Steven Smith Suggested Reading
13 May 2008
Legacy Code Book is Infinitely Valuable
Steven Smith writes
"I wish I'd read it years ago, and I'm finding myself refactoring and rethinking my approach to current systems I've been working on for some time to make them more testable and easier to work with -- and I'm already seeing improvements. Seriously, if you're writing software, you should buy this book..."
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Andrew Brust Windows Vista
13 May 2008
Impossible to Believe...a Simple Solution to Windows Vista Problems
Andrew Brust writes
"…either the two Longhorn code bases are not the same, and the Redmondites are telling us an untruth (doubtful), or a major set of issues with Vista can be solved (and are caused) by its default startup configuration."
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Stephen Forte NET Framework
12 May 2008
.NET 3.5 SP1 Redefines Service Pack
Stephen Forte writes
"... ADO .NET Entity Framework and ADO.NET Data Services (formerly code-named "Astoria") both ship new with the .net 3.5 SP1. This changes the definition of a "service pack" since we have new functionality added. Since these are new features it will not break anything old and it is ok to install over your current 2.5 installation...."
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Neil Roodyn Mobile
12 May 2008
Code for Windows Mobile Unit Test Requiring Time Change
Neil Roodyn writes
"I have been working on some software that needs the time to be changed as part of the tests. This might not be as simple as you think, but it's not hard as long as you know to set the local time not the system time on the device."
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Brian Noyes Visual Studio
12 May 2008
Weird happenings in VS linked to evil suo file
Brian Noyes writes
"One thing you should try is to close VS, delete the suo file in the solution folder, and open the solution and try it again. Like I said, dozens and dozens of times, this has made something really squirrely go away for me....If those don't do it, it was probably your code in the first place."
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Joel Semeniuk Office System
12 May 2008
Try a Vanity Video Check on the New Live.com
Joel Semeniuk writes
"My second experience was impressive as well - I performed a vanity video search - up popped a few results - simply hover your mouse over the video thumbnail...That feature actually gave me a startle, since I wasn't expecting it and all of a sudden my computer was talking to me."
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Scott Golightly Office System
12 May 2008
Is Live Search Update more than Skin Deep?
Scott Golightly writes
"It is a lot cleaner and loads a lot faster. I have only done a few searches with the new page and don't have any feel for changes to the search results. I like the new clean interface but to be honest what I really want..."
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Barry Gervin Office System
12 May 2008
Why Live Search is on Par now with Google
Barry Gervin writes
"Live Search got a refresh recently and it's actually pretty good, dare I say may be even better than Google.... Plain old web results are perhaps the most important criteria. I think this will be impossible to provide any meaningful observations after spending < 1 hour using live search. I'm going to give live a shot as my default search engine..."
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Jonas Folleso Editors Picks
12 May 2008
Silverlight Sparkles as a Cross Domain Proxy
Jonas Folleso writes
"It uses the URL input module to retrieve the URL of the feed, the Feed-Fetch module to read the feed and then output it. Click for an example of my feed proxyed through Yahoo Pipes. The following code shows how to consume the feed in Silverlight 2:"
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Daniel Egan TechTalk
08 May 2008
Microsoft User Groups get help
Daniel Egan writes
"Consistency and scale in the services we provide to User Group Communities has been a challenge and a source of consternation for all of us over the past years....This platform has two distinct offerings:"
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Stephen Forte TechTalk
08 May 2008
5 Reasons why I don't Twitter
Stephen Forte writes
"....The last reason...is that it is going to fail. Meaning, micro-blogging may succeed and eventually I will have to do it...but Twitter won't be the platform we use. First of all it is"
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Mauro SantAnna Editors Picks
08 May 2008
Soul Searching the old Borland
Mauro SantAnna writes
"...Given the clear Delphi roots in the .NET Framework – Anders is the “father” of C#, I use to say that “Borland still lives…inside Microsoft”....If you want to know"
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Barry Gervin Editors Picks
07 May 2008
Does Entity Framework Repace Data Access Layer?
