Archives
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It's been awhile
I've been in a writing funk for quite a while now, and it's time to get back.
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Scott's in-Telligent
http://scottwater.com/blog/archive/2004/07/15/TelligentSystems.aspx
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ScottWater Goes Virtual
ScottWater is playing around with Virtual Server 2005. I have been really impressed with it, and the ease with which you can network, and share files between virtual machines, and with the outer network as a whole. The trick is to use Remote Connection, rather than their web client.
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Virtual Server 2005 Performance
For those people trying out Virtual Server, like me, you can get a significant performance gain by using Remote Desktop Connection to get to your guest operating systems, rather than the web client, which for me at least (3.2ghz, 1.5gbram, 7200rpm hd) performs like a dog.
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Fighting With Hardware
Setting up a brand new machine, and I get hung up on the simplest part.
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NJ Dev Meet-Up Two: aka Geek Dinner
I just got done chatting with Don. It's been quite a while since the last NJ Geek Dinner, so we would like to set another one up.
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MS Sql Server 2005 Express
Microsoft announces SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. It'll be great to have a low-cost lightweight SQL server, WITH it's own (slated for 8/04) "database manager and query analysis tool." I wonder just how the "click-once" technology in visual studio will be connected with this product (that feature's scheduled for Beta 3. It's great to see the next evolution of MSDE.
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RE: Remembering passwords...
It looks like the number of passwords that I have to remember grows linearly over time. Since I don't have the best mnemotechnic abilities I decided today that it is OK to just forget them. Then, I just tell the whatever-site-I-must-log-on that I've forgot my password and ask it to send it by email (or reset it) each time my cookie expires. Then I simply cut & paste the password from the received email and voila, everything seems to work fine. This also allows me to implement real cryptic passwords without any fear that I might forget them later.
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Free fonts!
Thanks for the link Paschal; good free fonts are available at DaFont [Via Paschal Leloup]
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RE: Master-Page-Limitation in ASP.NET 2.0
The concept of Masterpages introduced in ASP.NET “Whidbey” is really fascinating. But it seems to have one major limitation, which appears to make it quite unusable in bigger Web-Applications: There seems to be no functionality, which allows a developer to programmatically change the used Master-Page at runtime.
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RE: Credit Card Fraud
My wife was hit by credit card fraud last week - somehow, someone managed to get her credit card number and used it to make charges to
- AOL - setting up an email account in my wife's name that even used our actual address, phone number etc.
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Application Center Test, VS, and robots.txt
VS and ACT
While attempting to write some stress testing using Application Center Test (that name just seems backwards to me), and stress testing a site with Robots.txt denying access to our authenticated folders for those search engine bots, I came across some interesting issues:
1) Lack of recorded SSL support (hence the (C)2001 on the about page -- this product is clearly dated).
2) If it sees robots.txt, even if that file allows the "Stress-Agent" user agent it claims to look for, it won't run the test
3) Visual studio integration doesn't allow you to change the option to ignore robots.txt
4) Lack of recorded SSL support (this really does annoy me! -- especially MS' workaround which I may post on separately)
1/4 I may tackle in a separate post; as for 2/3, by editing the non-included "properties.xml" in your Application Center Test project in visual studio, you can turn off cookies with the following section of xml at the top of the file:
<DefaultValues >
<Project >
<ProxyEnable type="bool" value="false"/>
<ProxyName type="string" value=""/>
<ProxyPort type="long" value="80"/>
<KeepOneRecycledFile type="bool" value="false"/>
<RecycleSize type="long" value="20"/>
<LogPath type="string" value="(automatic)"/>
<LogEnable type="bool" value="true"/>
<CheckRobots type="bool" value="false"/>
<UseAbortiveTcpClose type="bool" value="true"/>
<SocketTimeout type="long" value="120"/>
</Project>
...
(the file continues on)...
