Content tagged with [.net] on DuncanMackenzie.net

ImageShack Toolbar causes incorrect results from ASP.NET's browser checking code

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:09:00 GMT

We recently updated a few of our web sites with code that would provide a 'nicer' experience for browsers that were not compatible with the ASP.NET ATLAS (AJAX) scripts we were using. For some reason though, a few users who were running a fully compatible browser (Firefox 2.0.0.*), were seeing the no-script experience. We were puzzled, but one of the users figured out that their ImageShack toolbar might be causing the problem. Sure enough, after I installed that same toolbar myself I was able to test and confirm that it truly is causing the confusion.

Using a little test page, http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/services/browserinfo.aspx (feel free to use it for your own testing), I received the following results for Firefox 2.0.0.11 on Vista before installing the ImageShack toolbar.

Request.Browser

.Type: Firefox2.0.0.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 2.0.0.11
.Browser: Firefox
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

After installing the toolbar, I get this:

Request.Browser

.Type: Mozilla1.8.1.11
.Platform: WinNT
.Version: 1.8.1.11
.Browser: Mozilla
.Crawler: False
.EcmaScriptVersion: 1.4
.IsMobileDevice: False
.MobileDeviceManufacturer: Unknown
.MobileDeviceModel: Unknown
.Beta: False

Note the version change and the change in Request.Browser.Browser, certainly enough to throw off our atlas-compatibility check. I haven't figured out the appropriate fix for this yet, but it is nice to at least have one possible explanation as to why valid browsers are sometimes seeing our 'no script' experience.

Code Metrics in Visual Studio 2008 and the EvNet project

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:24:00 GMT

I don't know if this is good or bad, but I thought it was neat that I could right-click the main project (excluding all our client script and HTML) that runs behind on10.net, pick code metrics and see cool #s like "23,442 lines of code" :)

Lately though, I've seen us reducing that number while adding features, so this might the highest result I'll ever see for this project :)

The Viewport Meta Tag and the iPhone

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 08:55:00 GMT

I've been fiddling around with mobile interfaces for both my personal site and for the various sites I work on (http://on10.net, http://channel9.msdn.com, amongst others) and I noticed the use of <meta name="viewport" content... /> on some other mobile sites. A quick search and I found a great discussion of the viewport meta tag on furbo.org (the apple developer site provides the same info in a more reference format). Turns out this simple meta tag helps Mobile Safari determine how best to scale your site for the smaller screen of the iPhone (relative to a desktop that is). I don't have an iPhone, or an iPod touch for that matter (I gather the experience would be similar... if you don't want to get a full blown cell account I'd suggest the 'touch' for testing purposes), although I found a great testing site for the iPhone (best viewed with Safari 3.0 on your desktop).

Looking for good examples of Mobile Interfaces

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 10:39:00 GMT

I'm part of a dev team that builds blog/forum software and I've been thinking about mobile interfaces lately... so I'm trying to find a good example of site like ours that provides a good (enjoyable, useful and usable) mobile interface... one that will work across a variety of browses. It seems 37 Signals is thinking about the same thing these days and they've made a blog post looking for exactly the same thing I am, examples of good mobile interfaces. I'm looking for sites that are some combination of text and video blogging and are usable via a relatively modern phone. I found a lot of the comments to that post to be completely unhelpful... because they were focused on sites that are specific to the iPhone! Building an interface for the iPhone is not a bad idea, but I certainly wouldn't try to do that until after we had a good general purpose interface for a much wider variety of mobile devices. I did find a few interesting sites though, from the comments and from another site (Brian Cantoni's list of good mobile sites at http://cantoni.mobi/):

http://mobile.seriouseats.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
http://bbcriver.com/ (seems like it would benefit from some paging, but I could be wrong... is one big page better on a phone than paging?)
http://m.joystiq.com/

Of course, all of these map well to the home page of our site(s) (like on10.net or Channel 9), I wonder if there are any good examples for a web forum? I'm pretty sure that a lot of our users would like to be able to view Channel 9's Coffeehouse on their mobile device, and off hand I don't know what the ideal experience for that would be.