Barry Gervin writes
"...To be clear, the assumption here is that our data access layer in this situation is the full EF Stack: ADO.NET Entity Client, ADO.NET Object Services, LINQ to Entities, including our model... and the code generated entities and object context. Somewhere under the covers there is also"
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Sanjay Shetty TechTalk
06 May 2008
Rave Review of UMPC and Folder Share
Sanjay Shetty writes
"....IT ROCKS beyond imagination....Ok so once I got my UMPC next steps were to obviously get the necessary software on to it, which is an ok, however...."
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Scott Stanfield Editors Picks
06 May 2008
WOW, Custom Gibson for Guitar Hero III
Scott Stanfield writes
"....This is a 195MB 8-bit TIFF (5433 x 12,474 pixel) uncompressed image, converted by Seadragon.
The image is a composite of 12 individual images, taken with the following equipment....Images stitched together with..."
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Chad Hower TechTalk
06 May 2008
Review of Today's Tablets
Chad Hower writes
"...you want to buy a tablet today. How can you find a list of what is even currently available...I will start a list and keep it up to date as a reference of what..."
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Andrew Brust Editors Picks
05 May 2008
Quo Vadis, MicroHoo?
Andrew Brust writes
"...If Microsoft fails here, and continues to mis-handle its damage control around Vista, then the company will be in a bad place. The setback won’t be irreparable, but but it will be significant. But..."
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Stephen Forte Editors Picks
02 May 2008
Are Ruby on Rails Days Numbered at Big Sites?
Stephen Forte writes
"...Some sites are learning this the hard way. Twitter has had some major outages recently and some very public scaling problems. They are mostly a RoR shop...Rails gives you a framework and makes it simple to build sites that fit into that general framework. Once you step off the reservation, you are in for a world of hurt...there are no shortcuts. You have to"
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Andrew Brust Business Intelligence
02 May 2008
Two big MSFT moves sensible, shrewd, brave!
Andrew Brust writes
"....NET and WCF can now work with both messaging servers, and that’s a win for the whole Microsoft platform. So the two moves together are, I think, sensible, shrewd, and even brave. The tacit admission of Tibco’s dominance in certain spheres of SOA message bus implementations shows good market insight on Microsoft’s part. The investment in BizTalk’s EDI..."
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Jonas Folleso NET Framework
01 May 2008
Expression Studio 2 big thing missing
Jonas Folleso writes
"...The cool thing about the PHP support is that you get to preview your site with out having to run IIS or Apache...The big thing that’s missing from Blend 2 is..."
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Steven Smith NET Framework
01 May 2008
Comments in Code Indicate Functions Trying to Escape
Steven Smith writes
"...One of the things you learn with experience is the difference between comments as a waste of space that clutters up your code files and comments that are actually meaningful. ...I'm going to look at a specific case, which is comments that indicate an Extract Method refactoring is needed. Consider the following code fragment:..."
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Stephen Forte NET Framework
01 May 2008
NET Gains Momentum
Stephen Forte writes
"The Red Herring Top 100 Europe- .NET Gains Momentum....First it shows that .NET is gaining more and more momentum when Red Herring awards a .NET component vendor as innovative, influential, and trend-setting. (They usually reserve those terms for open source.)..."
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Venkatarangan Tnc TechTalk
01 May 2008
Problem Solved XBOX 360 AC Adapter
Venkatarangan Tnc writes
"AC Adapter was 110V and surprisingly unlike your laptop/mobile chargers this doesn't support multiple voltages. So to connect the XBOX in India I needed a new AC Adapter that works in 220V....Finally before giving up...I found a new XBOX 360 220V AC Adapter for Rs.1600..."
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Carl Franklin TechTalk
01 May 2008
Science of Good UI
Carl Franklin writes
"Mark Miller on the Science of Good UI...Good user interface design can be done by sticking to some good rules and avoiding common mistakes. You don't need to be a latte-sippin tattoo-wearin macbook-carrying designer to create user interfaces that work."
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Venkatarangan Tnc Office System
01 May 2008
Fix for Windows Live Suite Installer Failing in x64
Venkatarangan Tnc writes
"I use extensively Windows Live Writer for writing my blog posts and Live Messenger for IM. Now they come as a single install package ...When you try to install it on 64-bit Windows the installer fails....how to get the individual MSI files and install the programs from..."
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Carl Franklin NET Framework
30 Apr 2008
Unveiling the NET MIDI Router
Carl Franklin writes
"Carl steps into the spotlight this week to show us his MIDI Router project that he has been working on for a few years. The latest extension of this .NET program takes the player piano concept to a whole new level..."
