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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
The podcast recorded by Chris Green from Computing is now on the front page of the website! If it’s gone by the time you check it you can get all the archived podcasts from here (it’s the 28th March one!).
Hope Tim and I came over ok. Never like hearing the sound of my own voice! Apologies to the womans name I forgot who gave the demo of Expression!
Technorati Tags : Mix06 Podcast
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Upgrade my old SVP C500 to a brand spanking new Orange SVP C600. It’s very nice with a much improved resolution on the screen. Not sure about all the new features though to be honest as I’ve hardly had the time to look into the manual yet. It’s running Windows Mobile 5.0 so I thought great, lets do some SmartPhone development for it. Porting over Pocket Blogger to the smartphone will be a breeze I thought except I can’t get any of the webservice calls to work. I’m not sure whether it’s the webservice call that’s failing itself (I’ve read some places that you need to use an IP address rather than a domain name), or if the phone is failing to connect to the net at all! Any .NET SmartPhone developer gurus out there want to help me!? I gave up to be honest before I really started looking into it.
What we are going to get up running though at work is Exchange 2003 SP2 and the push emails to Mobile 5.0 devices. I’ll let you know how that all goes. From the blurb from Microsoft it should be as easy as anything, but you always know that probably isn’t the case!
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 has been released to manufacturing.
BizTalk is a business process management (BPM) server that enables companies to automate and optimize business processes. This includes powerful, familiar tools to design, develop, deploy, and manage those processes. Overview
This release introduces the Windows SharePoint Services Adapter to provide built-in support for accessing and publishing documents stored in Windows SharePoint Services document libraries. Organizations can now link the Office documents and tools familiar to knowledge workers with the enterprise portal systems that run their businesses.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
If your coding a WPF app as a windows app and thinking about allowing it to work in the browser then be aware of the sandbox, this limits certain chunks of functionality for security reasons. This whitepaper is worth printing out and keeping to one side when planning your application in the first instance or considering a browser move. Some chunks of functionality I am not sure why they are limited, bitmap effects for example, things will change I am sure.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Microsofts Michael Harsh has the details.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Allister introduced me to a fabuous little tool the other month that I use all the time here. It's called FolderShare and it's really really good. I mean REALLY good. No synchronising, no messing, all the files you need in one place and accessible by the whole team. So no messing around with sending attachments, or links to our team site. Just drag the document, spreadsheet, whatever, onto the folder - and kapow! - everyone in the team has it too. So simple. I'm glad I read his blog... So don't stop Allister - I'd never learn this many productivity tips without you...:-)
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Been over a month since the last trailer was posted, but heres one from the upcoming movie Davinci Code, staring Tom Hanks. Its the second full-length trailer, the first can be seen on Apple's website. The second trailer (hosted by Vividas has an auto-sensing bandwidth selection, so gone are the days of selecting high-medium-low-dialup, now the player will detect and manage the connection/buffering.
PPV: The Secret
The first ever Pay-Per-View (PPV) full-length movie premier and ofcourse its by Vividas, You'll have to watch the trailer to see what its about, but notice that unlike the previous clip, this player comes with a set of basic controls so you can pause/play and skip forward/rewind. If your dying to know the secret you could always pay 4.95 and watch the movie online or pay $19 and buy it on DVD.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Been over a month since the last trailer was posted, but heres one from the upcoming movie Davinci Code, staring Tom Hanks. Its the second full-length trailer, the first can be seen on Apple's website. The second trailer (hosted by Vividas has an auto-sensing bandwidth selection, so gone are the days of selecting high-medium-low-dialup, now the player will detect and manage the connection/buffering.
PPV: The Secret
The first ever Pay-Per-View (PPV) full-length movie premier and ofcourse its by Vividas, You'll have to watch the trailer to see what its about, but notice that unlike the previous clip, this player comes with a set of basic controls so you can pause/play and skip forward/rewind. If your dying to know the secret you could always pay 4.95 and watch the movie online or pay $19 and buy it on DVD.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Less than a week ago I reported a, albiet probably pretty minor, problem with the latest release of SyncToy for Windows XP (v1.1). I'm happy to report that SyncToy v1.2 for Windows XP has been made available that corrects the issues I raised!
