Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day

The Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 July CTP now available for download

2008-07-19T10:33:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Downloads - Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 Community Technical Preview (CTP) July

“Microsoft® Robotics Developer Studio 2008 enables hobbyists, academics and commercial developers to create robotics applications targeting entertainment, educational, home, commercial, or industrial segments.

Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio supports a broad set of robotics platforms by either running directly on the platform or controlling it from a Windows or Windows Embedded device through a communication channel such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth®.

…”

Microsoft Robotics Development Center - Welcome to July CTP of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008

“Welcome to the July Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008. This is the 2^nd CTP and like the previous, which was released in April, this one has a lot of new features and improvements. Some of the features are mentioned here but there are many more. For a complete list, please see Whats New?.

…

New Samples and Tutorials …

Simulation and 64-bit Machines …

Visual Studio Project Wizards …

Much Faster DSS Proxy Generation …

Embedded Visual Simulation Environment

In addition to having a stand-alone UI, the Visual Simulation Environment can now be embedded in other applications. This enables other applications to show the Visual Simulation Environment as part of their application.

…”

Microsoft Robotics Development Center - What's New in July CTP of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008?

“Here is a detailed list of what's new and changed in July CTP of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008.

Samples and Tutorials

Documentation for samples and tutorials is included in the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio help which is available from the Start menu after installation.

DSS Node Discovery using UPnP: A new UPnP sample illustrates how to use UPnP for discovering DSS nodes across a UPnP network.

Transport Extensibility: PipeTransport and PipeTransportHost are two new tutorials on how to write your own transport and load it in your custom host. In addition you will also find the UdpTransport and UdpTransport as additional transport samples.

LINQ: Service Tutorial 12 shows how to subscribe to the Directory Service using a LINQ Filter and how to receive filtered notifications.

Silverlight: The XBox Controller Viewer sample shows support for use of interactive Silverlight-based UI

Embedded Simulation Environment: The sample EmbeddedSim sample shows how to embed the Visual Simulation Environment in a custom Windows Forms user interface.

Simulated Pursuit Camera: The PursuitCamera sample shows how to implement a camera entity that follows behind a target and avoids obstacles.

Simulated 4x4-drive: The SimulatedFourByFourDrive sample shows how to implement an entity that behaves like a 4x4 off-road car.

LEGO MINDSTORMS: The RCX samples have been removed from this release.

Decentralized Software Services (DSS)

New Features and Bug Fixes

Global Assembly Cache: All DSS core DLLs are now installed into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). This means that they are a shared resource for all installations on a single machine.

…

Visual Studio Project Wizards: The Visual Studio project wizards for DSS services have been rewritten to simply creation of new service projects. Wizards are available for VB.Net and C# across Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. Visual C++ developers as well as developers targeting .NET Compact Framework will still have to use the DssNewService.exe command line tool.

…”

Why? Because robots are cool! :)

Nice to see VB.Net support filtering in… Once I get it installed (which I’m doing now, being adventurous and doing it over top the previous CTP…wait… Doh! It’s making me uninstall the old CTP. Well it was worth a try… ;) I’ll check out the samples and see if there are any in VB

LINQ To WMI – A marriage made in Heaven?

2008-07-19T10:09:00.001-07:00

Linq2WMI - LinqToWMI Release 0.3

“This release is the latest available edition originating from Emily Bosch, later rewritten for the RTM of .NET 3.5 by Eden Ridgway.

Additional features, bugs, documentation and samples shall be released as the project progresses.

To use LinqToWMI, simply do the following:

Download the zip (latest release)

Unzip the download and open the Visual Studio Solution

Build the Solution to obtain the library reference

Add to a project of yours and use :)

…”

CodeProject - Linq2WMI

“Linq to WMI is a project which was originally created by Emile Bosch (http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/emile/). However, the project was created under an earlier version of the .NET 3.5 framework in 2005. It was later updated by Eden Ridgway (http://www.ridgway.co.za/). This CodePlex project was added to maintain an open source version of those implementations for using WMI through Linq.

Enjoy :)

The project is broken up into three libraries.

