June 2006 Entries
Everyone in the know seems up in arms about the shelving of Microsoft
WinFS. I'm pretty upset about it too. I've been playing with it off
and on since the first build I got my hands on. It's slick. Very
slick. This "productizing" thing is annoying. Do they really mean
"profitizing?" Plenty of people think that this is the case.
According to the original post on the WinFS blog, parts of it will be
canibalized for SQL Server and ADO.NET. The idea of less structured
data in SQL Server is certainly important and needs to be there, but
this is hardly a replacement for WinFS. Adding features to...
So I got the error: "The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process." This has got to be one of the most hated errors in Visual Studio 2005 since it's often so ambiguous! No file was mentioned, just the message above. This was deploying to a Windows Mobile device (well, emulator anyway). I double-checked the file, restarted Visual Studio, no dice. Finally I got the bright idea to simulate a soft reset on the device itself. The was actually on the device itself, not on the dev machine. This makes sense. I had left...
Every so often, someone asks about a precompiled version of an application from my article series. I should have done this in sync with the columns, but oh well. I'm going to try to get each one published via ClickOnce now. Here's the link to my Wallpaper Cycler. It's a relatively simple application to scan a folder, and optionally its subfolders, in order to select an image to show on the desktop. You can specify a command-line argument of "-autoclose" in order to have it change the background and exit. This might be useful on system startup. I should probably...
Well, I got my invitation. I have one album online right now: http://picasaweb.google.com/ariankulp. It's nice so far, but hardly a Flickr-killer at this point. I don't see tagging yet (though labels or keywords from Picasa might filter through). I tried creating an album in Picasa, added some photos, then uploaded them. From the web site I added captions, then downloaded them back to Picasa. I thought/hoped that the new captions would import, but leaving the rest of the album alone. It looks like it had no effect on the local version. I'll keep messing with it. It's a simple, elegant...
Wow, I can't believe howe much trouble I've had getting search to work in Windows Vista! Based on a quote from MSDN:
"You can use new Windows Vista APIs to query items in the Windows Search Engine. Your application can use the OLEDB/ADO from managed or unmanaged code to issue queries using a SQL-like syntax. In return, your application receives an OLEDB Recordset where the columns correspond to properties in the Windows Metadata System, for example, System.Photo.FNumber." -- http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/prodinfo/what/discoverable/default.aspx
I cannot find documentation on this feature anywhere! I have a sample from the December CTP that uses a weird OLE DB provider...
In case anyone is interested, as part of updating my blog, I had a need to copy my Access database to SQL Server. Since GoDaddy doesn't allow remote access using Enterprise Manager (well, at all...) I had to perform all operations from their own web-based interface or from code. Their interface supported queries, but didn't support linked servers or OPENROWSET so I was forced to resort to code. My simple solution was to create a table data copier. Specify the host and destination datasource (using OLE DB connection strings), the table name, and optionally, a sort by column name (probably...
Am I missing something?! Is it possible that the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 (CF) has fewer mobility features than the full-size framework?! I wrote a two-part article on mobility for Coding 4 Fun (check my links along the side) and really enjoyed playing with the network and power features added from 1.1 to 2.0. Now I'm working on Pocket PC development for a project and it looks like you still need to use P/Invoke in order to determine this information. Think about it -- someone needs to go through the BCL list and decide which classes are worth porting to...
Wow! What a cool idea (if it works). Google has a new add-on to Firefox that makes it completely location-less. When Firefox starts up it synchronizes your bookmarks, cookies, history, etc. This has the potential to make your browser experience much more seamless. I hate rebuilding machines all the time, and something like this could make a big difference at least within the browser. I am currently using GBookmarks which is a great extension for viewing Google Bookmarks directly from a Firefox menu. Before that extension came out I didn't see much in using the service since who wants to...
You may have noticed some changes to my blog recently. Not much on the surface, but a lot taken in whole. I upgraded my back-end database from Access to SQL Server (finally!) and upgraded my blog software itself (also finally!). I've been on .Text .95 from the start and I've always liked it, but it's lacking in some ways. The biggest problem is that it isn't supported. No active development community means you are on your own! I mad a few small changes to mine, but I didn't have the energy to do much more.Phil Haack got this project going...
I've been running Vista for a few builds now, most recently getting updated to Beta 2. It's fairly common for me to need to mount ISO images of CD's/DVD's. My favorite, Daemon Tools hasn't worked in recent builds so I was forced to look elsewhere. It turns out that elby Virtual CloneDrive is free, and works great in Vista. It's possible that Daemon Tools now works in Beta 2, but their last release that promised Vista support never installed properly so I felt a bit let down. If you need to mount an ISO in Vista, give it a try!
Update...