I spoke at the Queensland MSDN User Group last night on WPF. The focus last night was on “lessons learned building a real-world WPF application“, (an app which I hope to release in beta in the next few weeks). The turn-out was quite good, especially given it was the first meeting of the year. It’s good to see the interest in WPF growing. Although I was a little dis-jointed at the beginning I think the session went OK. »
I was amazed by the angle taken by this SMH story - “Microsoft tried to doctor wikipedia”. Microsoft percieved inaccuracies and bias (something that goes against wikipedia’s vaulted neutral point of view) in an entry on wikipedia, asked a 3rd party expert to give their input, and offered to pay them for their time. Said expert did not need approval for Microsoft regarding the content, and MS actively encouraged the expert to disclose their involvement. Clearly my moral compas must be totally busted ‘cause I don’t see the issue.
I was investigating a spike in the number of context switches/second that was observed during some performance testing of an ASP.NET web application. During my investigation around this topic I found a number of entries from Microsoft on MSDN and Tech-Net that essentially said the same thing - “if you see a high number for this counter you should investigate further”. So what is “high” exactly? “ASP.NET Performance Monitoring, and When to Alert Administrators” (a useful source of performance counter information) does slightly better: Context Switches/sec. »
Dan alerted me to some interesting re-entrant behaviour he was seeing in an application ported from .NET framework 1.1 to .NET 2. I did some digging and was able to write this fairly innocent looking program: using System;using System.Diagnostics; namespace TraceListenerTest{ class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { //Trace.Listeners.Add(new TestListener()); Trace.Write(“this is a test”); Console.ReadLine(); } } class TestListener : TraceListener { public TestListener() { TraceListenerCollection l = Trace. »
Now that Dominic has changed jobs I really needed to learn something about this new internet company called Google. To that end I read the google story by David A. Vise. It gave a nice overview of the history of the company, and some discussion of its future directions in biology. One thing that I noticed but thought was a little inaccurate (possibly unintentionally) was in regard to a discussion of Google’s “20% time”. »
My (slightly melted) ASUS VX1 gets a not-too-shabby 3.5 on the WEI. Not bad for a notebook. .score, { font-weight:bold; font-decoration:none; font-size: x-large; cursor: hand; background-image: url(http://www.shareyourscore.com:80/images/button-blue.png); color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana, Arial; width: 80px; height: 80px; background-position: center center; vertical-align: middle; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-align: center; } 3.5 »
Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone. I had a great Christmas - it was nice to see Patrick and Dominic again after a long while. I received a number of cool presents, including a lovely Das Keyboard which I’m typing this on. I can type fine on it when I don’t look at the keys - when I look down doubt creeps in and I start to struggle a little. »
Not everyone has fast broadband. Even the most ardent geeks sometimes mistakenly choose places to live that can’t get great connections, and those folk won’t have the same snappy experience you as a developer have when surfing 127.0.0.1. For this reason sometimes it pays to use your applications for a little while under restricted bandwidth. While there are some really cool (and expensive) appliances and applications that can simulate whole (slow) network topologies complete with upstream and downstream packet loss and latency in a single box those aren’t the kind of tools you can quickly pick up and use. »
did u see the post by doug mahugh on this
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2007/01/23/interesting-times.aspx