Some people might complain that almost a week is too long. Understand that from the time that the problem was observed, reported, sent to the correct individual(s), priorities determined, project(s) shuffled, changes made, flowing through q/a, flowing through another team to get final publishing to the microsoft.com website... 4.5 business days is an awesome turn around time! And this is for a *free* product.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Someone told me about this at Spark but it has taken me this long to find the docs:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/specification/ws-roadmap/
Because of the work I did in infrastructure and managment I have been sort of tracking the problems with WS-RF and WS-DM against WS-Managment and CIM so this was very interesting and much needed.
On a seperate thought however I wonder if it takes such a lot of effort just to track what is going on in the WS world how many people who have day jobs can keep up with all this. Has the whole WS-stuff got too complex?
Don Box and Tim Bray obviously think so. I guess I probably agree with them although I wouldnt call myself a Restafarian of either description (I have problems with Flemings take on state)
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Firstly, yay me!
I don't care what you might think about the pros and cons of microsoft certifications. You may think they're pointless. You may think they're not worth the paper they're printed on.
Either way, I passed my first exam today. Woo and yay! 70-315 - I have a certificate that says I can "Develop and Implement Web Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET". Woo!
The second thing was a question that someone actually asked me this morning that piqued my interest.
What this guy was trying to achieve was filtering on a Date field in a Dataview, but rather than filtering on a continuous date range, he was trying to filter on a series of date ranges.
Put simply, he wanted to pull out all the records that had a date somewhere in March (for instance). I don't know the exact context he was coming from, but it would be useful if, for example, you had sales data spanning a few years and wanted to see how things were looking on a month-by-month basis.
Well.
I discovered it doesn't seem to be as easy as all that to do. I started out by creating a Dataset in Visual C# Express, just by dragging the Employees table from the AdventureWorks database on my toolbar (Ah, the company name may change, but the samples stay the same!).
My goal was to pull out Employees as a DataTable in my dataset, create a DataView from it and filter the view to just contain everyone that has a birthday in March.
To start, I thought I'd create a new column populated with an expression, something along the lines of BirthDate.Month (or something similar). However, it looks like you can't do that. Although you can take DataColumns and do simple stuff to them, adding values, subtracting values etc, you can't do anything (it would seem) that's specific to a slightly more complex datatype, like a DateTime.
The next thing I though of was to try a do some quick filtering with a LIKE clause in the dataview's RowFilter property, so it looked something like 'view.RowFilter = "BirthDate LIKE '03/%'"' think I could pull out all the March birthdays that way. (n.b. I didn't have to worry about the formatting of the Date because of the culture insensitivity of the expression used to filter DateTime columns.)
Apparently not, though. Apparently you can't apply 'LIKE' and wildcards to DateTime fields. Which, I must admit, makes sense. I was pretty much clutching at straws when I went down that route.
So, to recap, I wanted to filter on a set of dates. These happened to be all the dates in March for a number of years, but that's by the by.
In then end, this was how I managed to do it. When I started out, I though it looked a bit hokey, and a bit of a fudge, but as I looked into it more, I'm actually quite impressed with it. It may not be that elegant a solution, but hey, it does tha job, and at the end of the day, if it works then that's cool.
TestAdventureWorks.dsTest data = new dsTest();
TestAdventureWorks.dsTestTableAdapters.EmployeeTableAdapter da =
new TestAdventureWorks.dsTestTableAdapters.EmployeeTableAdapter();
da.Fill(data.Employee);
DataView view = data.Employee.DefaultView;
StringBuilder s = new StringBuilder();
int StartYear = 1945;
int Month = 4;
for (int i = StartYear; i < 2000; i++)
{
if (i != StartYear) s.Append(" OR ");
s.AppendFormat("BirthDate >= #{0}/01/{1}# AND BirthDate < #{2}/01/{1}#", Month, i, Month + 1);
}
view.RowFilter = s.ToString();
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Rows: {0}", view.Count));
Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Total: {0}", data.Employee.Rows.Count));
Console.ReadLine();
I don't know what the performance is like on it, though. In this case, going through 55 years on a set of 290 rows took around 70ms to complete. Not too shabby, I thought. Considering the length of the RowFilter string that went into it!
