October 2004 Entries
Yep, I missed DevDays but it doesn't matter! Microsoft has made the Dev Days presentations available via the web. Also available is the IssueVision "smart client" application. IssueVision is the application that was developed for DevDays. Enjoy.
Chris Sells has gathered some nifty Windows Forms 2.0 samples. Some of the cooler ones are the Outlook 2003 Clone and MSN Messenger Clone.Now Playing in iTunes: Fleming & John - Love Songs
I found a neat little plug-in called WMPTunelog that allows iTunes users the ability to add "Now Playing" information to their blog posts. It works by utilizing the same registry keys that WMP9 uses. The Newsgator .Text plug-in picks up the information and adds it to my posts. Cool.Now Playing in iTunes: Pigeon John - Deception
A friend of mine just asked me the differences between XP Home and XP Pro. So here's the answer. In short, if you're a home user you should go with XP Home 95% of the time.
I stumbled across a nice site for the 70-305 Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. It takes the preparation guide and matches it up with the proper Microsoft documentation. Nice.
I don't know why I'm running into all of these problems over the past week but here's another one. While debugging some ASP.Net code I reloaded my project in debug mode and I got smacked with a "Configuration Error". The error also specified a permission problem with one of my VB6 COM DLL objects. I quickly found this article Access Denied Error When You Make Code Modifications with Index Services Running. The problem stems from Indexing Service grabbing the temp ASP.Net directory and locking it. Once I shut down the service everything ran fine, including the code I was debugging.
We ran into an interesting problem yesterday. After the CryptoAPI mess we were preparing to put the server back into the pool. Well, one of our web reports was not posting back to the server. Of course I googled around and found this: Service Pack 1 for .NET 1.1 Broke My ASP.NET App.
"Well, there's not much on this page -- just a userid textbox, a password textbox, and a submit button -- oh yea, and a couple of validators. Of course, validators aren't checked clientside by Mozilla, and if they were failing in IE then the page wouldn't even...
While using the new Windows Shell I had a small problem with the current version of ASP.Net 1.1. For the new shell to work I had to install the .Net Framework 2.0 Beta 1. So when I came in to work this morning and cracked open Visual Studio 2003 I got smacked with an "Error while trying to run project: Unable to start debugging on the web server." error. So I googled the problem and found a solution. I changed the ASP.Net version to 1.1.4332.0 (from 2.0.40607.0) in the IIS properties of the web site and everything worked just fine. So...
Channel 9 has recently posted some incredible videos on the new Windows Command Shell (WSH) code named Monad. All I could say was "holy crap Batman!" Monad is an extremely powerful shell interface that let's you do practically anything in the shell. I was so impressed I signed up for the beta at beta.microsoft.com. (The ID for the beta is mshPDC.) I've just installed it and have started toying around. This thing is quite impressive.
From wikipedia.com: "Podcasting is the creation and aggregation of discrete, downloadable media files. Typically, audio files are created on a computer and then uploaded to a Web server on the Internet. An RSS 2.0 feed with enclosure tags is then amended each time a new media file is published, with a URL linking to each enclosure."
Ya, I've been listening some podcasts and downloading them via iPodder. Two of my favorites are Engadget and DotNetRocks (of course). Maybe Jed will have a podcast. That would be cool.
Many moons ago I created an encryption dll for our company website. This dll was created in VB6 and using the CryptoAPI. OK, so I cheated a bit and used some encryption code that was created by Fredrik Qvarfort. But why reinvent the wheel? Or the CryptoAPI calls? Anyways, during a routine security patch deployment the encryption dll on one of the servers stopped working. The funny thing was it was working fine on the other machines. So we reinstalled the web application, uninstalled and reinstalled the COM dlls as well as some system dlls. But the dll was still...
Here's are some articles on MSDN regarding developing for the Windows Smartphone using the .NET.
Develop for Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone Using the .NET Compact FrameworkCrafting Smartphone User Interfaces Using .NET Compact FrameworkSmartphone 2003 Application Deployment DemystifiedGames Programming with Cheese: Part OneGames Programming with Cheese: Part TwoGames Programming with Cheese: Part Three
Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the new Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Essentially this is Microsoft's attempt at placing a PC in the middle of your entertainment center rack. What's cool, is that it saves HDTV content. What's not cool, you can't use DirecTV natively. You need to use a IR blaster. Although I love the idea of having a PC in my rack until it can use DirecTV properly I'm sticking with my TiVo. Here's a good overview of the Media Center Edition 2005. Also, thegreenbutton.com is another good resource.