Exception Management is a topic near and dear to me personally, primarily because of the lack of understanding of most developers (that I have come across). There is an interesting change in the .NET 2.0 CLR on how it manages unhandled exceptions in a thread. If you write multi-threaded apps then this is important for you to understand. If you don’t write multi-threaded apps today, but I presume you would soon, then this is a good learning exercises. ...

Thanks to Wai for pointing this out, this is a rock song (I think) dedicated to Developers, you can download the songs in both mp3 and wma in various bit rates and they also have the lyrics; not bad I would say. :)

I got this via one of our communities internally at Avanade, and I have to admit it is pretty darn good, not sure why MS is now allowed to air it.

If you read the Ten Essential Tools Visual Studio Add-Ins Every Developer Should Download Now in MSDN Mag, then you are aware of CopySourceAsHTML which unfortunately works for only Visual Studio 2003. But if you are using VS 2005, fear not as Derick Bailey has updated the add-in . There is no installer (yet), but you can download the code and build it , which will locally also install the add-in. ...

I don’t know if I should laugh or be worried (when I fly into Delhi next month), but it seems the brand-spanking-new ILS landing system for Delhi Airport is not only setup correctly, there is no one trained to use it (yet), with some people in the government claiming success. It seems like a page out of Dilbert and seems like déjà vu when it comes to IT projects. ...

Seems like BBC is answering exactly the same question, and if you ask me they got too much free time on their hands.

It is quite interesting to see how many people don’t understand the basics of threading, while it is a difficult topic (especially to debug), and it is not the silver bullet for all the problems, but it sure is quite handy for certain things. With the inevitable shift to multi-core CPU’s and the release of Vista to take better opportunity of these extra power, more applications in the future should be ready to exploit them. Which makes it quite important for the average developer to start playing and understanding this. ...

Its snowing here in London right now - first snow if the season and its big flakes! Yippppeee!

Check out the Software Engineering Proverbs , oh how true they are :)

Adrian’s Rojapot has published the ultimate desktop graphics card comparison guide with over 240 cards being compared, grouped by Vendor and 15 points of comparison.

Check out the two Chinese students singing ; I do like the kid at the back who is too busy to be bothered. :)

As a few of you had requested below are links to some screen shots for the Belkin router. Current Status Login Screen LAN Settings DHCP Client List WAN Connection Type DNS MAC Address Wireless - Channel and SSID Security Use as Access Point MAC Address Control Firewall - Virtual Servers Firewall - Client IP Filters Firewall - DMZ Firewall - DDNS WAN Ping Blocking Parental Control Restart Router Restore Factory Defaults Save/Backup Current Settings Restore Settings Firmware Update System Settings ...

If you are writing an Indigo service and you can an error for something like the one shown below, then essentially you change the interface (i.e. your contract) you implemented in Indigo (now WCF), but forgot to change the interface in the web.config. <endpoint contract\="MY-TYPE-HERE" binding\="wsHttpBinding"/> Could not resolve type IMyService, contract cannot be created. Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: Could not resolve type IMyService, contract cannot be created. ...

I had send an email to a friend and based on the email bouncing I know I had the old email address; but this is one of the funniest error messages I have receive in a long time, it did put a smile on the face. Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mantramail.com. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out. ...

Beware, there is a new IM worm that promises a picture of Santa, but instead delivers a rootkit! The initial message will appear to come from someone on your IM list and will include “santaclause.aol.com/a?|” DONT click on that link! The worm is called IM.GiftCom.All. Read more here .

If you introduce your wife as “ [email protected] ” If you have more toys than your kids If you need a checklist to turn on the TV If you can remember 7 computer passwords but not your anniversary If you think that when people around you yawn, its because they didn’t get enough sleep If your wife hasn’t the foggiest idea what you do at work If you spend more on your home computer than your car Read more here . ...

Well it has been a week+ and the Belkin Pre-N Wireless Router I got has been humming away merrily, no issues so far - zilch, nada, nothing, null, unlike the Linksys piece-of-crap-good-for-nothing-junk ! Awesome! Have been very happy. I would highly recommend it. The first thing I did was update the firmware (it also has an auto-update feature, but more on that some other time). And once it was configured and up and running, did not need anything else. ...

While I totally agree with the concept of combacting rootkit with rootkit when it comes to the new generation of spyware, etc. (remember Sony’s need for control fiasco ), but my concern is there are many lazy programmers (yours truly included) out there and most companies are in a hurry to ship a product out the door without testing as thoroughly as one should, which means when dealing at the Kernel level for most end-users it could be a experience of more BSOD’s . ...

As part of the settlement with Sun, all the products containing MSJVM will be discontinued from MSDN Subscriber download in late December (which means any day now). Here is the list of products you won’t be able to download after this: Microsoft Application Center 2000 Microsoft BizTalk Server 2000 Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 Microsoft Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit Microsoft DCOM for Windows 95 v1.1 Microsoft Embedded Visual Tools 3.0 (2002 Edition) Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 & 2000 Microsoft FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions Microsoft Handheld PC 2000 SDK Microsoft Infrared Communications for Windows 95 DDK Microsoft ISA Server 2000 Microsoft Plus! 98 Microsoft Site Server 3.0 Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 Microsoft SNA Server 4.0 Service Packs 3 & Service Pack 4 Microsoft System Management Server 2.0 Microsoft Visual C++ (Alpha Systems) Microsoft Visual FoxPro 6.0 Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 6.0c & 6.0d Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 Microsoft Windows 2000 Microsoft Windows 2000 DDK Microsoft Windows 98 Microsoft Windows 98 DDK Microsoft Windows CE SDKs & DDKs Microsoft Windows CE Toolkit for Visual C++ 6.0 Microsoft Windows ME Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 DDK System Stress for Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 & Windows 2000 If you don’t have these on already, I would suggest downloading them and keeping them now. More information on this can be found here . ...

Here are a few more DOS pings from last night, I think these are poor souls who don’t know they have infected machines (or lets hope so). There is one (218.201.43.148) from China belonging to someone called Ming Chen in Chongqing, might have to drop his/her ISP an email. inetnum: 218.201.40.1 - 218.201.43.254 netname: CQ-CHONGQINGYIDONG country: CN descr: Chong Qing Yi Dong IDC Yong HU descr: 40-43 Duan Qi Yong ...

This is the not the first time this has happened, but in case you were seeing a few of my previous posts, no I am not listening to the same song by Bon Jovi (in a loop), but the media player blogging plug has bugs! It for some reason is stuck on that - does not matter even if I have Media Player even open or not. So its turned off for now, don’t have the time to find a fix. If someone out there knows a solution let me know. (BTW, I am running Media Player 10). ...

Well if you wondered what happens in a club, then check out this video (2.51mb) . :)

More news on Google, they have released two new extensions for Firefox, one is called Google Safe Browsing which detects any phishing and spoofing sites, and the other is for Blogger Web Comments - so you can see what others are saying about the page you are on, and even blog directly to your blog (running on blogger of course). ...

Cross posting from All about Interop ; System.Transactions has two timeout values that you can specify in configuration files. The default timeout for System.Transactions transactions is 1 minute. You can set it in either app config, web config, or machine config. (You can also set the timeout for a particular transaction programmatically within the application, by using one of the appropriate constructors for TransactionScope or CommittableTransaction). Setting the default timeout to 30 seconds in config code looks like the following. ...

You might have heard and seen this already, but GMail has has a few updates, now it supports RSS feeds and you can get it on your mobile/cell phone. Check out details here . [Listening to: I Am - Bon Jovi - Have A Nice Day (03:54)]