However, my question is this (and if you've read this far, perhaps you know the answer!) Is there a better way of doing it?
I thought of 1, which is to pull out the month component of the date in the original select statement, so your SELECT would look something along the lines of 'SELECT *, Month(BirthDate) FROM Employees'. It acheives the same thing as my first plan, and would allow you to just set the RowFilter to be 'BirthDateMonth=3'. But that's cheating!
Anyway, just wanted to share.
Yay me!
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Beatles' record label Apple Corps is suing Apple Computer over the use of the Apple name and logo.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Looking back through my stats on this blog I noticed that this is the month I have made the most posts since I started blogging at the end of 2003. I'm dead chuffed.
Actually March always is a good month for me blogging, I wonder why?
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
The Torrentspy search engine is seeking to dismiss a US film industry lawsuit accusing it of breaching copyright.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
This rather sums up my opinion of semwebs:
The principle of parsimony might better have been called Occam's Chainsaw, for its main use seems to be for clear-cutting ontology
And is rather amusing for a dedicated Ockhamist. From the Skeptics Dictonary
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Sean Lyndersay over on the IE team blog posted about the RSS Simple List Extensions (SLE) and how they are being used today.
(Note you need IE 7 to see the SLE functionality in-browser. Since not everyone will (or can) try out the IE7 beta, I've created some screenshots so you can see what all this is about.)
The first is Amazon's use. Here is Jeff Bezos' wishlist as an RSS feed with SLE.
Then there's eBay - this RSS+SLE feed provides filtering and sorting on a number of different categories:
Yahoo! Music has been experimenting too. Here is the Yahoo! Music Top 10 Songs list in RSS+SLE
More links including videos over at the IE7 team blog.
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Tags: RSS SLE Microsoft Mix06 IE7
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Brian McAllister describes the term "Enterprisey"
An architecture should be only as complex as it needs to be, containing as few objects as possble which communicate by the simplest channels that offer sufficient reliability.
Complex architectures increase the time to deliver the first version of an application that does anything meaningful and that people can use and comment on. They need to be used less often than most people think.
If you're writing an e-commerce site, get the...
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
How many SCRUM sprints do you have on the go at once? Probably one right? We tend to work with two at a time. I’ll explain how we do it, then I’ll tell you why we do it that way.
We start a sprint and one developer works on it until it is code complete, (including [...]
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
I've been reliably informed that Bournemouth University is offering a distance learning MA degree in Creative Media Practises. It might just be for you so go check it out. Even if you don't it's a nice piece of flash.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
I have often thought that driving is strange task that hasn't really changed much with technology - by in large it is still a very manual process.
Yes, we have GPS navigation, ABS brakes, parking sensors & Onstar (in the US) but what about getting the more research pieces of technology into everyday cars like automatic distancing, sensing of other cars also on the road.
Or incorporating head-up-display information on the windscreen like fighter jets, with thermal image tracking or automatic blocking out of the sun? Obviously price is one of the biggest issues. BMW Williams has something similar in their Formula 1 cars and Jason Bradbury mocks up an in-car HUD example.
Well I saw in Time magazine's gadget review recently, that Mercedes-Benz were adding 'night view assist', where they shine an invisible headlight-mounted infrared beam up to 500ft ahead of the car, which then displays as a black-and-white nightscope view on the dashboard.
Now just a few years to wait till every car something similar!
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
I have often thought that driving is strange task that hasn't really changed much with technology - by in large it is still a very manual process.
Yes, we have GPS navigation, ABS brakes, parking sensors & Onstar (in the US) but what about getting the more research pieces of technology into everyday cars like automatic distancing, sensing of other cars also on the road.
Or incorporating head-up-display information on the windscreen like fighter jets, with thermal image tracking or automatic blocking out of the sun? Obviously price is one of the biggest issues. BMW Williams has something similar in their Formula 1 cars and Jason Bradbury mocks up an in-car HUD example.