LinqToWmi.ClassGenerator

LinqToWmi.Core

LinqToWmi.Tests

Documentation is used throughout the code and should be fairly straight forward to use. However, the following links are the originating posts for this project.

Eden Ridgway: http://www.ridgway.co.za/archive/2008/01/02/an-updated-linq-to-wmi-implementation.aspx

Emily Bosch: http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/emile/archive/2005/12/12/10514.aspx” [Project Description leached in full]

Given the scope and depth of WMI, accessing via LINQ seems like a no-brainer doesn’t it?

TFS Roles and Security Quick Reference Poster

2008-07-18T08:25:00.001-07:00

Willy-Peter Schaub's Cave of Chamomile Simplicity - New TFS Quick Reference Poster - Roles and Security

“The new Team Foundation Server (TFS) – Roles and Security, which looks at how TFS evaluates effective permissions, has been published to the community servers http://www.drp.co.za and http://www.saarchitect.net in both PDF and JPG format.

…”

The DRP guys are at it again, this time with a very cool poster on TFS Security.

While I think I have my TFS Team Project security under control, there may be other Project Admin's I work with who still might be trying to wrap their head around it, so this might come in handy for them. And even though I've been Admin'ing TFS for a few years now, this poster taught me a thing or two. So much to learn, so few brain cells... ;)

Mashup, NPR Style – NPR opens up via new API

2008-07-17T10:26:00.001-07:00

TechCrunch - NPR Launches API That Serves Up 13 Years Of Content

“National Public Radio (NPR) has introduced an API that it says will allow developers to serve up mashups that include audio, images, and full text articles from the non-profit media organization’s archives that go as far back as 1995. You can access an overview of the new API here.

…”

NPR - NPR Tech Center

“NPR's API provides a flexible, powerful way to access your favorite NPR content, including audio from most NPR programs dating back to 1995 as well as text, images and other web-only content from NPR and NPR member stations. This archive consists of over 250,000 stories that are grouped into more than 5,000 different aggregations.

After registering, you can access the API by constructing a URL with parameters indicating what stories you want the API to return. The default format of the results is NPRML, a custom XML structure specifically designed to represent all of NPR's digital content comprehensively. The API can also return results in RSS, MediaRSS, JSON, Atom and through HTML and JavaScript widgets (other formats are pending). To learn more about how to access the API, go to the Story API documentation or use our Query Generator to help you get started. To see the complete list of NPR lists that you can query against, see our Mapping Index.

…”

Now I don’t listen to NPR much, but I still thought this was pretty cool… API’s just make me happy I guess (yeah, I know, weird… ;)

Fun with .Dump() in LINQPad – An intermediate level Dimecast for LINQPad

2008-07-17T09:48:00.001-07:00

Dime Casts. Net - # 25 - Introduction to LinqPad - Intermediate Usage

“In this episode we will learn how to use the LinqPad expression evaluator.

LINQPad is more than just a LINQ query tool: it is a code snippet IDE. Instantly execute any C# 3 or VB 9 expression or statement block!

In this episode we will look at how to execute native .Net code.”

A new Dimecast that shows some LINQPad intermediate level use cases.

I dig its .Dump() extension method…

TFS Power Tools - July 2008 Release (aka v2.2) – Welcome to Alert editing goodness

2008-07-16T18:20:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Downloads - Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools - July 2008 Release

“The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools is a set of enhancements, tools and command line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience.
The following tools are installed with the tfpt.msi package:

Command line tool (TFPT.EXE)

Team Explorer IDE menu additions

Build Notification tool

TFS Best Practices Analyzer

Process Template Editor

Work Item Templates

Custom check-in policies

TFS Server Manager

TFS Users tool

Alert Editor

…”

bharry's WebLog - July '08 Power Tools are available!

“You can download them here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=00803636-1d16-4df1-8a3d-ef1ad4f4bbab&displaylang=en

You can read all about them in the preview I wrote a couple of weeks ago: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/07/08/july-08-tfs-power-tool-preview.aspx

This is the first release of the Power Tools that we did some limited pre-release testing with our MVPs. It was very valuable because they helped find a few bugs that would have otherwise been in the release. The Team System Web Access update and the SCOM management pack are still in the works and should be available shortly. Also, for those of you looking for an eScrum update for TFS 2008, it's getting close to being ready too.

