtdsodbc.so on Ubuntu with FreeTDS), instead of the value
in /etc/odbcinst.ini.
I've updated the wiki page to make a note of this, but it might just be a quirk in
my all apt-getted setup.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
i-Mate have started shipping an OS update to their K-JAM device that includes the extra bits needed to support push e-mail. Push email is just one of the improvements in the MSFP (Messaging and Security Feature Pack) that works hand in hand with Exchange 2003 SP2.
Modaco once again got their first with the announcement: http://www.modaco.com/index.php?showtopic=237393
If you have an i-Mate K-Jam then you can get the bits here: ftp://ftp.clubimate.com/K-JAM_WWE_216901_2169101_020710_ship.zip
Marcus
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Denmark is forcing its citizens online, making it one of the world's most advanced e-societies, says the BBC's Ray Furlong.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Dr. Andy Sithers writes a great article on XAML and CIDER.
The Article!
From the newest student newsletter!
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
The memory upgrade for my MAC powerbook has now arrived, but the performance gains I was hoping for in Virtual PC have not.
Virtual PC for the MAC seems perfectly OK at running MS Office and other business applications but once it gets faced with an application like VS2005 that is continually running multiple threads to support things like intellisence then the performance just isnt there. I'm not saying it would be imposible to develop under it and in my life as a consultant I have seen people trying to develop applications on PC's slower than Virtual PC but really I cant justify the performance penalty to use it as my daily development tool.
This now leaves me in a difficult situation. You see I have fallen in love with my MAC. It is wonderull in so many ways that I just cant even contemplate giving it up. For email , web browsing , word processing , accessing my digital camera, news reading etc it is just so darn good.
So I am now condemed to carrrying around two laptops until I get totally fed up or Virtual PC becomes available for the new Intel based MacBooks and I can try my experiement again. So much for progress.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
The memory upgrade for my MAC powerbook has now arrived, but the performance gains I was hoping for in Virtual PC have not.
Virtual PC for the MAC seems perfectly OK at running MS Office and other business applications but once it gets faced with an application like VS2005 that is continually running multiple threads to support things like intellisence then the performance just isnt there. I'm not saying it would be imposible to develop under it and in my life as a consultant I have seen people trying to develop applications on PC's slower than Virtual PC but really I cant justify the performance penalty to use it as my daily development tool.
This now leaves me in a difficult situation. You see I have fallen in love with my MAC. It is wonderull in so many ways that I just cant even contemplate giving it up. For email , web browsing , word processing , accessing my digital camera, news reading etc it is just so darn good.
So I am now condemed to carrrying around two laptops until I get totally fed up or Virtual PC becomes available for the new Intel based MacBooks and I can try my experiement again. So much for progress.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Click here to browse to the search portal which enables you to search by keyword across all TechNet and MSDN blogs.
It's a handy site as you can search for blogs with specific keywords in their title (hence you can find all security oriented blogs) OR in their content (hence you can find all posts referencing security) - of course you can use this tool for topics other than security!
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
I’ve switched to the February CTP of Windows Vista which has the Sidebar in it for the first time.
I must admit that I was a little skeptical about the Sidebar in that I worry that I’m going to lose more screen real-estate but it seems like it’s fairly unobtrusive in the way that it’s prepared to hide behind other bits on the screen.
I was interested enough to go and take a look at how I’d build one of the Sidebar gadgets and I’m a bit disappointed to find that the developer story seems to be one built about browser technologies and script. I was hoping that there was a decent way to get WPF into the sidebar. I have a bit of a negative response to languages that don’t come with a compiler :-)
My first thought as to something to build was to build a simple Task Manager style Gadget that displayed what my CPU, Disk and Network are up to. I was thinking of a simple 3 bar chart drawn with WPF and, presumably, pulling the information in from WMI.
I’ve no idea how I would go about doing that with script. Do I write an ActiveX control? If I write an ActiveX control do I do that with Windows Forms and then host WPF inside of Windows Forms – it seems like that might be one level of interop too many to get to a WPF based solution.
