It’s that time of year again for my company. The decision has to be made on renewing my MSDN subscription.
Actually it’s been two years since I made that decision as the last time I renewed my MSDN Universal became a Visual Studio Team System for Software Developers with Premium MSDN subscription (thank you, Redmond marketing department), purchased as a two year eOpen license.
In my cash flow projections for my company, I have roughly £1,000 + VAT pencilled in for my MSDN license. It hurts...
Some months back I bought a HP 6910p laptop which included a HSDPA card, and it even came with a Vodafone SIM. I did look at the data plan from Vodafone; £15 per month for 3Gb of data, with no minimum contract.
I liked the idea of a larger data allowance than the 40Mb I currently have with my T-Mobile contract. I’ve never upgraded this original Web’n’Walk contract; I get 200 minutes, free answer phone collection and 40Mb of data for £16.50 per month. If I upgraded to get 1Gb of data (with laptop...
Code Camp 5 will be held this next weekend in the Twin Cities. You can find out more here. I'll be speaking about a shader algorithm you can use to build a point light. Here are the details:
Lighten Up! Lighting a 3D World with HLSL
The basics of Microsoft's high-level shading language (HLSL) are introduced, including a basic overview of the rendering pipeline, through the creation of a point light shader. HLSL allows graphics programmers to create realistic graphics through the...
Finally after 2 weeks I did get chance to publish the second part of my article on Sync Services. The article is a follow up article to Introduction to ADO .Net Sync and takes a look at how easily we can convert a two Tier Sync application to N tier using WCF services. The ability to sync up your data without connecting to the main database is a great value and opens the door to many complex architecture implementations. There are many examples on sync services online but most of them are in C#,...
(Sorry A blog post in Dutch about day 2 of a software conference in the Netherlands)
Vandaag (7 okt) was het dag #2 van de SDN Conference. Zelfde opzet als dag #1 alleen 1 sessie ronde minder, maar daardoor niet minder interessant.
De volgende sessie had ik op mn lijstje staan voor vandaag:
DB.04 Rock Star Common Table Expressions door Stephen Forte
Common table expressions (CTE) is een nieuwe feature in SQL 2005/2008. CTE is erg handig voor recursive queries, ranking en voor het...
Does anyone know where I can get more info on the Microsoft SOA and BPM conference scheduled for Jan 2009 in Redmond?
I know there are a few Canadian day-events, but I've also heard there's one in Redmond as well...
D...
This is one that belongs on failblog. I happen to be using Visual Studio 2005 at work, so the prop snippet generates a private member variable to encapsulate in a property. In this case, I needed the property "Value". Guess what happens?
private string value;
public string Value
{
get { return value; }
set { value = value; }
}
Fail. The only thing that needs to be done to correct this is to qualify value in the setter.
set...
For those Linux devs who don’t have something adamantly against Microsoft, Mono 2.0 has been released! From the release notes: Mono 2.0 is a portable and open source implementation of the .NET framework for Unix, Windows, MacOS and other operating systems. Release Date: October 6th, 2008 Major Highlights Mono 2.0 is a major milestone in the Mono project, and it supports the following features: Microsoft Compatible APIs ADO.NET 2.0 API for accessing databases. ASP.NET 2.0...
Apparently, as reported here, RealDvD is not currently available (as reported in a previous post of mine) thanks to Hollywood believing that it violates copyright. I have tried the software out, and I like it. It's convenient to have playable copies of DvDs I own, even if they are tied specifically to my machine. Sometimes, it's cool to rip a DvD to take on my laptop somewhere. Will be a real bummer if it is ruled illegal is not sold; I was considering purchasing it when my trial ended. Pity...
Continuing on from what I started in the Part 1 post, I’m going to show you how to get set up with Windows Live mail for your domain (assuming GoDaddy, but correlations will be present). It’s easy, relatively quick, and will result in a free service that ought to minimize your mail frustration. Step 1: Get an account started on domains.live.com To get started, browse over to http://domains.live.com. Towards the bottom of the page, click get started and then enter in your domain information....
I've been delving a fair bit into WCF lately and have been encountering enough gotchas that it is clear that it's time for me to resurrect my tech blog. My first post: an errant WCF Socket Exception which looks like a timeout due to the message is actually an exception caused by DBNull. You may have come across the above msg at some point in working with WCF. The socket connection was aborted. This could be caused by an error processing your message or a receive timeout being exceeded by the...