…”

bharry's WebLog - July '08 TFS Power Tool Preview

“We are approaching the release date of our next release of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. We are targeting to have it available in about 3 weeks. As I've mentioned before this is a smaller Power Tools release than we typically have done. This is because so much of our effort has been on getting TFS 2008 SP1 done. I am expecting that our Sept Power Tools release will have a lot more in it. We'll start planning that feature set soon. The other thing is that this Power Tools release is going to be more of a "wave" than a point in time release. A few of the components are being released at different times and in different vehicles.

The main components of this release are:

A new UI for subscribing for TFS Alerts - This new UI is a VS plugin (and therefore much more friendly than the BisSubscribe command line tool) and enables much more flexible subscriptions. This is, perhaps, the premier end-user feature in the July release.

…

TFS Best Practices Analyzer support for SQLServer 2008 …

Support for changing user's names …

Team System Web Access Update …

TFS SCOM Management Pack …

Bug fixes in WIT Templates and the Process Template Editor Power Tools …

Improvements in TFPT.EXE…

…”

The new Alert Editor looks pretty cool.

Now that I can use the TFS Alerts via email feature (Thank you Adam), I would really like to apply some filtering to it and am way too lazy to get up to speed on BisSubscribe… ;)

[Humor] Pod Cast

2008-07-16T13:47:00.001-07:00

Office OFFline Web Comic - Don't all podcasters?

[Comment about how this could be someone I know deleted]

Live Mesh – Now open to everyone (who have a Windows Live ID and are in the US) [Update: Well not really “to everyone”]

2008-07-16T07:22:00.001-07:00

LiveSide - News blog - Live Mesh Is Indeed Now Open

Where we were wondering before, we can now confirm that Live Mesh is indeed open to anyone with a valid Windows Live ID. Open to anyone in the US without having to adjust a thing, and open to anybody elsewhere in the world willing/able to adjust their OS’es region and language setting to EN-US. The announcement has been made on the Live Mesh Forum:

Live Mesh is now openly available to anyone in the U.S.

The Live Mesh team is pleased to announce that anyone in the U.S. can now use Live Mesh just by signing in to www.mesh.com with a valid Windows Live ID. No sign up needed to participate!

International Customers

With Live Mesh open to anyone in the US, our international friends can join in the fun early as well - with one caveat: you must be willing to change your Windows operating system region and language setting to EN-US. Once you do this you will be able to immediately sign in to Live Mesh with a valid Windows Live ID. Please be aware that this may cause other applications that specifically require your native country region and language settings to encounter problems.

…

…”

I’m really digging Mesh and can’t wait to get my hands on the SDK (and see all the goodness about it a PDC…)

How am I using it today, you ask?

a) IE Favorites Sync

It works great as a way to keep my IE favorites sync’ed between my primary machines.

b) WLW Text Templates – Text Snips Sync

My WLW Text Template plugin saves all the templates as individual XML files (because I wanted to one day be able to sync/copy them between different machines easily). So using Mesh to sync them was drop dead easy. And now all my templates are sync’ed on all the machines I use WLW on. That’s cool! :)

c) Misc stuff I want to sync between my different machines

Normal file sync stuff… Notes, etc.

(via Ed Bott's Windows Expertise - Live Mesh is now open to all)

Update #1: 7/16/2008 @ 6:00PM PDT:

LiveSide - News blog - Live Mesh Is Open, But With A Cap?

“We previously reported that Live Mesh Is Indeed Now Open. Well it is according to the Live Mesh Forum Announcement, but with a possible cap by the looks of it! We apparently created quite a stir in the blogosphere (thanks for the cheer Angus), but also for the Live Mesh Team:

Our forum announcement from yesterday got a lot of people talking. We just updated the forum post to clarify exactly what's going on, but I want to explain here as well. This week we did two things:

Doubled the maximum number of users we'll allow to access the Live Mesh Technology Preview.

Simplified the Tech Preview sign-up process. We've removed the requirement to sign up via Microsoft Connect, so that instead you can sign up directly from www.mesh.com.

