Last week I was traveling.  I came home to find that the drive on my HP SmartMedia Home Server had died.

Steps were fairly simple to get the server back up and running, but I did have one problem with configuring remote access.  Here is the process that I followed:

1. Bought 2 identical 3tb drives.
2. Installed the two drives into HomeServer.
3. Uninstalled the HomeServer Console and the Windows Media Extender.
4. Ran the HP Recovery DVD… for some reason I had to copy it to my hard drive to get it to work.  It failed the first time I ran it from the DVD drive. It basically walks you through the steps for recovery and then executes the rest unattended.
5. After the OS is installed, make sure you keep going back to Windows Update until there is no more updates left to install.  When I tried to register my domain with Windows HomeServer I kept getting:
   
   An unexpeced error has occured communicating with the Windows Live Domains service. 80000190

This was resolved by repeating the Windows Update process until there was no more updates… then configuring the domain name in Settings –> Remote Access –> Domain name

Interesting tool with an API to take snapshots of your website, which converts them into DeepZoom tiles that can be displayed on multiple devices.

Looks like there is a number of new goodies to play with from Microsoft.

This is a nice example and gives you the basics of game building on Windows 7 Phone.  It is a play on Angry Birds, an addictive game by Rovio. 

I have been working on StickerValue.com to learn the new Razor View engine introduced in MVC 3.  It looks like now I can start playing with MVC4 and bring the site to mobile devices.

I was taking a look at the 4.5 .NET Framework docs and it was really happy to see a generic WeakEventManager.  I was hoping for a more ergonomic API… but it looks like we are going to be stuck with the AddHandler / RemoveHandler syntax.  I was hoping they would get a little more fancy and supply a short-cut syntax much like what we use for subscribing and unsubscribing from .NET events.

This post is related to helping someone on the MSDN forum to try to find a memory leak in their application.  Others may find the technique useful for detecting memory leaks.

Here is the forum thread:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/268462f3-ec45-4507-996e-70fb1f00d68f

This is a handy little LINQ extension I use all of the time to recurse through IEnumerable<T> object graphs. 

          
            /// <summary>
            ///
Traverses the specified source.
            /// 
            ///var
total =
            /// Application.Current.Resources.MergedDictionaries.Recurse<ResourceDictionary>(
            ///
obj => obj.MergedDictionaries);
            /// </summary>
            ///
<typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
            /// <param
name="source">Root object.</param>
            /// <param
name="fnRecurse">The function used in recursion</param>
            ///
<returns></returns>
            public
            static IEnumerable<T>
Recurse<T>(this IEnumerable<T> source, Func<T,
IEnumerable<T>> fnRecurse) { foreach (T item in source)
{ yieldreturn item; IEnumerable<T>
seqRecurse = fnRecurse(item); if (seqRecurse != null)
{ foreach (T itemRecurse in Recurse(seqRecurse,
fnRecurse)) { yieldreturn itemRecurse;
} } } }
        

Jason Bock just posted the sessions for TCCC8.  Looks like some interesting material… looks like there is going to be content on developing for Win Mo 7.

I stumbled across this looking for for WPF samples.  It looks like they updated the WPF Toolkit.

http://wpf.codeplex.com/releases/view/40535

You can hear about some thoughts on PDC 2009 over on Microsoft Developer Evangelist Jeff Brand’s blog.  He sat down with Rocky Lhotka, Scott Davis and myself in December and we talked about our thoughts on PDC.

http://www.slickthought.net/post/2010/01/07/Spaghetti-Code-Recaps-PDC-2009.aspx

I gave this presentation in St. Louis and Minneapolis last year.  I updated it and gave it to the .NET User Group in Mankato, MN last night.  It now includes a section on MEF (Managed Extensions Framework).

You can download the updated deck and slides below.

Code and Deck