Save and you're good to go...just right click your test, and the output window in visual studio should tell you the test is running. -
Longhorn Hang Reporting
When windows crash under WinHEC Longhorn -- and believe me, they will -- you may try to end the task under task manager to get control of your machine again. A new window pops up, similar to the Error Reporting from XP, this one's called "Windows Hang Reporting", aka dwhang.exe.
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.NET Free TV Listings
Gotta Love it... I had purchased Pocket TV Listings, by ThumbsUpSoft, and really couldn't be happier with it. The app is easy to use, the listings are good, and the interesting thing is that it looks like it's free now (must've been my emails every few months that I forgot my product key -- sorry!).
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XPSP2 Bluetooth
As Graeme has posted, Bluetooth has been much improved with Windows XP SP2. This makes it much easier to activesync over bluetooth, and worked perfectly out of the box with my Belkin adapter (except for the fact that I had to say yes to install the unsigned drivers). It took a few tries to realize the reason I couldn't sync even though I could connect was due to the fact ActiveSync wanted to connect over COM3, which was not a port that the XP service had installed by default. However, adding a new COM port under the Client Applications tab in the configuration did the trick. Since the software was already installed, the WidComm stack is used, and works great... now if I could just figure out how to stop the Bluetooth signal from wreaking havoc on my cordless phone...
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X-Smiles
DonXML, a fellow Longhorn enthusiast, as well as a vocal XML proponent (as the name would suggest), pointed me in the direction of X-Smiles. This takes the levels of XHTML and SMIL compatability seen in browsers such as Opera, and Firefox to a whole new domain. Built in JAVA, and intended “for exotic devices,” the project looks very interesting. Very cool stuff... I will be writing more as I get a chance to play around with it.
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Suspect Memory
While many people I know have always suspected my lack of ability to remember peoples' faces, but remember numbers and useless trivial knowledge, I'm talking about RAM. My laptop has been performing strangely ever since I upgraded to a gig of ram from the onboard 512mb. It'll do things like blue-screen XP after an hour of idling (forget about actually doing work). So to that end, I'm doing some serious testing of the RAM to make sure I didn't get any bad chips (I'm almost positive I did).
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Longhorn Speech API Article
Recently published was my brief article to Developer.Com on the Longhorn Speech API, and how to do some basic recognition and synthesis. Code sample included!
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Prashant Sridharan at MS
During college, the book that got me into developing client/server apps, and in fact the book that I learned Java with was Advanced Java Networking by Prashant Sridharan. Now I learn that in the meantime, he has since moved to MS from Sun, worked on the J++ team, and migrated to Product Manager on the C# team...Very cool!
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Longhorn Component: "Hoolie"
I've been looking into the inner workings of Longhorn 4074, and have discovered there's much more here than meets the eye (or keyboard). I'm sure a lot of this is under wraps because it's not MS' way to put forth something that's not usable yet (see the hidden windows manager command for an example of this -- it's cool, but it's not working for all video cards, slow, etc...but still in development).
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HOWTO: Fixing Longhorn Networking
My saga with how to fix your network connection after it goes haywire in Longhorn.
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HOWTO: Fixing Longhorn Networking
I had read about network connections being broken under Longhorn, from builds 4051 through the current WinHEC 4074, but hadn't yet experienced the fun learning experience (spoken slowly through clenched teeth) that it would afford me further down the road. These are my experiences; I hope that they help someone else out as well.
I wanted to get to Longhorn remotely via terminal services, so I installed both Terminal Services, as well as the web server component that allows access from http://[ip]/tsweb .
I had a friend test out the connection, he said it was cool, so I had thought it was in the bag. Fast forward through headaches by the name of Magic Packet and VPN... finally success -- I can VPN remotely, and send a packet from within my network to the broadcast address. Only... I can't seem to get to the machine, even just to ping it. I get home, and the machine is turned on all right, and waiting at the login screen, but when I log in, there's no network connection... router's fine; even the machine works when I boot into XP instead of Longhorn.
Fastforward days ahead, many headaches, and I'll spare you the litany of “please work now” and various degrees of anguish, and head to the miracle cure.