On a related note, Brian Cantoni (the author of that list of good mobile sites) has a great series of blog articles about testing your web applications across all major smartphone platforms.

I'm planning to get rid of setting our Theme in ASP.NET

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 22:46:00 GMT

The auto inclusion of all our CSS files has finally become too annoying. We'll still use the app_theme directory, as it is a handy way to store our stuff... but I'm really hoping to not set the theme, and to add the appropriate CSS for the situation (mobile vs desktop for example) while also combining our CSS files and 'minifying' them all through a simple 'css.ashx' style handler. This should make it easier to do that combining at run time, while leaving them nice and separate for debug and development purposes.

We might still have it set in development mode though, if it is necessary to get some of the editor awareness of our CSS... but I think we can make it work.

Death to app_themes!

The code for my blog site is now available on codeplex.com

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 05:56:00 GMT

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very highly supported and recommended by many folks), if you are in the market for some free blogging code.

The Channel 9/Channel 10 team is hiring

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 17:16:00 GMT

Hey folks, I work as the dev lead for Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online and other sites. We build community sites for Microsoft using video, audio and text blogging and we build them using the latest .NET technologies. If you are into web development, if you have a passion for design and user experience, and if you really rock at AJAX, Javascript, CSS, C# and ASP.NET .... then this is the job for you :)

The Developer and Platform Evangelism Team is hiring a software design engineer to join the team that builds and extends Channel 9, Channel 10 and more. Our sites build a two way interaction between our customers and Microsoft using video as the primary communication tool. In the past several years we have built several additional sites and our network has grown in both traffic and content, and as a result we are looking for an additional Software Design Engineer to join the team. We are looking for someone who lives and breathes HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX and ASP.NET. The ideal candidate will have skills in all those technologies combined with a passion for design and user experience.

Do you like to ship, takes chances and effect change? Do you want to build cool sites that use Silverlight and Atlas to deliver a great user experience? Then come join our group where you'll find a small dynamic team of folks and you'll swear you are part of startup.
Experience in HTML/CSS, ASP.NET and C# is required and experience with AJAX, SQL, Scrum and Test-Driven Development is highly desired. Experience with Silverlight and/or WPF is not required but it would be great to have.

If you are interested and you meet the requirements, go to the official job listing on the Microsoft careers site and submit your resume!

Internal Microsoft tool, eScrum, is available to the public...

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 00:10:00 GMT

We (the dev team behind Channel 9, Channel 10, Mix Online, and others ...)been doing scrum-ish development for a few sprints now, but we recently switched to using eScrum. This is a set of templates and tools for use with Team Foundation Server and it really rocks. There are few less-than-polished elements about the install and the web interface, but I'm glad they shipped it out for general use.

You can read a good summary of eScrum on the blog 'A Developer's Life', which is also a good resource for lots of other Visual Studio related news.

Need to write a parser of your own?

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 07:41:00 GMT

I haven't had to write a parser since university, but if I had to write one now I'd definitely be checking out Tommy Carlier's 10 part series showing how to write a parser for a demo programming language of his own creation.

If you are wondering where I get my Xbox Live info...

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 08:18:00 GMT

A few people have emailed me or posted comments wondering how I grab the Xbox Info for the Twitter app and for my services.

It is not from scraping and it is not from any publicly available source. I joined the Xbox Community Developer Program (XCDP), which is an official program designed to support folks who are building community sites (forums, reviews, blogs, etc...) around Xbox related topics.

Many folks who want Xbox info, are not working on a large site like the people in the XCDP, which is exactly why I created my service. This way, people who are building a small tool or script, most likely to be used by a small number of folks, can have access to some well formed and easy to use data.

What if you would qualify for the XCDP? Well, at the moment I don't have any direct link for you, but I'll ask around to see if I can find a link or a contact for anyone may qualify and would like to sign up....

