I heard that the framework 2.0 version of the SSCLI was scheduled for relase today. I liked the framework 1.1 version of the SSCLI - being able to browse the actual source code for many of the class libraries very handy. Reflector does a great job of decompiling the framework code but for (mostly) more sensical local variable names, and COMMENTS! you can’t beat the actual source. »
I just finished reading an interesting post from Dax Pandhi’s weblog comparing WPF and flash. Dax’s company Nukeation Studios have designed a number of popular .NET sites including the franklins.net and dotnetrocks (and pretty much everything else public facing) for Carl Franklin, hanselminutes etc. I’ve always been curious about how WPF stacked up compared to flash, since I’ve never programmed in it. The big selling point that I knew of was WPF is hardware-accelerated. The big selling point for flash looked like the ability to run on different platforms, and a large base of users with the flash player already installed. »
Like lots of other people I was unable to attend Mix06 because of project commitments. Fortunately the sessions from Mix06 will be available to watch via streaming in about a month according to this posting on the mix site. I can’t wait. I really enjoyed the PDC 2005 material I watched, and I expect Mix will probably be no different. »
Some months ago I was chatting to my good friend Darren Neimke - we were discussing SnippetCompiler, a nifty little utility from Jeff Key for writing and running very short .NET programs. I told Darren I’d started using SnippetCompiler fairly regularly, to which Darren replied something like “why not just use notepad and CSC.exe”. Why not indeed. Since then I’ve adopted Darren’s minimalist attitude and regularly use these two whenever I need a small test application for some purpose. »
Somebody at Microsoft recently gave me one of these tablet guys, with the proviso that I “make everybody want one”. Its hard not to like this squishy, smiling guy that looks a bit like a blue TV with arms holding a pen. You can think of him as the more powerful, more mature brother to the origami. And better yet, he likes WPF. This photo is proof. Maybe he can’t wait for the warm inner glow the previously under-utilized video card inside him will bring, as it renders beautiful anti-aliased rotating text-boxes on 3D surfaces. »
Yes, you too can 0wn a Mac in around 30 minutes 0wn32 must provide their own unpublished exploits that haven’t been patched by apple to take advantage of this offer. »
I like sniffing packets, and like to use ethereal to do it, however I always forget the syntax for writing a packet capture filter for capturing on multiple ports. I’m blogging it here so I don’t ever have to search for it again. port 80 or port 8080 How did I ever forget something so simple? »
Apparently Sun (you remember them…the dot in dotcom) have taken out some prominent advertising for OpenOffice on the route between Seattle and Redmond. One of the ads alludes to OpenOffice being “Compatible with expensive, closed, memory-loving software”. I found this quite amusing given benchmarks like this one between the two office suites. Sun –; »
I’ve been spending most of my spare time experimenting with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). One thing that I think is lacking from the WPF world is a sense of community - there are lots of individuals (mostly inside MS, but some outside also) putting up great tips on how to do things, but no sites dedicated to WPF to aggregate that. Whenever somebody showed an interest in WPF and wanted to get started invariably I had to tell them “I’ll email you a link” because there was not an easy-to-remember URL that always pointed to the details needed to download the latest bits. After getting sick of emailing URLs to cool stuff to myself, and copying XAML snippets into text files I decided I needed somewhere to gather all this stuff together, and LearnWPF.com was born. Sadly creating a community web-site for a rich-client technology meant downing my well-liked XAML for something far less exotic. Fortunately I was able to leverage all the great work Darren has done on Single User Blog V2 to create LearnWPF.com. Rather than going for something heavy like CommunityServer I wanted something light and simple that I could customize with impunity. SUBV2 is built around the new WebPart infrastructure in ASP.NET 2.0 (copied from Sharepoint), and designed to be highly skinnable. I was pleased to see after a week of CSS fiddling (and making pretty gradients in the GIMP) I was able to come up with a site that looks almost identical on Mozilla v1.5 and IE6. I was amazed when the site gave a fairly accurate rendering on Safari (given the number of Safari CSS problems my current team has had to deal with during my “real“ work). The “look” for LearnWPF.com is based around the simple premise that you can never have too much brown or orange on the screen at one time, and that everything looks better when you put gradients in the background. I’d like to thank Dominic, Nik, Grant, Darren and Adrian for their feedback on my “look and feel”, I ignored most of their well-founded advice and went with more and more brown and orange. Currently there is not a great deal of material on the site, but I will be working on more tips during the week, and I have already organized for some other contributors also. If you’re reading this and wondering how you can get your WPF goodness up onto LearnWPF.com then get in touch. When I can tear myself away from WPF again to do some ASP.NET coding I am going to add an aggregated WPF feed to the site, exposing an RSS feed of all the WPF-centric weblogs that I know of in a single location. I’ll be continuing to post here - LearnWPF will be more “WPF tutorial” focused while my site will continue to be more “rants and pictures of me in wrestling masks” focused.
I’m blogging this so I don’t have to remember it (google searches never seem to turn up the right answer). Start Biztalk: net start BTSSvc{YOURGUID-GOES-HERE-1234-567890ABCDEF} Stop Biztalk: net stop BTSSvc{YOURGUID-GOES-HERE-1234-567890ABCDEF} You can find out what GUID you need to use here by doing “tasklist /svc” from the command-line. »