I'm not a network guy; I just play one at home.
Sure, I can set up a fairly secure network at home, keeping my machines fairly happy with their little cable-modem tether, but as far as going into routing tables, I had a few things to learn, and still do. However it was checking the differences between the routing tables that led me to my solution. First off, I checked the properties of my LAN connection in network properties; good ip from the DHCP, and I can get to my router by going to my 192.168.0.1 address, but as far as going any further -- forget it. Manually setting IP, and DNS didn't help either. I could resolve the name, but not any hits from a "ping www.google.com". There's not a default gateway...instinctively, I know this is the problem -- 100% positive; but how to manually set the gateway?
Enter "route print". Here's the bad table;
It looks ok, but no gateway declared. I'll save you the why and how, but what I did was compare my working xp table w/ the nonworking Longhorn one, and was going to go 1-by-1 and make them match, but the first add was the one that did the trick. First off, the interface (the last number in this command) is the number of the LAN card when you type "route print". The command to fix it?
route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 192.168.0.1 metric 20 if 3
Note that 192.168.0.1 needs to be changed to whatever the router address is. Then you should be golden. Here's what your router table should look like afterwards:
Enjoy being back connected! -
Bill Gates -- The Early Years
This photo is priceless!
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Longhorn 4074 "Optimization"
I say “optimization” because this may remove features that could be important to you if you are a developer, but the authors of the pdc Longhorn Optimization Guide, under the noms de plume Chris123NT and Nighthawk, have written another one for build 4074.
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VS2005 Team System Guides on MSDN
Visual Studio 2005 Team System Documents
MS has just published a cache of useful info about visual studio team system 2005; check them out!
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Speech SDK Released
As Wally McClure posted first, the MS speech sdk version 1 is released, and is available here. The download ran me 295mb, and contains extensions for VS2003, enabling users to create SGXML (speech grammar xml files) therein.
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Longhorn 4074 Remote Terminal Services Setup
With 4074, Terminal Services doesn't get it's own element in add-remove programs. However, since IIS is not installed by
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Microsoft Enters Translation Market
Microsoft has entered the translation business with the announcement of “Microsoft Application Translator (MAT)”. The announcement is intriguing. The betaplace guest id is: MATGuest (case sensitive). This will allow applications to change their localized language on the fly, without the developer having to do the legwork.
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Longhorn SDK, Dev Preview 2
DonXML notes :
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Longhorn DVD Burning Woes
I'm trying to install longhorn, but I'm still stuck staring at the ISO. It turns out that the file's too big for a CD, but not formatted as a DVD ISO that Nero can recognize. I'd love to be able to make a bootable DVD of it, but I can't seem to force Nero to do what I say.
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Rendered-HTML Editor
Via Jon Galloway:
"Document Examiner is Right-click addin for IE that allows browsing the DOM and updating it on the fly."
This is the easiest way to see the results of changes in CSS files with aspx pages, in my opinion. It beats making change by change and rerunning the page! **Finally hit the 100 post mark!** -
Updated Longhorn Online SDK
The Online Longhorn SDK now sports a shiny new "Build: Developer Preview 7.2" label in the upper right corner, which may spell updated docs either right now or in the short-term future. At a cursory glance, however, the MSAvalon namespaces are still in the online docs, and the Speech docs are still sparse.
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Longhorn, Winhec, and How-To-Get-My-New-Build
Chris Sells has posted a pre-emptive strike answering many of the questions of us non-WinHEC attendees in his latest post. A new build of Longhorn was released to attendees and
will bewas made available (at about 4pm EST on 5/6/04) to developers via MSDN“Real Soon Now“. The build is labeled M7.2 (Milestone 7.2, I imagine), and will have some of the swapped out namespaces (namely MSAvalon, though there may be others). -
Learning from our mistakes - The Backup Lesson
While I have faith that a large percentage of the developer community as a whole back up their work machines, or at least the code / content portion of their data, I wonder just how many expend that same effort into their home PC's. This follows that same adage of the carpenter who takes home the mistake pieces, but sells their quality work. Today I'm going to reinstall all of my software again onto my HP iPaq 5455.