Saw an article today at silicon.com that announced "the long-awaited software developer kit for the Surface tabletop computer will be made available to those attending Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) at the end of the month." Here's the link to the article: http://software.silicon.com/os/0,39024651,39299687,00.htm Background is that Microsoft recently made the pledge on the PDC website, as part of a listing for a session focused on writing Surface applications. Here's what...
My questions for the town-hall tonight (not that anyone will care ): Ask McCain the question: What do you mean by "Winning the war". Ask Obama the question: What do you mean by "Ending the war". The answers might be very similar...
If you haven't been keeping up with the latest news on the Colorado Springs SharePoint User Group site (www.cossug.net) then I thought I would drop a little bit of a blast on my blog.
We have decided to move the meeting nights from the first Tuesday to the second Wednesday of every month. This was mainly due to the fact that we were overlapping with another really established .NET User Group in the same area. We couldn't have that. We want everyone to be able to make it to all of the User Group...
If you use Visual Studio 2005 or later and you don't use snippets, you are missing out on yet another time saving feature. Snippets effectively allow you to drive your programming experience even further via Intellisense and keyword combinations, making repetitive tasks such as defining properties, encrypting and decrypting information, and connecting to data as easy as a few keystrokes. Yesterday I was thinking about how much snippets make sense from the perspective of programming. I remember when...
Summary
Extract your zip file in aspspider.net using OpenSource Zip Library in asp.net (SharpZipLib)
.NET Classes used :
using System;
using System.IO;
using ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip;
I have used open source zip library. Which you have to download from http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/Download.aspx
Put ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.DLL into your bin folder of asp.net application.
Use Following function to extract zip file. Assign your zipfilename in...
Not really, but hopefully just as cool. Brian Harry has posted a teaser about the upcoming "Team Foundation Server Power Tools - October '08 Release", of which includes a Windows shell extension to TFS. If you’ve never been able to use TortoiseSVN during your development, you’re missing one of the greatest tools available to a Windows developer.
Sure, we’ve had SVNBridge for a while now, and it works well with CodePlex, but I never could get comfortable with it for a couple reasons; Checkin...
I just found this free ebook that microsoft made available for download.
For those that are interested in the latest updates and the changes in the Windows 2008 TCP/IP stack i think it is a good reading.
See the following link at the microsoft site http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c76296fd-61c9-4079-a0bb-582bca4a846f&DisplayLang=en...
If you are using Outlook 2003, 2007 you would have experienced the Desktop Mail Alert that comes up when a new email is received. It typically shows up in the right bottom above the system tray.
While it is very useful to get a glimpse of the content as well as decide on whether to read the email or not, it can take up memory resources and occasionally make Outlook hang, particularly if you are parallelly running memory intesive applications such as Visual Studio, a few Excel files etc.,. I wanted...
In This Issue: Dhiraj Gupta, Peter Brombert, Bill Reiss, Jesse Liberty, Mike Snow, Terence Tsang, Lee, Karl Shifflett, and Tamir Khason.
Karl Shifflett reports a very long weekend and an update to XAML Power Toys: XAML Power Toys 3.1.0.2 Has Silverlight 2 Support!.
Tamir Khason reports Silverlight Bidi Controls Library RC0 and movement from Beta 2 to RC0 , and everything is on CodePlex!
From SilverlightCream.com: Silverlight Min-Map Dhiraj Gupta has the beginnings of a mind-mapping...
It’s time to start talking about the next SMB in Minneapolis/St. Paul! We’re going to be meeting at the Deluxe corporate headquarters in Shoreview, MN on Oct. 31st.
What better way to wrap up the month of October and start your Halloween weekend than to meet up with your local social media peeps? How about how about a chance to talk social media with the bestselling author of the hit book The New Rules of Marketing & PR: David Meerman Scott? In addition we’ll have a chance to talk with startup...
Microsoft will be presenting some very interesting stuff at the PDC this year. One of the much-anticipated Oslo-related messages came last week, ahead of the conference, with the public announcement of "Dublin", an Application Server and host for WF / WCF applications. And get this: There will be CTP BITS available for .NET Framework 4.0 and Dublin at the PDC! Essentially, Dublin offers significant feature additions to the WAS (Windows Process Activation Services - remember?) that ship with Server...
MSBuild files are loaded and parsed in order. This means that properties and items are in scope if they have been previously defined anywhere within the load chain. Here's an example.
Test.proj
<Project DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<PropertyGroup>
<HelloWorld>Hello World!</HelloWorld>
</PropertyGroup>
<ItemGroup>
<Files Include="*.*"/>
</ItemGroup>
<Import...