…”

Okay, so it’s kind of, sort of open to everyone now… In any case, it’s easier to get in than it was before! (but hurry if you want now ;)

Help keeping the VM sprawl patched… Free Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool released

2008-07-16T07:02:00.001-07:00

virtualization.info - Microsoft releases Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool

“After a couple of months in beta testing, a new virtualization tool from Microsoft is ready for RTM: the Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool.

This product allows the update of large-scale deployments of virtual machines, leveraging PowerShell, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2007 and WSUS 3.0 (or Configuration Manager 2007).

The user can configure virtual machine groups and multiple jobs for each one to schedule different updates at pre-defined times.

Exactly like the VMware Update Manager (VUM) included in VI 3.5 does, this tool isn’t able yet to inject a new patch into an offline virtual machine passing through its virtual disk.

It just automates the VM power-on, updates deploying through virtual network access, and VM shutdown.

…”

As I’m trying to get back into the VM space a little (seeing 12+ PC’s, which do nothing 95%+ of the day, stacked in the corner of my Lab is starting to really bug me) I can see where this could come in real handy.

The issue for me may be SC VMM and WSUS as my first Hyper-V system will be a Dev system and I don’t think we have SC VMM in-house yet (WAIT, hold the presses!… Looks like I have SC VMM as part of my MSDN Subscription. That rocks! What did we do before we had MSDN Subscriptions? :)

(via A Continuous Learner's Weblog - Links (7/15/2008))

Terrarium Lives! - .NET Terrarium 2.0 now on CodePlex

2008-07-16T06:31:00.001-07:00

CodePlex - .NET Terrarium 2.0

“Welcome to the .NET Terrarium 2.0 project! Terrarium was created by members of the .NET Framework team in the .NET Framework 1.0 timeframe and was used initially as an internal test application. At conferences and via online chats, Terrarium provided a great way for developers to learn about the new .NET programming model and languages as they developed creatures and introduced them into a peer-to-peer ecosystem.

The Windows SDK team evolved the game in the .NET Framework 2.0 timeframe, but we haven't worked on it for over two years. As a result, the source code for Terrarium 2.0 doesn’t use the very latest .NET technologies. By making the source code available, we hope to provide a fun and interesting opportunity to learn about and use the latest advances in the .NET Framework.

In Terrarium, you can create herbivores, carnivores, or plants and then introduce them into a peer-to-peer, networked ecosystem where they complete for survival. Terrarium demonstrates some of the features of the .NET Framework, including Windows Forms integration with DirectX®; XML Web services; support for peer-to-peer networking; support for multiple programming languages; the capability to update smart client, or Windows-based, applications via a remote Web server; and the evidence-based and code access security infrastructure.” [Project Description leached in full]

Fear and Loathing - Reintroducing Terrarium, now with 2.0 goodness!

“To skip to the chase… http://www.codeplex.com/terrarium2

Origins

A long time ago, on a development team far, far, away, some bright dude (or dudette) came up with the idea of Terrarium.

Terrarium was a .NET 1.x game/learning tool that was aimed at getting people interested in .NET and building cool stuff. In Terrarium, you can create herbivores, carnivores, or plants and then introduce them into a peer-to-peer, networked ecosystem where they complete for survival. Terrarium demonstrates some of the features of the .NET Framework, including Windows Forms integration with DirectX®; XML Web services; support for peer-to-peer networking; support for multiple programming languages; the capability to update smart client, or Windows-based, applications via a remote Web server; and the evidence-based and code access security infrastructure.

…

Credit where credit is due

While this was my labour of love the past couple of months, I really want to thank everyone involved from the Microsoft side in getting this project going. Shout outs especially to Lisa from the Windows SDK team who’s become my best friend over the past couple of months and really got things moving on the MS side. Without her the Ark would still be boxed up somewhere in that warehouse.

Communities are not created, they’re grown and it takes time. I’m taking a chance on this project (as is Microsoft) in the hopes that it *will* spark some creativity and contribution. The discussion forums on CodePlex are there to talk about it and the Issue Tracker is to suggest features and report bugs. Who knows, given time to grow, we may be talking about this same time next year with a plethora of Terrarium resources out there. At least that would be a nice place to be and it can happen with you.

