Urlograph
Kim Gräsman has a cool URL snipping tool for IE: Urlograph. It shortens URL’s from Amazon, Google, and MSDN so that you can paste them without the unnecessar...
Dell Power Adapter recall
So it turns out that the power adapter that has been on pretty much 24x7 under my desk for the last couple of years is susceptible to overheating and is the ...
CopySourceAsHtml VS add-in
This is definitely one of the easiest to use tools to turn source code into syntax colored HTML. It’s a Visual Studio plug-in. The HTML it generates uses CS...
MSN Music UK
Richard Blewett posts about MSN Music being available in the UK. I’ve been using the UK service for the last few weeks and I’m reasonably impressed. There s...
.NET Developer Books
Mike Taulty has a good selection of book recommendations for a .NET developer to have by their side.
Wanted: Application Development Consultants
I work for a team that is part of Microsoft Services in the UK. We provide consultancy and support to customers specifically related to application developme...
Blogging hiatus
Things have been especially busy on my team over the last few weeks contributing to my lack of reading and hence lack of posting. Now that I’ve got the unrea...
Suzanne Cook on versioning and deploying unmanaged files
Suzanne Cook posts about making an unmanaged DLL part of a managed assembly so that it can be deployed and versioned in the same fashion as other managed as...
Paul Vick on cycling strategies (and programming languages)
I’ve written before about my expectations for the divergence of VB.NET and C# given their different target audiences. Paul Vick takes a view from a slightly...
WS-Security and hashed password stores
Scott Watermasysk asks how he should deal with password validation for UsernameTokens with WS-Security if he has stored his passwords salted and hashed. This...
HTTP protocol violation errors in .NET 1.1 SP1
Dare Obasanjo posts about a change in .NET 1.1 SP1 that can result in errors in RSS Bandit.
Windows Media Player 10 Available Now - Supports MSN Music Beta
Windows Media Player 10 is now available for download. This follows the beta launch of MSN Music yesterday and provides access to browse the catalogue from w...
Visual Studio Beta 1 Refresh with VS Team System now available on MSDN
Make sure you read Rob’s post to see what else you should also download to have the full experience. [ Sam Gentile]
.NET 1.1 SP1 available
Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003 Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Service Pack 1 for other Windows versions
Contract First
Drew Marsh talks about his approach to the contract first development of web services and his answers to Aaron Skonnard’s questions.
They’ve Got (Less) Mail
Sometimes I turn off e-mail for an hour or two so that I can focus and don’t get sidetracked by incoming messages on other topics. Not sure banning e-mail f...
Still kicking
Following in a great tradition, I joined Microsoft at the beginning of June and my blog fell silent. Given the erratic nature of my past blogging frequency, ...
Working at Microsoft
Brad recently blogged about all the new moves people have been making and tomorrow I start my new life.
Chasing the Quest for ASP.NET Scalability
In The Quest for ASP.NET Scalability, Michèle Leroux Bustamante looks at some of the architectural and design decisions that may affect ASP.NET application ...
Keyboard scan codes
Keyboard Scan Codes
EIF vs. log4net
Daniel Cazzulino has written a comparison between the Enterprise Instrumentation Framework (EIF) and log4net.
Boost for Visual C++ Developers
Boost for Visual C++ Developers: Use the C++ libraries developed by the Boost community, and get functionality beyond what’s in the C++ Standard Library.
Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier
Microsoft File Checksum Integrity Verifier is a command line utility that computes and verifies hashes of files.
The divergence begins
10 months ago, I wrote about the expected divergence between C# and VB.NET. I think we’re starting to see the beginning of this:
Deleting autocomplete items
Keith Brown sent out this interesting tip:
Writing code quicker
Today I finally got fed up with writing all those repeated properties for XML serialization and data binding. I decided that I couldn’t wait for code expansi...
Still Getting Things Done
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that, in common with others in the blog community, I was trying out David Allen’s GTD methodology.
SSH/Win32
OpenSSH is a FREE version of the SSH protocol suite of network connectivity tools that increasing numbers of people on the Internet are coming to rely on....
Early Adopter has moved
Scott and Sean have moved their Early Adopter blog away from Radio. It is now here.
The missing pieces
Despite the work going into Whidbey and the associated growth in the .NET Framework, today we’re developing against .NET 1.1 and it doesn’t support everythin...
Spam filtering mail
A couple of months ago I was scouting around for a spam filtering service that would act as an SMTP relay and filter out spam into a separate mailbox. The p...
Salt with your hash?
If you are using a hash to hide the value of a password then it is a good idea to throw in a salt so that two people with the same password will have differe...
Orange SPV headset adapters
Good review of Orange SPV SmartPhone audio adapters.
New ActiveSync builds
I’ve been struggling with a few connection problems trying to sync my SmartPhone to Outlook in recent weeks but since I was already running ActiveSync 3.7.1 ...
Really Getting Things Done
It’s been some weeks since Scoble mentioned attending a David Allen seminar. He made a few follow-up posts and I was initially sceptical. However, with his a...
VS6 Service Pack 6
Microsoft Service Pack 6 for Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C++ 6.0 with Visual SourceSafe 6.0d addresses known issues with Visual Basic 6.0, Visual C++ 6.0 and V...