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Sondre Bjellas TechTalk
30 Apr 2008
18 Features Windows Should Have
Sondre Bjellas writes
"PC World ran an article on 18 Features they think Windows should have, but doesn't, and that they think Microsoft should borrow and steal to add them as features in Windows...Here is my own list of alternatives to the 18 features listed by PC World"
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Carl Franklin Windows Server
30 Apr 2008
Windows SteadyState Resets Your Computer
Carl Franklin writes
"...allows administrators to configure PCs to roll back to a base configuration after every reboot. Combined with Group Policy for restricting access to resources you can create the perfect kiosk computer"
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Guy Barrette TechTalk
29 Apr 2008
Seize the Deal! Office 2007 Ultimate
Guy Barrette writes
"If you're a student and want a legal copy of Office 2007 Ultimate, you can get one for $60US or $65 CAD but you must hurry, this Microsoft offer ends in 2 days! Others countries: Spain, France, Italy......"
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Gill Cleeren NET Framework
29 Apr 2008
Tutorial on Silverlight Data and Services
Gill Cleeren writes
"I take you through building services that are ready to be consumed by Silverlight clients using WCF....look at 3 types of services your Silverlight application can connect with: self-describing (using WSDL, meta-data driven), non-self-describing services (REST APIs like Flickr...) and finally RSS"
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Brian Noyes Editors Picks
29 Apr 2008
Prism is a Composite WPF Guidance Package
Brian Noyes writes
"...if you have a large, complicated smart client application, particularly one developed by multiple (possibly distributed) teams, you can't afford to build it all into one big monolithic mass of UI code in a single or small number of top level windows and their code behind. You will need to modularize the application and compose the UI that the user sees out of smaller, more granular and well factored parts that are..."
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Gill Cleeren TechTalk
28 Apr 2008
Pick up TheRegion Gadget
Gill Cleeren writes
"TheRegion.com...it's "the place" on the web where you can read all the news, articles and other interesting stuff Regional Directors are blogging about... it contains a full database of all the profiles of RDs and an overview of all events being done by RDs."
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Joe Homnick SharePoint Server
28 Apr 2008
SharePoint 2007 Top Six Developer Utilities
Joe Homnick writes
"I just finished our first Microsoft Official Course on Advanced SharePoint Development this last week and in almost every module we had some kind of utility that would ease our development implementation of the concepts. I thought I would share a list of the top utilities we came up. Most of these are free..."
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Rob Howard Office System
28 Apr 2008
Taming the Email Monster
Rob Howard writes
".... how I manage my inbox....The latest Office update was very disappointing for me as I was really expecting to see some new innovative things...Outlook presents such a great opportunity to innovate in the Office platform and I don’t get why that hasn’t happened. Nevertheless..."
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Venkatarangan Tnc Windows Server
28 Apr 2008
Installing WS 2008 on a Laptop
Venkatarangan Tnc writes
"I was running Vista Business in my Sony Vaio Laptop for almost a year and I wanted a change...Going back to Windows XP was unimaginable and felt old. I needed something new... I got interested in trying Windows Server 2008"
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Chad Hower NET Framework
28 Apr 2008
C# to Create an Inline X86 Assembler
Chad Hower writes
"This is from the Cosmos project but could easily be used to generate any X86 code. It's really neat, write C# like code that has 1:1 mapping to X86, and to generate the X86, just run the C# code...."
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Barry Gervin SQL Server
28 Apr 2008
Entity Framework vs. Data Access Layer
Barry Gervin writes
"Does the Entity Framework replace the need for a Data Access Layer? If not, what should my Data Access Layer look like if I want to take advantage of the Entity Framework?... I don't think there is a single correct answer. Architecture is about trade offs and the choices you make will be based on..."
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Neil Roodyn TechTalk
28 Apr 2008
Mail hijacked
Neil Roodyn writes
"Is this the beginning of the end of email? Is email just a broken protocol now? How much longer will it be before we give up with email?"
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Venkatarangan Tnc Suggested Reading
28 Apr 2008
Read and Recommended High Tech and Vision
Venkatarangan Tnc writes
"...must read for anyone in High Tech Industry....One of the common business management myths the book dispels is that you need a clear laid out Vision and Business Plan to run a successful business."