So there you go. Have at it. Build some creatures, learn some .NET and game programming, but above all… have fun!”

OMG, it lives! I’m sure many .Net old timers remember Terrarium. I remember playing with it in the Labs at PDC 2001 and always thought it was pretty darn cool. Sure it’s not Spore, but hey, at least this has shipped and we get the source for it! :)

Make sure you go to Bil’s blog post about it as he talks the past, present and future of Terrarium. Congrats to Bil Simser and team for getting this out.

(via Twitter – Tweet:Terrarium 2.0 released to the wild. Let the creature creation begin (again). http://is.gd/UG0)

WinForms and WPF. Great alone, yet better together

2008-07-15T06:38:00.001-07:00

DevCity.Net - WinForms and WPF Interop - The Best of Both Worlds

“Introduction, Code and Markup

So here's the kind of scenario I have in mind.   You have a Windows Forms project on the go and you want to create a ListBox that has more than just text in it. You want to have an image at the left hand side and two sets of text at the right, each string in a different size font and a different color.

Of course you could use Owner Draw, MeasureString, DrawString, DrawImage and a bunch of other hokey stuff to do this in WinForms.   And before WPF came on the scene that was all you had in your toolbox.

But now that WPF is here you can create ListBoxes that are far more complex than this one. Mind-boggling complexity and knock-your-eyes-out design characteristics, actually.   To be truthful though you really need Expression Blend as well as Visual Studio 2008 (or VB 2008) if you want to create anything that has a lot of sub-elements and/or many variations of colors, such as rotated gradients.

If you're not ready to abandon Windows Forms totally (and why should you?) then you can get most of the best of both worlds and port those fancy design WPF controls into your Windows Forms.

On the assumption that not everyone has Blend or the full edition of VS 2008 I'm going to limit the ListBox to something quite basic and will leave it to you to take it from there upwards in the design stakes.   The demo project for this article is written using VB 2008 Express Edition. This article isn't going to be a full primer on creating WPF controls, but I hope to show you enough detail for you to be able to try the approach out yourself - pushing the envelope as your WPF knowledge grows.

…”

I think this is the tutorial I’ve been looking for since VS 2008 came out, with it’s cool WinForm/WPF support. I’ve dropped a few WPF ElementHost’s/User Controls onto my WinForms but then had no clue what next to do.

This 17 printed page article provides some good, yet simple, cut-n-paste code to you you started, and then best of all, does adds some analysis of that code providing people new to WPF (cough… like me in spades… cough…) some idea of what it does and why it’s important.

New (beta) MSBuild Tasks Suite - FreeToDev MSBuild Tasks Suite

2008-07-14T07:45:00.001-07:00

CodeProject - FreeToDev MSBuild Tasks Suite

“Welcome to the FreeToDev MSBuild Tasks Suite. Here you will find a collection of MSBuild tasks dedicated to the .Net 3.5 Framework.

The Suite provides over 70 tasks covering the .Net Framework, IIS7, Team Foundation Server, WMI and more.

Every task is provided with clear documentation and a working sample. Where applicable, tasks also provide remote support, e.g. IIS7, GAC etc.

The Suite can be installed via an MSI for easy and consistent deployment.

There will be frequent updates to the tasks over the next few weeks to provide additional remote support, new tasks and better documentation, so keep an eye on progress and provide as much feedback as you can via the Discussions and Issue Tracker pages.” [Project description leached in full]

An interesting project and collection of MSBuild Tasks that I’m now monitoring...

There’s already a beta release with bin’s, MSI and CHM (and the source is available via the Source tab).