Using IDisposable - not just for disposing
Eric Gunnerson: When we decided the using statement, we decided to name it “using” rather than something more specific to disposing objects so that it could...
A bridge too far?
Joshua Allen has a nice post about data normalisation. He suggests that sometimes it is necessary for performance and scalability reasons that you don’t ful...
Web services for instant messaging?
I’ve been interested in Instant Messaging and Presence for some time now. A number of protocol groups were spawned from the IMPP effort including XMPP, an XM...
Session based ViewState is hard
In a well reasoned follow-up post, Scott Hanselman explains why storing ViewState in an ASP.NET Session isn’t as easy as it first appears. Amongst other goo...
Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek Talk Longhorn
A great interview going behind the technology to the personalities involved in the Windows User Experience team at Microsoft. [via Chris Sells]
Managed IFilter sample
Andrew Cencini: In this article, I will not focus as much on the fairly extensive ‘baggage’ that is involved in supporting the IFilter interface (there are m...
Comparison of features that are included in Windows SharePoint Services and in SharePoint Portal Server 2003
830320: This article lists and compares the features that are included in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Ser...
Even the Texans wouldn’t be so bold
Joel on Software: There’s UCS-4, which stores each code point in 4 bytes, which has the nice property that every single code point can be stored in the same ...
Individual Ownership Destroys Encapsulation
Keith Ray: …because everyone is afraid to modify other’s classes, their own classes become kitchen-sinks full of stuff that really belongs elsewhere – this ...
Concise VB.NET?
Okay, VB.NET has a more concise syntax for checking reference equality without calling out to Object.ReferenceEquals:
16-bit compatability and other stuff
Raymond Chen: Imagine if somebody took away your current editor and gave you a new one with different keybindings. “But the new one is better.”
The rights and wrongs of ASP.NET
In reply to this:
Ah, the desktop window
Raymond Chen slaps the wrists of developers who’ve ever used the GetDesktopWindow() call to populate the window handle parameter of some API call or other (...
Interplanetary Roadside Assistance
Spirit fell silent, alone on the emptiness of Mars, trying and trying to reboot. And its human handlers at JPL seemed at a loss to help, unable to diagnose a...
To STAThread or not?
Craig describes tracking back a nasty bug that turned out to be interop related and due to missing the [STAThread] attribute from his Main(). On the other h...
InfoPath SP-1 Preview
LauraJ: Exciting news here about the InfoPath 2003 SP-1 preview that you can download here.
Architect, Developer, or Mathematician?
Michael Platt: I have done a ton of interviewing of architects and typically look for this simulated annealing in their problem solving approach using a num...
Theory vs. Practicality
Mike Taulty: …when I went to University (here, starting around 15 years ago) we did some practical computing work but the emphasis was on computing theory. S...
Distributed data for security
Robert Hurlbut continues the thread about distributed computing with reference to data security. The thrust of the piece is about providing additional secur...
Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe attachments
I’ve created a new version of my Outlook Attachment Security Unlock Applet that works with Outlook 2003.
The Craftsman Series
Craig points to The Craftsman Series. I also read and enjoyed these articles after a recent recommendation.
Life can be good with VMware
Jon Kale talks about how, even when work sucks, life can be good with VMware and a dose of Snapshot and Revert. I think my experiment with Virtual PC 2004 ...
Xml Serialization fans step forward
Scott Hanselman: I am a fan of XmlSerialization, and I’m a fan of anything that makes my job easier. We’re using the hell out of XmlSerialization on a proje...
Distributed security
Robert Hurlbut follows up Sam Gentile’s post about distributed development. There’s not much I can argue with here. In my response yesterday, I mentioned se...
No runtime version of InfoPath
Despite my initial scepticism, and what I consider to be a lack of direction from Microsoft about how best to utilise InfoPath, I’ve been bitten by the InfoP...
Where the tiers live
Sam Gentile writes about how he feels that developers don’t get the distributed paradigm when developing in .NET and that the documentation and literature do...
How clean is SOAP?
The February 2004 issue of Communications of the ACM includes an article entitled How clean is the future of SOAP? (sorry, you have to be a member or have a ...
Best FTP Tool?
Scott Watermasysk is Looking For the Best FTP Tool:
HTML as form content
The HTMLEditor control is a wrapper for MSHTML, the rendering portion of Internet Explorer (and IE’s largest single component). It is written in C#. Unlike t...
Developing with InfoPath
A couple of weeks ago, Patrick Logan made reference to one of the PDC sessions on InfoPath saying that it was “Better than previous demonstrations and white...
A custom channel sink to fix the HttpChannel/BinaryFormatter/ASP.NET host bug
Richard Blewett writes about a custom channel sink to solve the problem where you get strange remoting error messages from a SerializationException about fo...
Just Links
Brad points to Microsoft’s How To: Secure Your Developer Workstation document. Sam notes the Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability p...
Publishing with FrontPage 2003
I’ve updated my site so that I can publish general pages (non-blog posts) using FrontPage 2003. Looking back, I guess I used to look down on FrontPage users ...
Blogging and the future of USENET
I’ve been making occasional posts to this blog for almost 2 years now - I started at the beginning of March 2002. At that time, I was about as enthused about...
Tools towards .NET management
In his post about the coming year, Tim Sneath gives his list of hurdles that he thinks must be addressed in order to achieve critical adoption of .NET: