Archives
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Viewing MSDN code samples in Firefox or Mozilla browsers
UPDATE: This should no longer be required - apparently the MSDN CSS has been fixed to support Firefox.
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[tip] Speed up VPC under XP SP2
[Update: Virtual PC 2004 SP1 is out and is the official, supported way to speed up VPC under XP SP2. This hack is no longer required. Get VPC 2004 SP1 here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/downloads/sp1.mspx ]
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[utils] slayer office favelet suite / FireFox Web Developer extension
I agree with secretGeek - this may be the coolest thing I've seen this week:
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RSS is out of order? The whole system is out of order!
RSS doesn't scale. As blogs and RSS aggregators get more popular, they overwhelm web servers. The kind folks who run weblogs.asp.net and blogs.msdn.com were getting slammed for bandwidth and made a bad decision - they chopped all RSS feeds all posts to 500 characters, and the aggregated web page feed to 500 characters, unformatted.
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WQL / Reflection DataProviders for ADO.NET
WQL DataProvider for ADO.NET WQL DataProvider is an ADO.Net data provider, so you can use it just like usual MS SQL DataProvider, but for WQL (WMI + SQL = WQL). This DataProvider supports SELECT, ASSOCIATORS and REFERENCES queries. Doesn't support event queries. [Via The Code Project Latest Articles]
Having written a custom ADO.NET data provider before, I'm appreciative of the amount of work that this entails. Downloading just the source didn't go smoothly for me, but the dependencies were in the demo project so I can't complain. I didn't see the actual code for WQLDataProvider.dll in the project, but that's what Reflector's for. And if you just want to use it and don't care about the code, use the DLL and you're set.
This allows you to databind against Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), which employs a SQL like syntax to query systems, applications, networks, devices, and other managed components. The project includes a functional WMI Query Analyzer.
And while I'm at it, if you haven't seen Matthew MacDonald's article on Creating a Custom ADO.NET Provider, it's worth a look. The cool thing about the article is his sample - he implements a Reflection Data Provider [source]. Cool idea. I tested it out by databinding on the types and members of the Reflection Data Provider itself. Talk about dogfooding... -
[OT] Nuclear Power's Bright Future... (just not in the USA)
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[Funny] Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!
These crack me up.
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Miguel de Icaza on Longhorn changes
Interesting post by Miguel de Icaza on Microsoft's recently announced changes to Longhorn. Good to read if only to get a better understanding of the complexities of Avalon's implementation.
My prediction is that Avalon v1 will be a throw-away: it is not really the foundation on which you will build applications: V2 will likely not be backwards compatible, they will have to re-architect bits of it: which means that people will end up with two frameworks running side-by-side: Avalon V1 and Avalon V2.
The above problem is compounded with the fact that the CLR has not really sorted out a good model for sharing components across versions of the framework: the GAC solution today is a bit of a hack to keep things separate and allow for multiple installations, but does not solve
This is like cooking, you can not rush a good steak, or a cake or an omelette by cranking the heat. Some things just take time. [Via Miguel de Icaza]
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Monoppix Preview (0.2.2.3) Release
Monoppix is a GNU/Linux distribution which includes Mono, XSP, and Monodevelop, and runs completely off a CD. It allows you to get familiar with Mono development in Linux without installing anything on your computer.
Monoppix was based on Knoppix and Miniknoppix and was developed by Roiy Zysman (zroiy at spymac dot com). -
ISORecorder v2 (beta) - Works in XP SP2 and W2K3
I was happily using ISORecorder to burn ISO images to CD-ROM's / CD-RW's until it stopped working under XP SP2. CDBurn has worked since then but it's just a command line app.
Alex Feinman just released a beta of ISORecorder v2, which works in XP SP2 and W2K3.
Careful - v2 doesn't work on pre-SP2 machines, and you'll need to uninstall the old ISORecorder before installing v2.
more info (new features / known issues / screenshots)
[p.s. 6 GMail invites - contact me if you'd like one]