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Javascript Bad Math
I really wish someone could explain to me how, in javascript, the following calculation happens:
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MVP Summit "Revealed"
For those of us wondering just what was revealed about certain technologies at the MVP summit (in this case, windows mobile), PocketPC thoughts gives this article:
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Longhorn RepeatButton Control
So, while I was scanning throught the Longhorn SDK, I came across a rather interesting gem of a control: the RepeatButton. This control shares a parent, ButtonBase, with it's siblings, Button, CheckBox, HyperLink, and RadioButton.
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VS2005 Newsgroups
The public newsgroups for whidbey are at:
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Announcing.... GetMyNews for Longhorn
I would post a screenshot, but there's not much to see. Rather, this is for your aural pleasure. GetMyNews vA1 listens for any of a set of commands listed in
it'sits (and that's one of my pet peeves) grammar file, NewsCommand.grxml, and will go out and hit an rss feed provided by http://googlenews.74d.com . -
Audio Under Longhorn
One of the questions I get asked most often about Longhorn is in regards to audio hardware. 1) What is a card that works under Longhorn, and 2) How do I get the drivers working?
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Back To Bloggin'
After a long time off ...a few weeks of sparse posting, I'm back with some new posts. In case anyone was wondering, I had the opportunity to perform the Verdi Requiem at Carnegie Hall under Maestro Vincent La Selva and the New York Grand Opera Company. It was a blast, but it's time that I got back to some development work.
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Windows Mobile 2003 Connection Manager
Alan Jarvi has compiled a great reference for the Windows Mobile 2003 connection manager screens, located here. However, the reason I went looking for info was buried in screens not shown.
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.Net 2.0 ObjectDataSource
One of the cooler features of Whidbey and the 2.0 framework is the ability to bind data directly to the Business Layer. In this article, I'll explain how this can be achieved simply, using the PDC bits. This is very cool, and will be enough to finally stop me from passing DataTables/Readers around through the layers (a big no-no).
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ObjectDataSource Sample:
The source for the project can be downloaded here.
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Whidbey & Longhorn Project Name Restrictions
This is just a reminder that strange things can happen when you try to name a project with an existing class in the .NET framework. For example, for creating a new sample test project, I usually give it some sort of simple descriptor and put it in my HD's example code folder.
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Longhorn, Future TV, and Obese Clients
From talks after the Newark Devdays conference, here's an article to hopefully break my blogger's block. This is my vision for how convergence hardware (between tv and pc), the internet, and the tv viewer seeking more could look in the future. I term these “obese clients,“ using Avalon's extremely rich UI possibilities, and enhancing the stale push-tv model of today. Let me know what you think.... or even better, get cable companies to think about offering services such as these.
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Cable TV & PC Convergence
Here's a topic that came up in a discussion after the Newark (Secaucus) DevDays...and an explanation about why I'm writing this....
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Article: "XAML Custom Controls and Animation"
My first article on XAML/Longhorn on Developer.com and CodeGuru.com was published today.
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Scoble & Tivo
Since Scoble's comments seem to be down for now, here's my response to “Why hasn't Tivo taken off“, which was actually an extension of Mark Canter's post -
ImageStack for Longhorn
Well, after a bit of time refactoring and ironing out some functionality issues, ImageStack for Longhorn Version A is on my downloads page (the file contains source code and binaries). This is an image browser that can be scrolled through with the mouse wheel, and zoomed with a mouse click. Change folders with the “Get Image Stack“ button.
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Longhorn Animations and Timelines Part I
After a suggestion from DonXML, I left the world of manually starting up LengthAnimations bound to width and height properties of a Canvas control I had implemented via code, and took up the task of learning the Timeline object.
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Longhorn Dev Experiences
Today's simple Longhorn dev trick?