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Andrew Brust Windows Server
28 Apr 2008
iFrame Attacks not due to IIS
Andrew Brust writes
"...a rash of malicious iFrame attacks that have plagued the Web recently. It would appear that IIS, ASP.NET, and SQL Server are not the culprits. A response to me and others, direct from Microsoft follows"
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Mauro SantAnna TechTalk
25 Apr 2008
HandyTen Pack of Almost Free Utilities
Mauro SantAnna writes
"I just bought a new laptop computer and replaced the failing hard disk of my old one.... Since I had to do two machines I decided to write a list of the shareware/freeware I would have to download and install. Here is the alphabetical list:"
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Michele Leroux Bustamante TechTalk
25 Apr 2008
Step-By-Faulty-Step AD FS Guide
Michele Leroux Bustamante writes
"....the process didn't have to be so painful except that there are just a few instructions that are less than clear, incomplete or incorrect....just a few fixes to the lab instructions could have avoided all that.... hope you find this helpful if you are trying to follow the lab"
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Rob Howard TechTalk
25 Apr 2008
SEO & ASP.NET Keywords in URL
Rob Howard writes
"There are 3 documented areas that Google looks for keywords: URL, Title, and finally the body of your content. So if you are not embedding keywords into your URL then you are missing an opportunity..."
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Andrew Brust Editors Picks
25 Apr 2008
Some Holes in Live Mesh
Andrew Brust writes
"...here are all the different Microsoft Sync technologies I can think of. Let’s get them all to use Mesh under the covers, and get them to work in a federated, cooperative fashion...The point is that a transport isn’t enough. We need something that understands devices contextually and has a good idea of what to sync where, and at what quality."
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Michele Leroux Bustamante SQL Server
24 Apr 2008
My Proxy Wrapper and the EVIL SUO File
Michele Leroux Bustamante writes
"...It is a proxy wrapper for WCF clients that illustrates how to swallow timeout exceptions and recreate channels automatically when there is an exception that faults the channel....all of a sudden my logic for checking if the channel was faulted after a timeout, was failing..."
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Guy Barrette TechTalk
24 Apr 2008
CR 2008 Runtime - basic vs full
Guy Barrette writes
"...Your first reaction might be to go to the Business Objects Website and download the CR 2008 runtime....Well, that's the wrong runtime...So where do I get the basic"
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Neil Roodyn TechTalk
24 Apr 2008
Mesh - no show stopper at DevConnections
Neil Roodyn writes
"...To my surprise most of them didn't know about it, and many didn't care. Why not? Because it is not of relevance to them, or so they believe. I think what we see with Live Mesh might be the start of something exciting, something..."
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Michael Palermo NET Framework
23 Apr 2008
How to Create a Silverlight Game
Michael Palermo writes
"...how to start writing your first Silverlight game. I show how to create a dramatic space scene, add a soundtrack, and associate movement with the mouse wheel...."
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Stephen Forte NET Framework
23 Apr 2008
Will Live Mesh Make Microsoft a Player?
Stephen Forte writes
"...Contrast this to what Google is doing. Google is trying to bring all of your applications from the desktop to the cloud. Microsoft is trying to get you to keep your desktop applications for their rich features and leverage the cloud for..."
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Rockford Lhotka NET Framework
23 Apr 2008
Silverlight Data Portal Prototype - Good News, Bad News
Rockford Lhotka writes
"...The good news is that the basic concept of the data portal works. Defining objects that physically move between the Silverlight client and a .NET web server is practical...The bad news is that it can't work exactly"
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Scott Golightly TechTalk
23 Apr 2008
Wish List - Mesh with CardSpace
Scott Golightly writes
"...When the SDK comes out later it will be interesting to see how Microsoft delivers on their promise of having the same API on the client and in the cloud. If the API looks just like the current .NET Framework that would go a long way to making this the "killer application" of..."
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Rob Howard TechTalk
23 Apr 2008
Search Engine Optimization for ASP.NET Developers
Rob Howard writes
"...Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing your natural search rank on sites like Google. A lot of people and companies spend thousands of dollars on AdWords..."
