If you ship the standard C run time library or the MFC/ATL libraries via the Microsoft merge modules, you need to be aware of a dependency on Windows Installer V3.1. The merge module Microsoft_VC80_CRT_x86.msm has a custom action included in at called 'SxsInstallCA'. This only appears in the binary table of MSI 3.1.
This change is a breaking change between Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 and the RTM release.
In a follow-up to the Geek plates,
Computing in the UK has a Back-Bytes column running humourous stories about the industry. One in this week was, 'What epitaph would programmers have on their tombstone?' Cited examples were things like 'Terminated and stayed resident' for those old DOS types and the the XML heads such as Mike...'</Mike>'. I suppose me->Release() for the COM types a bit of IDispose wouldn't go amiss. What would yours be?
As the train trundles home, I've time to reflect on being presented with the Loghorn roadmap. BillG had a busy day - It was announced he will receive an honorary knighthood, he gave a talk as part of the chancellor's speech and finished our day off with some seamless computing. Certainly the vision of ubiquitous computing across many diverse devices seems to be pretty near - how good the experience can become and how much Microsoft gets of the play remains to be seen.
The pillars of Longhorn was an excellent show by
Abbott and Costello sorry, Don and Chris, was excellent if only for the good humour and demonstration of agile programming and refactoring.
Avalon looks to present many opportunities for producing fantasticly user friendly and enriched displays. Despite the rather contrived app crufted up in front of us, the scope for mixed multi-media and traditional content in an enhanced GUI is great and has many applications, non more so than in the field in which I work - industrial automation vision systems.
WinFS looks to provide performant search and finding of data in the file system by an extensible meta-data system. One thought struck me, that by extending the meta-data of items in a WinFS app, the whole picture is then tied to WinFS - if you want to move it to another platform you have to re-do the extensions in another technology, rather than say a build a specific app for that form of data. Just one of the choices we have to make anyway I suppose. Overall impressive though.
Indigo also looks impressive though I think Don had the short straw being on after lunch. There was insufficient time to do justify all the work that's gone on in the evolution of loosely coupled messaging. As someone with investment in DCOM this is probably the most interesting pillar and the one to play with first if and when time allows investigation.
All in all a great day - thanks guys and I hope you all enjoyed the Marsala Zone. You have to make time to come up north - I think you'd enjoy the trip, stopping off in Birmingham to check out Stratford Road, the home of the Balti, Manchester's curry mile and slightly further on, many of the north-west's excellent Indian restaurants.
Many people know about Don's infamous IUNKNWN and INFOSET license plates, but recently I've been noticing more technology-inspired license plates around town. Just the other day at the grocery store, I saw a car with a GUID license plate. And not that long ago I saw INT3 on one car and FFFF00 on another (bright yellow) car.
It's making me wonder how common this is. Does anyone out there want to admit to having a tech license plate? We can play a mini game of Bumper Stumpers (if you remember that show)!
[Adam Nathan's Interop-Centric CLR Blog]
In the UK it is not so easy to create custom number plates. They have always followed a defined pattern. The Motor Car act of 1904 introduced plates in the form A N, which eventually expanded to AA NNNN in 1930. From 1930 through to the 1950's the format AAA N through to AAA NNN was used. These were issued by the County and Borough Councils The last two letters indicated the region the car was registered in (plates are usually kept for the life of the car). The numbers and letters were issued in rotation so ABV 1 to ABV 999, BBV 1 to BBV 999. Between the 1950's and 1963 the format changed to NNN AAA. There were numerous other quirks in the scheme that resulted in certain letter and number combinations being withheld, for example all plates with MN and MAN were allocated to the Isle of Man.
When the permutations ran out in 1963 a letter was added indicating the year, forming AAA NNNA. This became compulsory in 1965 with the letter C - it was only the busier councils that used A and B. The last letter changed each year in August leading to a demand for new cars in August as people clamoured for the new registrations. That scheme lasted 21 years not 26 because the letters O, I, Q, U and Z were not generally used. Q was used for modified cars, I and Z were used for Northern Ireland. Logically a 'volte-face' resulted in ANNN AAA lasting another 21 years. In 1974 licencing responsibility moved from the County and Borough Councils to the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Authority based in Swansea, South Wales.
In 2001 the DVLA introduced a new scheme with a two number year identifier and a changed area designation. These now take the form AA 51 AAA where the first two letters are the region and the two numbers are the year representing September 2001 (5 being like an S). Plates numbers change each September and March so in 2002 they took the form AA 02 AAA etc.
As you can see the UK schemes have restricted creativity, but it has not stopped a flourishing industry in personalised and cherished plates. Even the DVLA has got in on the act by creating a Select Marks marketing arm. As plates are issued, certain letter and number combinations are withheld to provide a pool of plates for this commercial side of the government service. There are some possibilities: WIN 32, OLE 32, L 1 NUX etc. but IUNKNWN is definitely out.
I thought it would be interesting to see the semantics behind this very public interface as often a visitor doesn't see this hidden 'behavior'. As a visitor to France for many years, it only recently dawned on me that in their plates have two numbers indicating the department or region of France the car is from.
This number plate business provides an interesting parallel with the philosophy of keeping the surface area of an API small, the interface simple and thinking ahead to versioning issues.
A/W just sent me a copy of the 9th printing of Essential COM.
Either A/W is printing 25 copies per run or my API of the Day posts have driven up demand for old-school programming techniques.
[Don Box's Spoutlet]
I checked my copy - 3rd printing. It seems there's old school and older school. Bah.
I've been playing with getting metadata out of image files and writing metadata to files. I'm impressed with GDI+ but has anyone else found the PropertyItem documentation a bit sparse? Most of the CLR has nice examples but these classes are a shim over GDI plus and you need to drop down to the SDK docs for more details. Even then there is no real examples of updating metadata. The CLR also lacks the constants so they need pulling from GdiPlusImaging.h in the SDK.
After reading in a JPG I can now add an archival record in XML (RDF/dc) to the EXIF UserComment field. Why am I doing this? From what I can find all other initiatives satisfy some other need than archival records. Adobe are pushing XMP which is based on RDF but is more geared to workflow management and has a much larger scope. DIG35 was another initiative but appears to be stalled.
Today's beer: Pike "Old 89" Nitro Porter, brewed in Seattle, Washinton
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