Some of you out there have emailed me and expressed interest in knowing a little more on what I do and what is the purpose of this blog and what the heck does it run on? Now I am absolutely amazed that there are people out there reading this. My question to you is, what the heck are you doing reading this, don’t you have work or something to do? Anyways, what can I say, I am a Geek!...
I never knew this but if you want to force a debugger to launch (especially useful when writing a Windows Service for example) you can use System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Launch(); Now I have not tried this myself (yet), but have others? If so, whats the feedback?
Yipeee! I you are a MSDN Universal subscriber - you can download the version they handed out at WinHEC!
In Longhorn MS is looking to add some laptop-specific features designed to make portable machines easy to use as consumer devices such as portable DVD players. They are also looking to add a separate UI that could be “instantly booted up“ to play movies, music, etc. - hence getting you the the experience more comparable to using consumer electronics devices. For someone like me who is mostly on the road, this would be good, if I can cut down to one “device” (i....
Longhorn Milestone 7.2 (M7.2) bits were handed out at WinHEC. Per <strong>Chris sells</strong> , the MSDN subscribes should be seeing this soon. You can check out some of the reviews from the WinHEC participants <strong>here</strong> . I am now rubbing my hands gleefully and eager to get my hands on it - have to wait for it to show up on the subscriber download at MSDN - will need a new HDD then :)....
Quite funny check <strong>it</strong> out if you got the time. :) If you rate the movie, you can get a FREE copy of Visual Basic.NET
In a loosely coupled system (e.g. Service Oriented Architecture i.e. SOA), the dependencies can be either a Real Dependency or an Artificial Dependency. Real dependencies are the services that you need to fulfil your need, this is something that cannot be eliminated or reduced. Artificial dependency on the other hand are the features you need to adhere to in order to consume the services you need. Typically these fall in the categories of platform dependencies, API dependencies, language, etc....
A friend’s (Phil Kerkel) laptop recently got infected with HackerDefender which cost him about a day’s worth of work. Now this seems to be harmless, but something like this invading the system is scary, especially when you have all your data and not to mention in most cases a lot of our client’s data! Basically, these guys use the FTP services installed on Windows machines running on high speed networks (such as DSL/Cable, or University campuses) to they can use that fat pipe to distribute copyrighted material such as films, games and software etc....
If you have had enough of Clippy, check <strong>this</strong> out. Not suitable for those with an aversion to profanity!
Karan found this and you can read about all of it in his blog. But I checked and he is right! Gmail does not show me the time of the “origin” of the email only when gmail got it. So taking Karan’s scenario: Retrieve from external pop3 mailbox 250 new messages Import 250 Messages look at inbox, and you have 250 messages received at the same time (1 min ago) Oh wow!...
Now <strong>this</strong> probably has to fall in the News of the Weird category, I would probably have fallen asleep, drooling on the computer, which would have caused something to short circuit and then blow up the machine, and eventually get the house on fire. Hence, not work losing your house over this.
You probably already heard this, but <strong>Chris Sells</strong> has a new column on MSDN called <strong>Longhorn Foghorn</strong> , that describes each of the “ <strong>Pillars of Longhorn</strong> ” - this is something which IMHO developers would understand and appreicate. In the first article he explains the “Pillars” and then in the next two goes onto build Solitaire. You can download the sample and play with it too.
<strong>Shadowfax</strong> is an interesting set of “Reference Solution” that is being worked on by the PAG group at Microsoft. I think this would be a very important piece in the whole SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) space, with getting bits out the door in a quick and reusable fashion. Basically this is a similar implementation of Indigo in todays technologies (i.e. those that are currently shipping such as .NET). This “unifies” the four messaging options you have today:...
I suddenly started getting an error during boot up on one of my machine and could not figure out what it was, after spending a fair amount of time on google, I found this listing of error codes that I feel was very helpful. You can bookmark this post and use it as your reference. Code Description 01x Undetermined problem errors 02x Power supply errors 1xx System Board Errors 101 System board error - Interrupt failure...
So, somehow I was one of the “dudes” to get a gmail account. Since I have been travelling a lot (on work), I don’t get the time to be online as much - if you have me on one of the IM’s, you know that - since I am online only about 50% of the day. But the point I am getting to, is that I have not had a chance to play with gmail all that much....
I am not sure if I should buy this t-shirt or not? What do you think? :)
OSnews and Aspire were running a <strong>competition</strong> for writing a Development Article where I had submitted an entry on Exception Management in .NET. To my surprise I <strong>won</strong> that (even though there were not too many entries). You can read the article <strong>here</strong> . I will be posting here also probably this weekend.
Microsoft is planning on releasing a Longhorn Refresh to geeks like me at WinHEC next month. I am looking forward to that as there are just too many leaks right now. On an average on a machine with a 1gb of mem, I have to reboot on an average every two hours otherwise the memory workingset get way to huge with all the disk thrashing!
After my <strong>recent post</strong> on spyware, there is an interesting <strong>story</strong> being run by BBC where 90% of technology managers say that there is some kind of “spyware” running on their employees PC to track their browsing habits with 29% of those being installed surreptitiously. The interesting number to me was that about 6% of users believed that the machine they use had been infected by such software. So I guess you should stop reading this now and get back to work....
<strong>ICP DAS USA</strong> has a new PLC coming out that is running on Windows CE.NET 4.2 on a Intel Strong ARM CPU. It can run PC based control software developed with higher languages such as c#, vb.net and embeded c++. This offers the best of both the worlds - PC and PLC. If you like ladder logic you can use ISaGRAF and TraceMode. It also has a builtin VGA, Ethernet, CompactFlash, USB, Keyb and mouse ports (phew) and can use a regular monitor (or touchscreen) to view its HMI....
Karan pointed this one out to me, but <strong>seems</strong> like google is into Mirrors now. <strong>Check</strong> out what “eerhab tima” returns. :)
I posted an article (click here or on the title) on what the Zachman Framework is all about. I find it so surprising that in today’s world, I came across a whole bunch of people who call themselves as “Architects” who have no idea or clue as to what the Zachman Framework is. I am not trying to be critical towards those people, they are probably very smart and know their stuff, but I figured maybe its a time for a crash course....
Today, on one of the computers at home, Meenakshi accidentally installed one of the spy-wares (via a popup - which interestingly was not blocked). This changed the search engine used by IE, installed some toolsbars and opened a whole bunch of popup windows. Also disabled some of the other legit toolbars that were running (MSN, Yahoo, Google, etc.) Anyways, it took me a good 3+ hours to track the bugger down and clean up the whole machine....
Ladies reading this (are there any btw), I am just the messenger, so don’t shoot me. Per my dear friend Karan “…the thing about women is that they wont let u die they will keep u alive, in pain and agony, screaming and shouting, but wont let u fall over the edge…. “. He can be flamed <strong>here</strong> . ;)
<strong>Here</strong> is a very old post I found lying around on my disk by Brian Harry, he was the Product Manager of the CLR team at Microsoft (he might still be, I just don’t know). This is a long and very interesting read on the issue of resource management and the deterministic finalization of .NET. Brian provides the backgorund so most people (who were flaming MS at that time), understand that this is really a hard problem to solve....