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Jonas Folleso TechTalk
23 Apr 2008
Mesh - Takes Silverlight Offline
Jonas Folleso writes
"Live Mash enables you to wrap existing web applications and take them offline. The “Mesh Operation Environment” contains a tiny HTTP server that enables offline functionality. Microsoft is taking an approach that is more similar to"
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David Yack TechTalk
23 Apr 2008
Mesh - Is it Part of a Bigger Rollout...
David Yack writes
"...before you starting thinking oh it's just Sync stuff or another SkyDrive....Look deeper and you will find a developer story too - MOE - Mesh Operating Environment which opens up a ton of developer opportunities....I think this is just a down payment, as part of the bigger rollout of the S+S story..."
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Bill Evjen Editors Picks
23 Apr 2008
SOA in 10 Steps
Bill Evjen writes
"...You will find a lot of articles out there that define the reasoning for moving to a service-oriented architecture, but you will find very little out there that talks about how you should go about taking your first steps into this new world....Doing this is good for your business...Now, onto the steps you can take to bring your company to an SOA...."
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David Yack TechTalk
22 Apr 2008
5000 cores 10 petabytes Data Center Servers
David Yack writes
"...This new center houses processing servers for Virtual Earth's photorealistic 3-D....The new center houses servers totaling more than 5000 cores and more than 10 petabytes of data...."
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Edgar Sanchez TechTalk
22 Apr 2008
Nested Sequences and Palindrome Numbers
Edgar Sanchez writes
"Problem 4 of Project Euler poses...intriguing problem given all three digit numbers (100, 101, 102, ..., 998, 999), find the largest product of 2 of those numbers, where the product is a palindrome. One possible functional C# solution is..."
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Guy Barrette Visual Studio
22 Apr 2008
Get Enterprise Library 3.1 working in VS 2008
Guy Barrette writes
"While waiting for Enterprise Library 4, you might want to use Entlib 3.1 with Visual Studio 2008. All the blocks will work but the VS integration will not. Does that mean you're stuck editing the config file by hand? Not at all, all you need is..."
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Sondre Bjellas NET Framework
22 Apr 2008
Robotics - Future that is Inevitable
Sondre Bjellas writes
"...Microsoft is holding a competition called RoboChamps that will launch 24th April...how to compete...great opportunity to demonstrate your programming skills and creativity - and a good opportunity to learn more about robotics development...."
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Gill Cleeren TechTalk
21 Apr 2008
Revamping MSDN
Gill Cleeren writes
"....We'll keep an eye on this, and hopefully this is an effort in which Microsoft will engage the community also. There might be a lot of valuable input there of the people that use the site a lot. Microsoft...?"
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Scott Golightly TechTalk
21 Apr 2008
Closing the Gap on HD
Scott Golightly writes
"...the biggest sale point of Microsoft's Silverlight over Adobe's Flash has been that Silverlight can play HD videos. Now it looks like Adobe has closed that gap so it may make it harder to sell companies on Silverlight...."
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Jim Duffy Editors Picks
21 Apr 2008
The Shoe is on the Other Foot for VB.NET Developers
Jim Duffy writes
"... Much like VB developers felt superior to VFP developers...today the C# developers feel superior to VB developers ...I think one of the things that makes the VB community uncomfortable is the "shoe being on the other foot" feeling. It doesn't feel good NOT being the "favored son"... anymore does it?"
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Richard Hundhausen TechTalk
21 Apr 2008
Printing from Remote Desktop toServer
Richard Hundhausen writes
"...My last resort was going to be to configure the server to connect back through the Internet to my home network, opening up port 9100 to the world...I started checking boxes and doing trial prints, until the LaserJet came to life..."
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Venkatarangan Tnc TechTalk
17 Apr 2008
Why I love the new Messenger Control
Venkatarangan Tnc writes
"... I love the new messenger control....The only thing I need to do is to be signed in to my regular Live Messenger...other than the Microsoft style of plethora of different sites you need to go before you understand it. To include this control...there are three steps"
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Steven Smith Office System
17 Apr 2008
Office 14 Triskaidecaphobia
Steven Smith writes
"Office 13 is going to actually be called Office 14....think it's pretty silly to eschew this incremental number in order to avoid superstition....from a company full of a lot of very well-educated and intelligent people, I would hope"
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Vinod Unny Security
17 Apr 2008
Vista 1 Year Security Vulnerability Report
Vinod Unny writes
"...just released a 1-year security vulnerability report of Windows Vista versus other operating systems for their first year.... compared are: Windows XP, RedHat Linux Enterprise 4 (Workstation), Ubuntu 6.06 and Apple MacOS X v10.4. Here is a summary of the report...."
