C#

Windows Virtual PC

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:59:37 GMT

I finally got around to upgrading my Windows 7 RC to RTM version and decided to dive into Virtual PC. So far so good:

Unlike per usual where I'd backup, reformat, boot from DVD drive and do a clean install of the OS, I opted for the standard setup.exe experience. It got rid of everything but kept directories into windows.old. From what I can tell, everything worked as expected post-install experience. (I backed up everything just in case....I'm not quite that bold yet to trust the default behaviors)
Installed antivirus software and followed this up by setting up Windows Virtual PC. I hadn't tried this during the RC but wanted to try out XP mode per Virtual PC Guy's Quake 2 entries.
I also setup a Windows Vista virtual machine for betaware. In particular, I wanted to get VS2010 Beta 2 in there so that I could try it both within VPC and as a virtual application. Once I installed the VPC integration components, the virtual instances ran smoothly.

Overall, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with the overall Virtual PC experience after years of abuse. I had setup VMs with dev environments in the past (WinXP with VPC 2004, Vista with VPC 2007) but it was too much to bear. I'm hoping third time is the charm for VM dev environments. If not, I could always take the less virtual more machine approach, even if there are caveats.

Hiring Services and Web Developers at ArenaNet

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 21:06:24 GMT

Recently, I wrapped up my duties as a lead developer at myspace and headed to ArenaNet over in Bellevue, Washington. My team is hiring and we’re looking for awesome services and web developers. If you’re looking for a new challenge and would like to be part of the next Guild Wars gaming experience, check out the descriptions at:

Services Programmer

Web Developer

And you can hit me up at yow-hann at arena dot net. Hope to see some of the GWB community folks out there!

C# V4.0+N…

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:59:00 GMT

Not having attended PDC 2008, I have been catching some of the recorded sessions online at: https://sessions.microsoftpdc.com/public/timeline.aspx. The above screenshot from The Future of C# (after 4.0) opens up a can of worms. Nice!

Windows Azure…

Yow-Hann Lee — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:04:37 GMT

Waiting to sign in to Windows Azure and seeing what it offers to Amazon’s EC2.

Catching the keynote at: http://www.microsoftpdc.com/. More information on Azure can be found at: http://blogs.msdn.com/cloud/default.aspx.

http://bluehoo.com/, with 121,476+ hoos found, as an example in action.

Seattle Code Camp v4.0

Yow-Hann Lee — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:06:19 GMT

Seattle Code Camp 2008 is once again held at the DigiPen campus. I never got around to recapping the one held earlier this year (v3.0) but have recaps of v2.0 here and here.

Check it out at: https://seattle.codecamp.us/default.aspx.

Latest and Greatest Watch Window

Yow-Hann Lee — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:49:45 GMT

You know the little watch window that you get in Visual Studio...well, in the scope of the software development world, this is what is currently in my watch window:

Microsoft Project Codename "Velocity" - Distributed In-Memory Application Cache Platform

This one is huge for .NET. All things considered, it is arriving late to the party (Reference memcached and jcs) but it is worth watching how it all plays out. I am looking forward to trying out the optimistic/pessimistic concurrency models and other cache configurations. So while like the rest of the folks who are excited about Silverlight 2 Beta 2 this week, it is Velocity that is going in the watch window.

As a side note, this now also means there is another answer to BrainSharpener #10. Depending on the scenario, that could either be a good or bad thing :)

Quick BrainSharpener (#11)

Yow-Hann Lee — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 17:24:09 GMT

Haven't been contributing to this series in a while, so here's a standard one to ease back into the flow...

Given any two large List<int>, what is the quickest way to find the mutual intersection of the two? Now take into consideration memory constraints?

MSDN Community Content Disappearing? It's all in the Version #s

Yow-Hann Lee — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:07:17 GMT

I blogged about MSDN Community Content last year. A month ago, they celebrated their first anniversary. Recently, I logged in and was ready to add content only to find some quirks:

On an initial glance, it would appear that previous posts had disappeared.
Discrepancies in the URLs between the user's page and the rss feed. (i.e. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.specialized.listdictionary(VS.85).aspx vs. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.collections.specialized.listdictionary.aspx). This meant that community content in the former URL didn't show up in the latter and vice versa.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/*(VS.71).aspx doesn't accept community content.

From #1 and 2, it seemed like MSDN community wiki was experiencing some issues with content migration. A quick search through Microsoft Forums confirmed this to be the case. Based on the thread, it appears the community team is working on ironing out their migration story though they didn't describe how.

One particular strategy to take would be to allow users to select which offerings (VS.85, VS.80, etc) to percolate to. However, the ideal flow would be to have the MSDN Community Content display all content regardless of the URL version. The UX would be a lot smoother and save users from having to sift through each version/URL to find community content. Additionally, if the community content only applies to a particular version of .NET, the content contributor should call that out. And if that is missing, readers can either check the date on the comment or another contributor can come in and add, "this is a 2.0 issue and has been fixed in 3.0" OR "this class is obsolete, please use X to conform to best practices". Ah, that is the beauty and very purpose of wikis! It handles content history/versioning and empowers the users to drive up content quality and conciseness.

So if you're interested in adding community content, be weary of which entry point you take (i.e. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureinfo(VS.85).aspx vs. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.cultureinfo.aspx (currently VS.90)). Unfortunately, if they're issues pertaining .NET 1.1 or a BCL issue inherited over the different iterations, note that you won't be able to add content in the VS.71 pages.

Video of the Day:

The Lone Server from Windows Server Division Weblog

MVC Framework in ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP - Workaround for Accessing Controls in Code-Behind

Yow-Hann Lee — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:26:11 GMT

I've been meaning to post the following but only got to it just now. For those that have started playing around with the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP, you will have no doubt come across being unable to access controls declared in aspx from code behind. This is a heads up for those wanting to start dabbling in the MVC framework.

When you create a new ASP.NET MVC web project, the pages don't have a designer.cs file. In a typical web project, this is still dandy since you can access the controls by ID in code behind; the designer files are simply abstracted. However, in the MVC web project, you will get compilation errors. Instead, you could access inline. ASP.NET runtime will generate your declared controls (peek in temp dirs of your loaded modules), which explains why you can access and manipulate the controls inline.

Naturally, you may not want to do this inline. To access your controls in code behind, simply right-click on your web project and select "Convert to Web Application". And Voila!

Courtesy of ScottGu

Microsoft Parallel Extensions CTP, aka Parallel FX

Yow-Hann Lee — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 01:00:39 GMT

As if there weren't already enough new technologies to play around with recently, here comes another that I mentioned previously.

The hub for Parallel Computing is at: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/concurrency/default.aspx. And you can download the Parallel Extensions CTP at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e848dc1d-5be3-4941-8705-024bc7f180ba&DisplayLang=en.

Late Nov and Dec has been a developer's dream, so many toys to play with in such a short timespan!