Well I saw in Time magazine's gadget review recently, that Mercedes-Benz were adding 'night view assist', where they shine an invisible headlight-mounted infrared beam up to 500ft ahead of the car, which then displays as a black-and-white nightscope view on the dashboard.
Now just a few years to wait till every car something similar!
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
The gripes series continues. This is an occaisional series on the problems I've found with ASP.Net v2. Here are the first and second installment if you've not read them already.
- The strongly type tableadapter has a Connection property which allows you to override the default of getting the connection string from the web.config. However, this is marked "internal" - which means it can only be called from Code Behind. It can't be called if (like me) you place your code beside the HTML in the .aspx
- Documentation for meta:resourceKey is lacking.
- Why does the VS.Net image library only come as .bmp and .png. The .png has alpha transparency, which as we all know, has been neglected in IE up until IE7. It would have been so easy to ship .gif versions too.
- When using onclientclick on a <asp:button>, you have to set UseSubmitBehavior to false to allow you to cancel the postback. This isn't documented (or intuitive)
- Right click on a link in the documentation browser and select "Open in new window". It doesn't - it opens it in a new tab.
- Why does a DataList not allow the ItemStyle to use DataBinding expressions? What if I want to style each item according to something from the database? You get the following error: System.Web.UI.WebControls.TableItemStyle does not have a DataBinding event.
- Why isn't VaryByHeader supported on on an OutputCache declaration in a UserControl? I want to cache my menu and I also want it to be localized. The way to vary the cache based on accept-language is by using VaryByHeader, but this not supported on a UserControl.
- LinkButtons and other controls which cause postback don't participate in client-side validation. The original post on this topic was 2001. And it's still not fixed! http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0105E&L=DOTNET&P=R5784&I=-3
- Membership.GeneratePassword() is poorly documented and incorrectly implemented. The second parameter is documented as: "The number of punctuation characters in the generated password". However, it is actually the minimum number of punctuation characters. In addition, if you look at the Reflector dissasembly, then the function will return an undefined value if the generated password fails Cross Site Scripting validation. It's impossible to do this with C#, so I suspect GeneratePassword was written with C++.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Mobile phone users may pay less for making calls abroad, under proposals put forward by the European Commission.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
The US regains first place in an annual global league table of countries making the best use of computers and the internet.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
We've all done it, something embarassing that we shouldn't have. It may be falling unconscious through drink in an amusing location when we were at college, dating someone you know you shouldn't have, slagging off your tutors before your viva, or whatever. Thankfully most of those moments are just that, moments and are quickly forgotten, remembered with a slight cringe or a chuckle.
Then the web came around and everything changed. Now that picture of you lying in an embarrassing heap half in a bush can be plastered all over the internet, or that raunchy competition you entered for a laugh on holiday one year can find it's way insidiously online with your name beside it...
Employers are now using the all seeing power that is Google to find out about current and potential employees, it's not just those embarrassing images or dark secrets from the past that can damage your career. There has been more than one case of an employee being fired for what they have written on their blogs, and with the all pervasive power of MySpace and their ilk it seems like everyone wants to say something online, without thinking of the consequences. Not to mention dating sites - Chris Bryant (Labour MP) won't live down the picture of him in his underpants on Gaydar...
And also remember that the web is not, and never has been, anonymous. In a recent case a poster to the Yahoo forums wound up libelling another member of the group, she now has to pay £10000 in damages. Ouch. As Sara mentioned too, admissions boards in the USA are now Googling prospective students, if anything bad turns up its bye bye to your application. Once it's out there, released onto the web, its there for ever and it will haunt you.
Scary isn't it? Well, there are a few things you can do to change it. SEO is the way to go, you will have a hard time to make it disappear for good but you can bury it in good information about yourself. The only trouble is, even if the bad info slips off the radar it will still be lurking somewhere, on a hard drive, in a corner, just waiting...
