WebLog of Ken Cox

Make Parallel APIs Seamless and Almost Invisible

Ken Cox [MVP] — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:33:00 GMT

Microsoft Canada’s Adam Gallant gave an excellent presentation today on ‘What’s New with Visual Studio Team System and MSDN’. Among Adam’s demonstrations were the new APIs to support so-called manycore architectures. Most of us are still writing code...(read more)

On Being Blow Away by Technology

Ken Cox [MVP] — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:17:32 GMT

While watching Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman, and Brian Goldfarb demonstrate Silverlight 4, I had a range of reactions: Wow! I’ve got to play with this stuff! I’m feeling overwhelmed by the avalanche of technology How will I find the time to do billable...(read more)

New Machine? Nope, Just a Defrag

Ken Cox [MVP] — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:10:00 GMT

I run Windows Server 2008 Enterprise on my quad core development workstation to take advantage of the OS’ Hyper-V support. (More info on setting this up at http://www.win2008workstation.com/ ) Anyway, Derek at Diskeeper corporation sent along an MVP freebie...(read more)

It Works On My Virtual Machine - So Ship My VHD!

Ken Cox [MVP] — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:42:00 GMT

With advances in virtualization technology, it seems like the old quip, “It works on my machine - so let’s ship my machine!” is becoming reality. In the old days, people would configure a physical box in their shop and send it out to the client or host...(read more)

Our Windows 7 Launch Party’s Over

Ken Cox [MVP] — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:34:33 GMT

The Windows 7 launch celebration went well at our place. I installed the “Windows 7 Signature Edition” on an older (Win 95 era) Dell machine and discovered that the new OS ran quite well. Even more surprising, Dell’s audio and video drivers for Windows...(read more)

VS 2010 Product Release Date? March 22, 2010

Ken Cox [MVP] — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:41:00 GMT

I don't recall Microsoft announcing a Visual Studio release date this far in advance. The official launch is March 22, 2010 . In the past there have been two product release dates for Visual Studio. The first was soon after release to manufacturing (RTM...(read more)

Animation on MSDN Web Pages? No Thanks

Ken Cox [MVP] — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:26:00 GMT

I may be fighting a losing battle against the Silverlight/Flash animation gurus. The Visual Basic Developer site on MSDN is showing off a preview of its proposed redesign . One of the “features” is a flashing, fading, distracting, and very annoying animation...(read more)

Windows 7 Ultimate Signature Edition w/ Party Pack

Ken Cox [MVP] — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:54:00 GMT

Gosh, it didn’t take long for eBay to come alive with offers to sell the Not For Resale (NFR) versions of Windows 7 ! I suspect most of these “Signature Edition” versions are coming out of the Party Pack that just arrived today. The asking prices seem...(read more)

Fixing the ‘Telerik.WebControls.GridInsertionObject does not contain a property’ Error

Ken Cox [MVP] — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:01:57 GMT

I really like working with the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX controls. However, I keep forgetting about a problem in the RadGrid that occurs when trying to add a new record using EntityDataSource. If there aren’t any records yet, and you click Add Record, you...(read more)

Congratulations Microsoft MVP!‏

Ken Cox [MVP] — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:40:40 GMT

I received a very nice email message this morning… “Congratulations, you are one of only a few thousand people around the world who have been recognized with a Microsoft MVP Award.” I’m proud of this award, and even though I’ve received it every year...(read more)

DropDownList Lookups Failing Due to SQL Char DataType

Ken Cox [MVP] — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:34:06 GMT

Here’s today’s episode of “Losing Time on Something Dumb”… In my ASP.NET 3.5 project (using Telerik’s AJAX controls) I filled a RadComboBox with Items and needed to set the selected item to the current value of the object (I’m using Entity Framework)...(read more)

WebsiteSpark – Free Software? Not Exactly

Ken Cox [MVP] — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:28:07 GMT

Microsoft has an interesting new initiative called WebsiteSpark that features a 7,122-word legal agreement . The attraction of the programme for small web development and design companies is obvious, starting with free licenses for development and hosting...(read more)

Publishers Prepare for Year End .NET 4.0 Release

Ken Cox [MVP] — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:40:04 GMT

While Microsoft is coy about product release plans (“When it’s ready” is a common evasive answer to the question), book publishers frequently reveal their (and Microsoft’s) plans online. If you’re curious about when software like .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio...(read more)

Fixing the System.Data.UpdateException – DefiningQuery and no Error

Ken Cox [MVP] — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:56:00 GMT

Here’s another in my never-ending series of fixes for dumb mistakes. In this episode we lose time with an Entity Framework error. Here’s the error message: System.Data.UpdateException was unhandled by user code Message="Unable to update the EntitySet...(read more)

Generating PDFs in ASP.NET Pages – PDF Duo .Net

Ken Cox [MVP] — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:05:34 GMT

In my current contract, I need to generate database-driven PDFs on the fly. I’ve done the first prototypes with my copy of Aspose.Pdf for .NET *. It’s an enterprise-ready, robust, and extremely functional component with a rich API, XML content input,...(read more)