New Dwarf Planet, Makemake, & Make: – We know the truth…

2008-07-14T07:27:00.001-07:00

Slashdot - Makemake Becomes the Newest Dwarf Planet

“Kligat writes "The Kuiper belt object formerly known as (136472) 2005 FY9 has been rechristened Makemake and classified as a dwarf planet and plutoid by the International Astronomical Union, according to the United States Geological Survey. The reclassification occurs just a month after the latter category was created. The object was referred to by the team of discoverers by the codename Easterbunny, and the name Makemake comes from the creation deity of Easter Island, in accordance with IAU rules on naming Kuiper belt objects." [Post Leached in full]

Easter Island deity? Yeah, come on, we know truth, it’s a Make: planet! I mean have you SEEN the stuff on Make:? I’m sure a dwarf planet is not out of the realm of the possible for them! ;)

Rosario April 2008 CTP VHD to Hyper-V in 8 Steps

2008-07-14T06:53:00.001-07:00

How Steve Got Burned Today - How To: Get the TFS "Rosario" April 08 CTP running under Hyper-V

“I just finished getting the TFS Codename "Rosario" April 2008 CTP running under Hyper-V. Because Hyper-V is a different animal than Virtual Server, I had some "head scratching" moments. I wound up doing a fair bit of research and asking for help before I was finally able to get it up and running on my Dell Latitude D630.

In this article I'll give a run down of the steps I used to get it running as well as some of the issues that may be purely due to running this on a laptop using Windows Server 2008 as a workstation. There will be plenty of linked articles. I'll point out the salient issues from each that helped me get up and running, but I recommend that you read the articles to get the complete Hyper-V picture.

What you will need

The Visual Studio® Team System Code Name "Rosario" April 2008 CTP (see Step 1 for links)

A Windows Server 2003 ISO or Disk - any version (see Step 8)

…”

I really want to start playing with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V, but don’t yet have any compatible hardware. Need to put in a request this week…

Anyway, when that hardware comes in (comment deleted about the length of time it will take to get said hardware) I think Steve’s tip might coming in handy. Not just for Rosario but for other Virtual PC/Virtual Server VHD’s too.

From no screencast host to ready to embed in a blog post in 7 simple steps with Silverlight Streaming

2008-07-12T10:23:00.001-07:00

Guy Burstein on MSDN - How To: Host Your Screencasts on Silverlight Streaming

“Are you familiar with Silverlight Streaming? If you’re not here is a good reason to start using it. Generally, Silverlight Streaming lets you host Silverlight applications on Microsoft servers for free. With some of the latest updates to this service, you can now upload and host your videos. If you are recording screeencasts as I do, this post can be very useful for you. In this post I will show how to create a new Silverlight Streaming Account, upload a new video and embed it into an HTML page.

You can check out the blog post I have posted with the embedded video.

…”

Nice… 10GB of free Silverlight, and thereby screencast, hosting. Plus if you want to start playing with Silverlight, but have no place to host it (because say your blog host limits what you can upload) then Silverlight Streaming is the place for you too.

Don’t let the “Streaming” title throw you. This free service is meant to host your Silverlight applications as well as streamed media…

SQL Load Test – Generate Visual Studio unit/load tests from a SQL Server SQL Trace

2008-07-12T09:50:00.001-07:00

CodeProject - SQL Load Test

“Project Description

This tool takes a SQL Profiler trace file and generates a unit test that replays the same sequence of database calls found in the trace file. The unit test is designed to be used in a Visual Studio Load Test. The code generated is easily modifiable so that data variation can be introduced for the purpose of doing performance testing.

The tool generates code for both Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. The source code is a Visual Studio 2005 project.

The tool is still in pre-release stage of development.

…

… You start with using the client application to generate a trace of the SQL statements which typically represent a usage scenario. You can then turn the trace into equivalent ADO.NET code program that can be used in a load test.

…

Tool Description

The tool generates a Visual Studio 2005/2008 Unit Test from a SQL Server Profiler trace. It extracts all the SQL statements and stored procedure calls from the trace and turns them into a single Visual Studio Unit Test, which can then be configured as a Visual Studio Load Test. The tool does not interact with the database itself when it analyzes the trace and generates the test code. It can therefore be used in “offline” scenarios.

…”

Interesting… My team was just chatting about about unit testing databases and I was also starting to think about load testing the database.

BTW, source is included in the released…

(via Willy-Peter Schaub's Cave of Chamomile Simplicity - SQL Load Test Tool ... the VSTS rangers release another great codeplex project!)