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Steven Smith SQL Server
17 Apr 2008
PhluffyFotos on top of SSDS
Steven Smith writes
"...a way for you to access data from "the cloud" providing a highly scalable and globally available data access story...I expect a developer could upload an application and configure its data source requirements and host the entire thing "in the cloud" paying some metered rate..."
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Kimberly L Tripp SQL Server
17 Apr 2008
Indexes in SQL 2005/2008 Best Practices
Kimberly L Tripp writes
"...why/how to best choose when to use INCLUDE v. having columns in your key....you can have A LOT more indexes in SQL Server 2008 but just because you can - DOES it mean that you should..."
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Matevz Gacnik Security
16 Apr 2008
Laws and Digital Signatures
Matevz Gacnik writes
"This document represents data and an enveloped digital signature over the complete XML document. The digital signature completeness is defined in the Reference element, which has URI attribute set to empty string (Reference Uri="")....The following should always be applied during signature validation:"
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Michael Palermo NET Framework
16 Apr 2008
Using the Mouse Wheel to Zoom in Silverlight 1.0
Michael Palermo writes
"I demonstrate how to allow your Silverlight applications to respond to mouse wheel events....Using the mouse wheel, I will provide the additional feature of zooming in & out."
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Edgar Sanchez TechTalk
16 Apr 2008
Project Euler and Functional C#
Edgar Sanchez writes
"...they are good programming calisthenics, and may also be a good way of learning a new language....I'll be using C#, but not your plain old C# mind you, as I'll do my best to use in as much as possible the functional facilities of C# 3.0. Let's see for example Problem 1:"
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Steven Smith ASPNET
16 Apr 2008
ASP.NET AJAX Download Performance Improvement Request
Steven Smith writes
"I would like to suggest...that it would be a good thing if the ASP.NET AJAX javascript library were hosted by Microsoft as an option. This would involve some slight changes to the coding (specifically I would add a property to the
control to enable using the Microsoft provided library), and would require that Microsoft make a commitment to having the .js file available via their infrastructure. In practice this would not be very different from the distribution model that they are currently using for Silverlight deployment, but would be much smaller...The chief advantage of this approach"
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Steven Smith ASPNET
15 Apr 2008
Extract Control for ASP.NET in Visual Studio
Steven Smith writes
"...One nice feature of Blend is the ability to select a chunk of XAML and choose to "Extract User Control". The result works very nicely, creating the separate control and inserting the reference to that control into the original XAML document. It would be very cool if ASP.NET had this same notion, wherein one could select a chunk of ASPX markup and choose "Extract User Control"..."
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Greg Low Windows Vista
14 Apr 2008
Internet Connection Sharing on Vista
Greg Low writes
"...how to share a single Internet connection...USB-to-Ethernet adapte...and use Internet Connection Sharing. I installed the drivers for the SiteCom device... and configured ICS and it just worked. I thought this was excellent until Tuesday last week when the latest update for Vista came down from Microsoft.com....ICS on Vista now doesn't understand you disabling IPv6. It interprets it as being unable to load it. Enabling it allows ICS to work again..."
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Scott Golightly Office System
14 Apr 2008
Error in Excel begs for Manual Testing
Scott Golightly writes
"I sent out an e-mail with a Microsoft Project 2007 .mpp file attached. I heard back from one of the people that I sent it to that they could not open the file....While saving to the older version I saw that I could save to Excel and decided that might be a better option.....My complaint was with the error. I shouldn't have ever had to see it. I can see 3 possible solutions to this problem.... am not sure what the cost of all this manual testing would be verses the amount of complaints Microsoft gets from customers but"
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Bill Wagner TechTalk
14 Apr 2008
Simple bit of C# code for Euler Problem 6
Bill Wagner writes
"Euler Problem six asks you to find the difference between the sum of squares and the square of the sum for the natural numbers 1 through 100. I took the easy route, and made a brute force implementation in C#. There are a couple new bits of LINQ syntax here. This query creates two different anonymous types. One for the number / square pair...."