I wonder if there’s another way of getting WPF solutions into the Sidebar? I can appreciate that script has an attraction in that it can be shared between the Live.com site and the Sidebar but it’d be good to find another (in my view a better) way of doing development for a rich environment.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Amazon is moving its European customer service centre to Ireland due to local language talents.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Team System is nearly done. It's set for "launch" at SD West 2006 on March 16th, though the blurb talks about announcing "general availability and release timeframes" - a wordy phrase which leaves plenty of room for not actually having the final product. Still, Team System Content Architect Rob Caron says it is shipping this month, so MDSN subscribers should watch their download list.
That presumes that they have the right subscription, of course. Even former Universal subscribers can only get a free transfer to one of the three Visual Studio role-based editions: Developer, Tester or Architect. It's a difficult choice which is likely to force compromises. It turns out that even the designers of Team System don't think you should do this. Rob Caron points to this quote, from Microsoft Solution Framework product manager David Anderson:
The role-based SKUs are offered because of customer demand for a crimped product at a lower price...You will never find the MSF folks talking about Team System other than holistically, to really get the full benefit in terms of ROI we believe that you need the whole system.
This being the case, the role-based packaging is a mistake. Team System is an expensive product, laden with requirements for server licenses, CALs and so on. There is no need to restrict what any one developer can do. I appreciate that any one developer is unlikely to use all the features; but chopping this "holistic" package down to three distinct products involves unnecessary compromises. Try to get the full suite if you can.
Tags: teamsystem
visualstudio
microsoft
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Time to get a little patriotic...
Fellow Brit, James Governior, moaned the other day (quite rightly in my opinion) about the lack of gusto and activity happening in the web start-up space in the UK. Now, it may be just a perception thing, but it seems as though we're somewhat lacking...what is it about the UK business environment that holds us back? We have some success stories in the high-tech industry, but not many to speak of at all (in fact I'm struggling to think of any - CSR and ARM come to mind), but why not in the online space?
It's weird. We have the skills - there are plenty of first-class developers in good old Blighty and a high quality pool of bright business minds that want the good life, but why is that those ingredients do not translate into the generation of successful world-class online businesses?
Maybe there are some hot players and but they just don't get the level of exposure the Silicon Valley young guns get If they are there, I haven't heard of them.
So James is going to try and do his bit for our queen and country. He's looking for some UK start-ups to explore and expose. If you know of any, ping James. He's hungry to know.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
The official website for Stargate Worlds (that I talked about before) has now been launched.
The content is a bit limited at the moment, but over time this will obviously grow. The forums have already been running for a while now and is a much better resource at the moment than the website. A good example of this is the interview with world builder Josh Kurtz, which beyond telling us a bit about Josh doesn't actually tell us anything about the game. Every game related question was met with a "we'll tell you more later" type response.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
The official website for Stargate Worlds (that I talked about before) has now been launched.
The content is a bit limited at the moment, but over time this will obviously grow. The forums have already been running for a while now and is a much better resource at the moment than the website. A good example of this is the interview with world builder Josh Kurtz, which beyond telling us a bit about Josh doesn't actually tell us anything about the game. Every game related question was met with a "we'll tell you more later" type response.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Following on from my previous post on varchar(max) for which the consensus was that one shouldn't use varchar(max) everywhere, I have found this great function that allows you to update a varchar(max) column with great performance gains ......(read more)
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Following on from my previous post on varchar(max) for which the consensus was that one shouldn't use varchar(max) everywhere, I have found this great function that allows you to update a varchar(max) column with great performance gains ......(read more)
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Users could soon be using their feet to sort through their e-mail messages.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
While checking out a really good tutorial site for the students (thanks Roan) I came across the site from hell.
after laughing so hard I nearly fell off my seat I felt that I had to post it for your amusement too. See if you can spot the subliminal message. I was sure it was a student site... :P
The link to this is from another really informative site, it has lots of html/css stuff to read through, and he's quite amusing too. (did I mention he works for Yahoo? - Damn, I'm starting to rhyme again! where's my medication...)