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Longhorn (and XP, 2000, etc) Speed Burst
Well, while configuring my PC to try to get some speed benefits whenever possible I came across this cool little util from Intel, sitting on that disk of stuff that came with my PC (and got ignored after I repaved it), called Intel Application Accelerator.
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ASP.NET Web security
Coming live from DevDays in Newark (really Secaucus), NJ:
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Ex-Intel Architect Discussion
An anonymous reader posted this link. It's an hour-and-a-half discussion about the pentium / x86 chipsets by Architect Bob Colwell, of Intel fame given at Stanford. This is a very interesting movie, and a fun flick for anyone interested in the lower levels of PC architecture.
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Strange No-Boot, Simulated Disk Failure
I've recently been having problems with my home desktop pc (the one I use for Longhorn development), sometimes getting a “windows can't read from the boot disk; perhaps you need a new one?” type message whenever I try to get into longhorn or xp pro (after I make the selection on the boot menu).
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Copying DVDs to PocketPC
I figured I'd watch some movies / tv shows I had on upcoming plane rides, or just while I'm waiting (rehearsals Tuesday nights, and I'm the type of person who's perpetually early). So, I decided to learn how to encode movies onto my PPC. (This is used to play on the PocketTV free player:
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DC License Plates
I'm not sure if anyone subscribes to my individual feed, and I don't usually write posts on politics (I can hear the sound of browser back buttons right now!), but I saw a license plate on the way home that really made me confused.
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MSDE Web Resource Kit
The MSDE Web Resource Kit is now available, with a sample ASP.NET data driven app.
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Longhorn "Verification Mode"
After changing some system settings in Longhorn in Virtual PC, and deciding just to “turn off” the window, the next time I started up, Longhorn was running very slowly. After a while, a piece of toast popped up explaining Longhorn was in “Verification Mode” due to the crash. It then allowed me to disable it, by brining up an “Is system allowed to run in verification mode?” dialog. Very interesting... perhaps this is the next evolution of Safe Mode?
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Avalon Control Collection - UIElementCollection
One of the first things I noticed when trying to iterate through the controls of a Longhorn form looking for a control was the absence of the Controls class. In its place is the UIElementCollection, a member of the MSAvalon.Windows.Controls namespace for the PDC build. This is an array which you can use to gain access to the child controls of an element from the codebehind. For example, if you had this scenario in the XAML document:
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My Published Articles:
Longhorn / XAML (Developer.com / Codeguru.com):
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"Blog" hits mainstream
I was surprised to hear “What is a weblog or blog?” as one of the questions for Jeopardy today. The answer? Presidential candidate Howard Dean made these popular for candidates during the 2003 democratic primary campaign (I'm working from memory here, so it's not a quote.) The Category? 21st Century Trends
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New Pages, & President Atchinson
For any loyal readers of my site, I've made available a Download Page available on the left menu of my blog. This will have links to software and samples I've written. Also an articles (published) page will be added soon.
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My Project Downloads
Windows Projects
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In Depth Longhorn/XAML Property Aliasing
[*Note, this is compiled and running on the PDC builds of Whidbey and Longhorn, respectively]
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In Depth Longhorn/XAML Property aliasing
After Chris Sells asked a few questions on my last post on property aliasing, and transforming bound data with the IDataTransformer interface, I realized the post may have been a bit shallow. Here's my article on how to bind & transform data, complete with working sample:
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eXcentrics Controls
I've used controls from eXcentrics world on a few projects I have been involved in, and am impressed with their reliability and ease-of-use. The controls are donate-ware, and $75 for source code access. The collapsable panel and bread crumb trail are my favorites.
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RSS Weather
I thought this was very cool -- NOAA (the national oceanic and atmospheric administration)Is providing rss feeds for the weather, organized by state. Formats are HTML, RSS, and XML/CAP. Since feedback is “accepted through January 31, 2003”, this has been fairly stable.