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Rockford Lhotka Editors Picks
14 Apr 2008
Silverlight Prototype Serializer
Rockford Lhotka writes
"Silverlight 2.0 doesn't have an equivalent to the BinaryFormatter or NetDataContractSerializer. This makes some things quite challenging...I've been working on building a Silverlight-compatible equivalent to the BinaryFormatter/NDCS. It turns out to be quite hard due to the limitations of the Silverlight sandbox.
For example, Silverlight does have reflection, even against private fields. However, you can only get or set a private field..."
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David Yack Editors Picks
10 Apr 2008
WPF - Sharing XPAP and Standalone Deploy
David Yack writes
"In order for code to run in an XBAP, it must be able to execute in the partial trust sandbox. So if any of the code you want to run in either circumstance needs more permissions, you’ll likely want to use ifdef."
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Michele Leroux Bustamante Security
10 Apr 2008
Feedback Wanted WCF Security Guide
Michele Leroux Bustamante writes
"P&P is putting together guidance for WCF security and is looking for feedback from the community. Now is the time to influence the results from your own practical experience so get in there and review the whole thing or the areas of your greatest interest over the next few weeks! The feedback will be really useful!"
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Alexander Wechsler TechTalk
10 Apr 2008
CF cards for XPe fxed or removable
Alexander Wechsler writes
"There are two kinds of CF cards available. A lot of them are intended for use in cameras and PDAs, etc. and have a bit set indicating that they are removable. The problem is that it is not possible to boot XPe on them without getting the bit set to fixed...There are tools in the market that will do this, but these do not always work reliably. My advice..."
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Carl Franklin Windows Server
09 Apr 2008
Focus is on Hyper-V!
Carl Franklin writes
"...Hyper-V is the virtualization product that shipped as a beta with Windows Server 2008, the release version to be available 180 days later....Anil digs into the strengths and weaknesses of Hyper-V and how it compares to products like VMWare's ESX Server."
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Matevz Gacnik Editors Picks
09 Apr 2008
WCF Reliable Messaging and Retry Timeouts
Matevz Gacnik writes
"There is a serious limitation present in the RTM version of WCF 3.0/3.5 regarding control of WS-RM retry messages during a reliable session saga....The problem arises when one of the sides does not get the message acknowledgement in time...The problem is that there is no way for the sending application to specify how long the retry timeout should be. There is a way to specify channel opening and closing timeouts..."
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Jonas Folleso SQL Server
08 Apr 2008
LINQ talking to Access generating SQL code
Jonas Folleso writes
"...Officially only SQL Server 2000 and 2005 is supported by LINQ to SQL, but it turns out the DataContext object accepts a IDbConnection in its constructor. By passing in a OleDbConnection you can have LINQ talk to an Access database. You will not get design time support in Visual Studio 2008, and have to write all the mapping classes your self. But at least you can execute some basic LINQ queries. The LINQ runtime will not now that it's talking to a Access database, and it will generate SQL code as if it was running against a SQL Server."
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Joel Semeniuk Suggested Reading
08 Apr 2008
Requirements Management with Team System
Joel Semeniuk writes
"Requirements Management is something very near to my heart. So, is Team System. Wouldn't you know that there is now a white paper out from Microsoft that talks about both..."
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Guy Barrette SQL Server
08 Apr 2008
LINQ to SQL Returning Complex Objects Performance Test
Guy Barrette writes
"...one reader commented that the proposed LINQ query would be utterly slow so I did a quick unscientific showdown....In the left corner: the query returning complex objects from anonymous types...In the right corner: the query returning complex objects from POCOs...The result: it's a tie! Yep, both queries returned the results in about 2 seconds using SQL Server Express 2005 locally (no layers, no WCF etc)"
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Chris Auld Windows Server
08 Apr 2008
Web Management for Hyper-V
Chris Auld writes
"...in the move from Virtual Server 2005 R2 to Hyper-V we lost the Web management capability for the VM server. Hyper-V management is all MMC based....kickstarted an Open Source project to build a Web UI using the Virtualization WMI interfaces. Well worth taking a look...."
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