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
So that people can have an opportunity to meet me in person (man, does that sound vain or what?), I've added a 'meet cory smith' link to the top navigation. I'll make every attempt to keep that up to date, so if you happen to be attending one of these events, be sure to stop by and say hi.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Further to my post on creating a borderless (opase) window in WPF, check out this widget sample from Unni. I shows how to use this approach and with code that has code behind files. Check out the Application.cs file in the sample code.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
This is so obvious it was clearly meant to be seen. But for those wondering what the Origami project actually is. Go to http://www.origamiproject.com/2/ then view the source in your browser. Right at the top is a helpful comment (Look away now if you don't want to spoil the surprise) and it says:
<!--
Origami Project: the Mobile PC running Windows XP
-->
Well it was hardly a surprise. What is intriguing is if XP will have extensions to support the cool stuff that we have in Windows Mobile like the camera/phone support that is not currently available in XP. I guess we have to wait another week for the full details...
Ian
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Three German ciphers unsolved since World War II are being cracked by a grid of home PCs linked online.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
A free USB flash drive from Microsoft ... the only catch is that you have to take a very quick 4-question quiz about MS licensing.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
I am so sorry to anyone who had to deal with my awful RSS feed minus line breaks for the past few weeks. I made a change to it a week or two ago to make it full text because of a comment someone left on my blog but I somehow forgot to add the line of code that puts the line breaks in.
I wasn't actually sure about putting the HTML in to the feed, but it seemed to be what other people were doing so I thought I should. The articles are less valuable without the links. I then had to encode it so it would validate, but I'm guessing aggregators are expecting that.
I've also added a GUID for each article so hopefully that should help solve any problems people might be having with duplicate articles. I'm having heaps of problems like that with my feeds at the moment.
If anyone's having problems with my feed or has any suggestions for improvements, just email me or leave a comment in my blog.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
I am so sorry to anyone who had to deal with my awful RSS feed minus line breaks for the past few weeks. I made a change to it a week or two ago to make it full text because of a comment someone left on my blog but I somehow forgot to add the line of code that puts the line breaks in.
I wasn't actually sure about putting the HTML in to the feed, but it seemed to be what other people were doing so I thought I should. The articles are less valuable without the links. I then had to encode it so it would validate, but I'm guessing aggregators are expecting that.
I've also added a GUID for each article so hopefully that should help solve any problems people might be having with duplicate articles. I'm having heaps of problems like that with my feeds at the moment.
If anyone's having problems with my feed or has any suggestions for improvements, just email me or leave a comment in my blog.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Does anyone have any idea why Norton's Internet Security program would filter out your user-agent details for security reason? I guess I can see an argument for hiding the referer if it was from an external site (even though I know I'm not going to do anything email with it like spread rumours that 219.13.167.21 was surfing dodgy sites before they came to me), but I can't see how not telling the site what platform you'd like the information for could make you any safer.
The only thing I could think of is that knowing your user agent makes you easier to attack, but I think that logic is pretty flawed because there are more reliable ways to find out what browser someone is using (ie. seeing what javascript methods are available). The fact is that if you're using a major browser it's more likely to have known vulnerabilities and if you're using an unknown browser you're probably using linux.
You can't really be anonymous on the internet because as long as you want to talk to me I need to know where you are on the internet. Norton can't filter out your IP address and as long as I know that I know far more about you (yes all of you) than I'd know by knowing what sort of browser you use. I'm not really nefarious enough to think of what I could do with that information, but there are some really clever nefarious people out there and I'm sure they're writing code right now to use your IP address to do dreadful things.
This tiny little thing frustrates me because I'm a web developer and I know that user-agents are used by heaps of web developers to make user's experience better by serving up content that's optimised for their browsers (as opposed to spying on them - mostly anyway).
A lot of these developers really care about the user's experience on their website and go to extraordinary lengths to make it as compelling as possible. To me the slight increase in security gained by concealing the user agent doesn't seem to be worth missing out on this work.