Have a read of the Times Online article yourself and feel afraid. Thankfully, my name is clean. :)
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
The latest update is available on the official netbake site here.
Tags: netbake, bakery software
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
We have decided that our bakery control system is going to be called netBake. We’ve started an official blog for it, which you can see here.
Tag: netBake
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Now I knew they were there but I never saw them (did you?) but Adobe were lurking about at Mix and from what I can tell largely lurked in the WPF and Expression sessions (for obvious reasons). I see that Jesse is busy opening up a slavo with Adobes Mike Chambers about WPF\E and a Flash vs WPF\E debate is raging in other quarters. While at Mix I missed the fact that folks like JD were at the show and I would have loved to have met him (and frankly others) in person. I have known JD for a long time and while he has a corner to fight he's a good guy and it would have been great to discuss with him what he saw and felt about the show. It's this kind of open and freindly discussion that's needed not s**t slinging.
I have in the past stated all the reasons why Flash and Flex in the Microsoft development world don't cut it and while we can go and on and on about who features what but at the end of day it boils down to "I am a Microsoft shop, I code C#, I code using Microsoft tools, I do this every day all day, what can you offer me in the shiny new RIA world?". Java servers, actionscript (AS 3 is cool no doubt but still alien to a Microsoft developer) and web services don't cut the mustard when you compare to Microsoft servers, any CLR compiled language (ok not quite true in the WPF world but the point is that with a little work any CLR language can and in C# and VB.NET most bases are covered) and the WCF stack. How many times do I need to say this.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
One of the problems with Borland's up-for-sale dev tool for .NET is that it only targets .NET 1.1, now replaced by the shiny .NET 2.0. In order to use the current version of the Framework, we have to wait for Delphi "Highlander", promised for later this year. Except we don't: Daniel Wischnewski has worked out how to target .NET 2.0 with Delphi 2006.
Very interesting, though I'm not sure I fancy developing production software like this. This catch-up business looks like an ongoing problem for Delphi, no matter who owns it. It's not just .NET 2.0; we'll soon be thinking about XAML and Windows Presentation Foundation and who knows, even cross-platform WPF/Everywhere.
The old argument is that this new stuff takes a while to bed down, and you can't deploy in the early days anyway because nobody has it or trusts it, so it doesn't matter if Delphi lags a bit. The counter-argument is that developers need to try things out, and if they have to switch to another tool to do so, they might not come back.
In any case, ASP.NET 2.0 is ready now. Server technology doesn't take so long to establish.
I hope "Devco", the code-name for Delphi's future home, finds a way to shorten these catch-up periods.
Tags:
borland
delphi
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Playing virtual reality computer games may help treat the condition known as lazy eye, say researchers.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Dozens of phone masts have won permission because of bureaucratic errors, a BBC News website investigation finds.
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
I've been playing Geometry Wars (Evolved) on my 360. It got to the point where I thought 'this is just getting impossible!'. Too many nasties trying to do me in...
So I hunted around for how I might improve and came across these videos by some total Geometry Wars gods (nuts).
These gods (nuts) are recording their efforts. In this video it starts off pretty 'do-able' and quickly gets frantic - skip to about 2 mins to get quite nutty...
Watch and behold.
(Takes screencasting to whole new level ;-)
Seve Cakebread is the creator of this insane game,
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
I’m delighted to announce that I will be speaking at the Software Developer Conference 2006 in Holland on the 15 and 16 of May. I love this conference. It’s been running for 15 years and the confere...
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Published on 28 Mar 2006 from
Go on... prove it!
I'll start...
I can prove that I am a geek because...
- I code in my spare time.
- I don't hate watching a computer screen 24/7...
- I love gadgets!
- I adore the latest and greatest softwares!
- I want to own my own software development company one day!
- Did I happen to mention that I loooooove coding...
- I am a problem solver
- I love challenges
- You struggle to drag me away from my computer or mobile!
- Oh and by the way I love coding!
- I have used Linux (I can't say it's my favourite OS but I have used it!)
- I program embedded devices!
- I have programmed mobile devices
- Oh and yes you guessed it.... I LOVE coding
Beat that!