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NJ Developers Meetup
Scott Watermasysk just posted about the first NJ Dev Meetup:
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Longhorn/XAML Property aliasing
Since so many people are talking about using the ContentPresenter to bind data via an alias, I figured it would be a good time to mention the IDataTransformer interface.
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Save Streaming Media Files (Including .ASX)
In case you ever wanted to save a local copy of that streaming movie trailer or funny video a friend sent, there's a neat little program called SDP (Streaming Download Project) Reciever which allows you to do this. Best of all, it's freeware.
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Microsoft Source Code Access
After the news from the other day, I had read a bit into how Microsoft licenses source code access to some of it's partners and came across this link on their “Code Center Premium” product. The video is very interesting, and shows how partners can debug into windows source code methods without having to suffer through downloading a huge block of code. The software that they show, WinDBG, will go out to a server to grab the relevent bits of code, and cache them locally (obviously) for future reference. This is a very interesting program, and is available to quite a wide array of developers, including MVPs in good standing for two or more nomination cycles.
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Longhorn on Primary RAID
“Nick B.” writes in microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.general on how to install and boot Longhorn on a RAID controller:
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"TranslateIt!" Longhorn
TranslateIt! is a longhorn implementation of a simple web services frontend, allowing the user to translate text from one language to another, via the textbox, dropdown, and candy-blue button at the top left.
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Comcast gives away Free McAfee Firewall
I figured I'd drop some security tips while the talk of exploits and worms is rampant.
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Longhorn -- "Not Yet Implemented"
I'm starting a thread of “Not Yet Implemented” Methods in the Longhorn SDK.
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Gel Buttons in Longhorn
Absolutely great article by Nathan Dunlap over at the LonghornBlogs site:
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Mars Rover Software
It has been very interesting following the progress of the Spirit, and recently the Opportunity rovers on Mars. I had found a link on the software QA and analysis that went into writing secure, stable code for the mission critical systems. It's a very interesting read, although it is pretty short.
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Longhorn and XP Dual-Boot
After a dead-hd replacement (I dread hearing hard drives start to click), I have finally got XP and Longhorn to cooperate. Longhorn still doesn't seem to like the RAID, but at least I can have XP on the RAID and Longhorn on a normal drive. The trick is install XP first, install Longhorn, then boot off of the XP CD. Run the recovery console off the CD, and “FIXMBR“, “FIXBOOT”, and “BOOTCFG /rebuild“, adding the XP install back to the boot menu. All should be well at this point!
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DOS Syntax
Here's a new DOS command I wasn't aware of:
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Pocket RSS / Syndi
Syndi is.
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.Text My Subscribers
In setting up a .TEXT personal website, I'm trying to extend the functionality of the existing software. Dave Winer has provided an application for users to show what sites they subscribe to, as well as a form to query it. The “My Subscribers” table will show the other subscribers to the site, and how many feeds they have in their shared OPML file.
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XP Security Lockdown
While updating a family computer (you know what that's like ... 15 security updates behind), I realized just how important XP SP2 will be (Paul Thurrott's preview is here.) While it can make initial configuration of some net-enabled apps more difficult (you'll have to add the application), in the end there will be less of those annoying popup programs to clean up on peoples' machines.
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Longhorn Speech - Context Sensitivity
“The language model describes in a statistical fashion the likelihood of specific word sequences occurring at a given time. In other words, what is the probability of the word "America" following the words "United States of"? These statistics are determined by analyzing a large collection of written and spoken text. Because of their statistical nature, they are flexible - any word sequence has some, albeit small, probability of occurring - but lack the rigor required for high recognition accuracy.”
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Fun Tool: ClipboardSwitcher
Everyone has their own set of favorite tools, and I thought I'd add one of mine. Clipboard Switcher is a shareware
traynotification icon that lets you switch between 10 clipboards using ctrl+1 through ctrl+0. It's really convenient for pasting bits of code, or storing multiple url's etc.
http://www.injurytracker.com/clipboardswitcher/