It's the people using the websites who lose out because it's not the web developer who can't use the website or get to the information. It's not the web developer who misses out on the time saving javascript features or the beautiful layout. It's the users who miss out and they miss out because the web isn't as good as it could be.
I know some people like to run around claiming that we webbies are a selfish bunch because we're always on about things like standards compliance and multiple levels of backgrounds in html elements whenever a new version of a browser is going to come out rather than things like tabbed browsing that the users can actually see. The only reason we want these things is because they help us build better websites and the people who benefit from better websites are the people who use them.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Does anyone have any idea why Norton's Internet Security program would filter out your user-agent details for security reason? I guess I can see an argument for hiding the referer if it was from an external site (even though I know I'm not going to do anything email with it like spread rumours that 219.13.167.21 was surfing dodgy sites before they came to me), but I can't see how not telling the site what platform you'd like the information for could make you any safer.
The only thing I could think of is that knowing your user agent makes you easier to attack, but I think that logic is pretty flawed because there are more reliable ways to find out what browser someone is using (ie. seeing what javascript methods are available). The fact is that if you're using a major browser it's more likely to have known vulnerabilities and if you're using an unknown browser you're probably using linux.
You can't really be anonymous on the internet because as long as you want to talk to me I need to know where you are on the internet. Norton can't filter out your IP address and as long as I know that I know far more about you (yes all of you) than I'd know by knowing what sort of browser you use. I'm not really nefarious enough to think of what I could do with that information, but there are some really clever nefarious people out there and I'm sure they're writing code right now to use your IP address to do dreadful things.
This tiny little thing frustrates me because I'm a web developer and I know that user-agents are used by heaps of web developers to make user's experience better by serving up content that's optimised for their browsers (as opposed to spying on them - mostly anyway).
A lot of these developers really care about the user's experience on their website and go to extraordinary lengths to make it as compelling as possible. To me the slight increase in security gained by concealing the user agent doesn't seem to be worth missing out on this work.
It's the people using the websites who lose out because it's not the web developer who can't use the website or get to the information. It's not the web developer who misses out on the time saving javascript features or the beautiful layout. It's the users who miss out and they miss out because the web isn't as good as it could be.
I know some people like to run around claiming that we webbies are a selfish bunch because we're always on about things like standards compliance and multiple levels of backgrounds in html elements whenever a new version of a browser is going to come out rather than things like tabbed browsing that the users can actually see. The only reason we want these things is because they help us build better websites and the people who benefit from better websites are the people who use them.
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Somone's done a wonderful video on Google videos showing what ipod packaging would be like if it was designed by Microsoft. :D
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Somone's done a wonderful video on Google videos showing what ipod packaging would be like if it was designed by Microsoft. :D
-
Published on 02 Mar 2006 from
Latest Version of MOM 2005 Resource Kit Now Available for Download
This resource kit has been updated to support MOM 2005 SP1 and new tools have been added:
Alert to RSS Utility – Enable subscriptions to alert information via RSS.
DAS Role Update Utility – Tighten the security of MOM servers by removing the BUILTIN\Administrators group from the MOM Administrator role.
Computer Group Hierarchy Utility – Export and import the Computer Group Hierarchy, including using AD containers and hierarchy to create Computer Groups
Console Scope Utility – Automatically update Console Scope membership and mirror AD Security Group membership into console scopes.
Management Group Utility – List and cleanup Management Group membership data on individual agents.
MOM Remote Pre-requisite Checker – Verify the configuration of the services and ports required for agent installation and discovery.
Response Test Utility – Quickly test response scripts for minor errors from the command line, before finally saving them to an MP.
You can download the updated MOM 2005 Resource Kit here: but you should be downloading this specifically for the Exchange management Pack config wizard. If you're not using the management packs for Exchange, go and beat up the correct person in your org who can go and get this implemented. With all the stuff coming in E12, you want to really have MOM monitoring your Exchange environment so you can have all the availability and uptime you want...