Want a networkable OS in a 10MB Download… All you need is Windows For Workgroups 3.11 :p

2008-07-12T08:44:00.001-07:00

Because I’m a freak-geek, I wanted to make sure I had a copy of Windows 3.11 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on my network somewhere.

Why? Heck, I don’t know… “because.” Because maybe one day I’ll want to create a VM on a flash drive for them just so I can amaze family and friends when I boot it up (See, I AM the life of the party…! LOL)

So this morning I went to MSDN Subscribers Downloads and grabbed a copy.

I had a good laugh at the download size. 10Mb for WFW3.11. Remember when that was “huge” and took up a good portion of our hard drives? lol

Since we’re on the wayback machine, this reminds me of my first “production business” application which was deployed on Windows 3.0/3.1 and built with Borland’s ObjectVision (this was before VB1 came out ;). It was a call tracking application to help our company track/log incoming tech support calls, arrogate the results (via sneaker-net and floppies, we later upgraded to lan-tastic) and “management” reporting. It was slow (which our RAM upgrade from 4MB to 8MB helped ;) but was at least as fast as the paper process it replaced and provided data that was impossible to gather previously.

“I remember when I was just getting started programing, we had to use chisels to chip the 1’s and 0’s out of stone…” :p

IndyMac’ers – How can I help?

2008-07-11T19:22:00.001-07:00

I know some old friends from IndyMac sometime read my blog... If you need some help, references, support, shoulder to cry on, etc, please feel free to contact me… Email me, or call me at home (I’m still in the same place as when I worked there…plus I’m in the book).

For the rest of you reading this who haven’t heard, this link pretty much says it all. In short, IndyMac has “failed” and been taken over by the FDIC. This is the second largest bank failure in US history…

Say what you will about the management, regulators, government, etc, I don’t care. I care about the people I know there, people who worked there for years and how are now in a very ugly world of uncertainty and doubt.

I lived through Andersen’s collapse (which is a long story, having been closer to that issue, not directly but via a tangent, than I ever really want to think about… ) and it’s pretty damn scary place to be.

Again, please my friends, contact me and let me know if I can help…

16 years… My honey and I have been married for 16 years today. Wow…

2008-07-11T08:58:00.001-07:00

Today is our 16th wedding anniversary. Yeah, wow…

16 years seems like a long time, and yet it seems like it was just yesterday that got married. It’s been an interesting time, where we have both grown and changed, where our daughter has gone from a lanky 9 year old to a Dr. of Physical Therapy and our son from a dream to high schooler. Jobs have changed, friends have come and gone, we’ve faced a number of challenges and the creep of time is never ending. Yet, today our marriage is a strong as it was on that very special day 16 years ago.

I don’t know where I would have been if I never meet her, but I do know I would not be where I am today without her. The fact she’s put up with me for all this time says a great deal about her, don’t you think? ;)

I love you honey. Happy anniversary

Security.Cryptography.dll & Security.Cryptography.Debug.dll from the CLR Security Team (with full source)

2008-07-10T14:46:00.001-07:00

CodePlex - CLR Security

"Introduction

Welcome to the CLR security team's Codeplex site. On this site you'll find a set of projects that extend the security APIs shipped with the .NET framework to provide additional functionality. We also have some tools to help in debugging security related problems in your code.

Project Description: Security.Cryptography.dll
Security.Cryptography.dll provides a new set of algorithm implementations to augment the built in .NET framework supported algorithms. It also provides some APIs to extend the existing framework cryptography APIs. Within this project you will find:

A CNG implementation of the AES, RSA, and TripleDES encryption algorithms

A CNG implementation of a random number generator

A class that allows dynamically creating algorithms both from this library as well as all of the algorithms that ship with .NET 3.5

An enumerator over all of the installed CNG providers on the current machine

Extension methods that allow access to all of the keys installed in a CNG provider, as well as all of the algorithms the provider supports

...

