Community developer blogs

Chris Hart

Recent Posts

• Upcoming talk on SL and .NET

  Posted: 23 Sep 2008 at 22:14 by Chris Hart

  So I volunteered again for a .NET user group monthly meeting – this time I’m presenting a whole session on getting information into and out of Second Life using .NET on the server-side. If you can make it along on Saturday 27th at 12pm SLT, you may learn something about the following (agenda still t

• Blog tagging

  Posted: 05 Sep 2008 at 14:38 by Chris Hart

  So I got blog tagged by Dana Coffey - and what does this mean? Well, I have to let the world know 6 random facts about myself. Here goes! I'm allergic to milk (diagnosed officially), and I think I'm allergic to almonds, possibly peanuts. Personally, I'd rather not test this out, so I just avoid them

• Catching up

  Posted: 25 Aug 2008 at 19:03 by Chris Hart

  I've been totally swamped with all sorts of projects recently, including hacking with OpenSim code, building a SharePoint deployment solution, building content for then hosting another fantastic event on Second Life, hosting Code Clinics on Microsoft Island every Wednesday, and watching Bob the Buil

• OpenSim on SQL Server

  Posted: 11 Jun 2008 at 13:03 by Chris Hart

  Over the past week I've made some great progress on my OpenSim experiment. For starters, I've got my server configured in Grid mode, and I have all four of the main servers running on SQL Server. This did require a bit of development - the inventory server was quite broken for SQL Server, so James a

• SharePoint Content Deployment Walkthrough

  Posted: 29 May 2008 at 12:06 by Chris Hart

  I've just been through two days of pain trying to get content deployment to work from an internal authoring site, authenticated against Active Directory, to a live site that is Internet-facing (hence allows anonymous access), and has a forms authentication user store. It's more of an admin nightmare

• Exploring the OpenSim Universe

  Posted: 28 May 2008 at 10:58 by Chris Hart

  Over the past few weeks I've taken a big leap into the world of Open Source development and started messing around with OpenSim, the BSD licenced 3D virtual world based on Second Life, but reinvented from scratch using C#. It's an immense project that's been in development for a while, and it's star

• Help, my window has disappeared

  Posted: 06 May 2008 at 09:10 by Chris Hart

  Handy tip that James pointed out the other day - my Virtual PC machine console window keeps disappearing (perhaps thinking that I have an external monitor plugged in). You can see it on the task bar, but clicking on it doesn't bring it to the top of the pile on the desktop, so, how do you get it bac

• Heroes Happen Here in Second Life

  Posted: 17 Apr 2008 at 13:47 by Chris Hart

  April 26th is the day for your diary; all our preparation work finally gets load tested to the extreme as we host the Heroes Happen Here launch event for Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on Second Life. We're getting three extra islands for launch day so we can make the ev

• .NET Rocks Second Life

  Posted: 13 Mar 2008 at 14:42 by Chris Hart

  Since I got involved with the Second Life .NET group, my free time has been eaten up by a monster! Ok, not the bad kind, but it's amazing how addictive Second Life is once you start to get involved with something worthwhile. We've been tackling this monster from two perspectives - one is to think ab

• Two and a bit

  Posted: 13 Mar 2008 at 08:37 by Chris Hart

  I have been amazed at how quickly Nathan has changed over the past few months. He never stops talking, and while we may not catch every word, he tries so hard and you can hear his pronunciation improve daily. His rapidly exploding vocabulary is amazing - he knows numbers up to 12, all the letters by

• Getting data into Second Life using .NET

  Posted: 17 Feb 2008 at 22:57 by Chris Hart

  I've been having fun getting objects in Second Life talking to a database on my dev server using .NET code, so I thought I'd share the magic with those of you who are interested. For the SecondLife bit, I'll use the llHTTPRequest object to request data from my external source. The real-world bit is

• A .NET Second Life

  Posted: 30 Jan 2008 at 15:21 by Chris Hart

  I've recently become involved with the .NET user group on Second Life, which (for those of you who've not yet tried it), is a great way to meet people from all over the world in a 3D virtual world. I've been a resident on there for a while now, but I'm only just starting to really make the most of i

• Why Amazon Prime is a waste of time

  Posted: 04 Jan 2008 at 12:25 by Chris Hart

  I recently purchased an item on Amazon that I needed delivered quickly, so I selected Express delivery from the delivery options. I saw a message - did I want to spend £49 and get express delivery on all my orders for a year? I decided against it - most of the time I can live with the delay of super

• Troubles with installing .NET 3.5

  Posted: 27 Nov 2007 at 09:37 by Chris Hart

  I had a bit of trouble installing .NET 3.5 recently. My machine had decided to install some Windows Updates at the same time as installing .NET 3.5 and I think the combination of the two caused the entire machine to fall over in a heap. One by one all my applications stopped responding, including ct

• CMYK vs RGB JPEGs

  Posted: 21 Nov 2007 at 15:44 by Chris Hart

  I had an interesting bug to fix this week, discovered in the context of a SharePoint application, but that equally affects anyone producing content for display on the web. The client I've been working with recently has been having trouble displaying marketing images from a SharePoint picture library

• Dialog Apathy

  Posted: 16 Nov 2007 at 15:26 by Chris Hart

  I recently turned off Vista User Account Control on my laptop. I'd left it on because I figured I'd give it a go and see whether I could fit in to the new Vista way of doing things. It was when I was clicking "OK, OK, Just Get On With It" on almost every dialog that I realised that this was not a go

• Sharing some SharePoint Knowledge

  Posted: 05 Nov 2007 at 16:42 by Chris Hart

  It's been a hectic few weeks - my first contract has been a case of diving in at the deep end and pulling together some fun SharePoint stuff on a project with a very pressing deadline. Phase 1 is now complete, so what have I been up to, and what have I learned? 1. If you import a bunch of users from

• Future plans

  Posted: 03 Sep 2007 at 09:33 by Chris Hart

  I've made the somewhat difficult decision to leave permanent employment and dive into the uncharted waters of contract work. While I've had a good six months back at work, I've been thinking long and hard about how best to move my career along. I've been spending a long time in the car to get to wor

• Heroes and Villans

  Posted: 19 Jul 2007 at 12:04 by Chris Hart

  On Monday night we finished watching Heroes series 1 on the Sci Fi channel, and even though we've had to put up with it being shown in 4:3 aspect ratio with annoying advert breaks, it's still the best show I think I've ever seen. I have been jumping off the sofa with excitement, almost shouting abou

• Who'd have thought it?

  Posted: 02 Jul 2007 at 10:22 by Chris Hart

  I've had mixed feelings about the recent series of Doctor Who; while I've enjoyed the Doctor's new assistant, Martha, the quality of the episodes has been very variable. The really rather awful Dalek two-parter in the middle didn't help the series much at all, aside from the fact that the Radio Time