Project Description: Security.Cryptography.Debug.dll
Have you ever run into an indecipherable cryptographic exception complaining about "Padding is invalid and cannot be removed" when using the .NET Framework's symmetric algorithms? Since nearly all bugs relating to symmetric algorithms tend to result in this same exception, it can be incredibly difficult to track down exactly what went wrong to cause the exception. Security.Cryptography.Debug.dll is a tool that can be used in these circumstances in order to help you figure out the root cause of your cryptographic exception.

..." [Description leached almost in full]

I think more important than the release of these projects and the fact that they were released with source, is the trend behind it.

Microsoft seems to be really "walking the walk." The Microsoft and the DevDiv have been talking allot about being transparent and releasing source where they could. But so far it seems a little patchy. The Scott Gu Secret Ninja Army has been one group that seems, from the outside at least, to be leading the way. But what's important to me is that more groups now seem to be following. For example, the Sandcastle who recently released their source, CLR Security Team releasing these projects and the debug/PDB .Net source reference. Plus the many other teams who also seem to be releasing their source...

This is a very cool trend that I hope continues... Hats off to the teams who have released their source and to those who are working to do the same. You officially rock! :)

(via .NET Security Blog - CLR Security Team CodePlex Site)

Fixed Feeds, Dynamic Feeds and Tagging, oh my… The Visual Studio Gallery gets even more features.

2008-07-10T14:21:00.001-07:00

Anthony @ MS - The Visual Studio Gallery gets a fresh set of features

“Today we released a significant update to the Visual Studio Gallery (visualstudiogallery.com) adding some much needed community features. The latest set of features will help visitors keep up to date on the latest additions to the Visual Studio Gallery and add rich details information about their extension & products.

With the latest update to the site we’ve now added:

Tons of fixed RSS feeds for everything from the recently added & highest rated extensions to feeds for each of the available categories to see the latest updates in specific types of extensions.

Tagging support allowing authors to tag extensions and better describe their products to users.

Dynamic RSS Feeds for each Tag so that any users can subscribe & keep up with new additions.

Dev Center owners can tag common entries and then suck in the feed on your MSDN page to highlight specific extensions.

Ken Levy has this working already on the VSX Dev Center (msdn.com/vsx) landing & community pages.

Authors can now add details about their extensions using either the WSIWYG or new HTML editor.

Support for larger thumbnails lets contributors upload images up to 640 x 480.

Visitors can now click to zoom larger thumbnails to see the full size version.

…” [Post leach level: 80%]

The team behind the Visual Studio Gallery is on a roll with a second cool update in so many months.

The biggies for me are the new fixed and dynamic feeds (“No, you don’t say Greg! We would have never guessed!” ;) Subscribed.

Thanks for the heads up Anthony!

Link to LINQPad – A Dimecast LINQPad Walkthrough

2008-07-10T12:10:00.001-07:00

Dime Casts. Net - # 22 - Introduction to LinqPad

“In this episode we will learn how to use the LinqPad expression evaluator.

LINQPad is more than just a LINQ query tool: it is a code snippet IDE. Instantly execute any C# 3 or VB 9 expression or statement block!” [Description leached in full]

A cool 8 minute cast that walks you through getting started with LINQPad.

If you’ve been wondering what LINQPad is all about then you have to watch this dimecast.

AnkhSVN 2.0 – Free and includes Visual Studio Integration

2008-07-10T09:37:00.001-07:00

damieng - AnkhSVN 2.0 - free Subversion integration with Visual Studio

“The guys over on the AnkhSVN team have acquired new members and burnt the midnight oil to deliver a great 2.0 release with:

Subversion 1.5 merge & tracking support

Wizards to help step through tasks like merging

Now s a source code control package (SCC) for smoother, faster integration

Pending changes window providing change summary

Easier to get up and running with the source

Property editor

Automatic update check

Despite all these great features it's absolutely free and still works with older versions of Subversion and both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008.

…” [Post leach level: 90%]

While I’m a Team Explorer/TFS guy (even for my personal project since it works so well with CodePlex) I know there are a ton of SVN users so thought I’d highlight this. If I were to, or when I do, use SVN, to keep sane I’d want VS integration, which is why caught my eye.

If I didn’t have access to TFS, SVN would be the first version control system I’d give a go and with that AnkhSVN seems like a no-brainer.