Put up a REST API for Xbox Gamertag Data

Sun, 27 May 2007 07:37:00 GMT

My twitter app uses a web service hosted on my site to get all the necessary Xbox Live info.... way more than the twitter app actually uses. This is a SOAP API, located here:

http://duncanmackenzie.net/services/XboxInfo.asmx

I know that some people prefer a more RESTful API though, so I also have another 'page' that you can call with a straight GET request and just pass the gamertag in as a query string parameter:

http://duncanmackenzie.net/services/GetXboxInfo.aspx?GamerTag=Festive+Turkey

Enjoy!

Speeding up your default document on an IIS web server

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:15:00 GMT

Great little post today, something that makes perfect sense but I've never heard it before...

How to speed up your most popular web page

Check out the new Community Bar on on10.net

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 08:15:00 GMT

One of my jobs over the past couple of weeks has been to build a javascript based 'toolbar' that could run across the top of on10.net and show folks headlines aggregated from a variety of Microsoft Community sites. So, along with a bunch of help from Adam and Erik, I managed to get it finished and deployed today. You can see it on top of the page on 10

If it overlaps with the logo for you, try forcing a refresh using ctrl+f5 in IE... or just picking reload/refresh in whatever browser you use... the css had to change to accomodate this new content and the old css often sticks in the cache longer than it should.

Amazon Web Services talk in Winnipeg

Wed, 04 Oct 2006 19:25:00 GMT

I love Winnipeg, but it doesn't normally get all that many developer focused talks... so if you live there and you are interested in .NET based web development, you should really get down to this event.

Winnipeg .NET User Group

Winnipeg, Canada
October 5, 2006 "Bleeding Edge Web Services"
Come hear AWS evangelist Mike Culver showcase some thought-provoking new directions into which Web Services are headed. The presentation will provide an overview of Amazon Web Services, and feature a code demonstration showing how .NET developers are able to easily build managed clients for these services.

The EvNet team is on Channel 9 again

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:01:00 GMT

This time we are shipping the latest update to Microsoft 10, fun stuff... and an example of exactly how far from normal our team can be.

WPF/Avalon seems so easy, it might be time for me to try it out :)

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:13:00 GMT

I was browsing on www.xamlog.com and I found this tutorial on "Reflection using Visual Brush and Opacity Mask", which shows you how to produce this effect:

with very little code/markup.

Hmm... now that I finally have Vista up and running, it might be worth giving it a try.

The on10/Channel 9 Dev team have another dev focused video up

Wed, 16 Aug 2006 16:38:00 GMT

I even got to be the 'preview' image! Check this out to hear a bit more about our design and implementation of on10.net, and for some more info on our plans around on10.net going forward and for moving Channel 9 on to this new code base.

Microsoft Gamefest

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 15:34:00 GMT

Met with Dave Mitchell from the Xbox team today to talk about Microsoft Gamefest. If you are going, drop me a line... I'll be there with a camera along with one or two other folks from on10.net.

Considering Team System? Check out the Team System Customization Toolkit...

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 01:49:00 GMT

Customizing VSTS to work exactly how you or your company needs it to isn't an easy job, but this toolkit should make it easier!

VSTS Customization Toolkit with new Process Template Editor

The Visual Studio Team System Customization Toolkit contains everything you need to graphically manage process templates, work item types and global lists. The latest release, the Process Template Editor, simplifies the customization of VSTS templates with an easy to use GUI. Start customizing today!

Learn a bit about how on10.net was made

Mon, 13 Mar 2006 17:11:00 GMT

Interview with the dev team (including me) is up on Channel 9

Have you tried my RSS editor? Comments?

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 05:50:00 GMT

Ok, so I'm fishing for comments... not compliments at least, but I'm still fishing... I've seen a fair bit of traffic to the install point but not a single email or blog comment about this app... go ahead fire away (and yes, I know that it doesn't do Atom feeds... yet).

Beta versions of the MSDN home page now available...

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 02:33:00 GMT

I've been working (as part of a large team!) on the new platform for MSDN, which is up and running at http://msdn2.microsoft.com... and now you can see prototype versions of the MSDN home page ontop of that same platform. Check it out here [http://beta.msdn.microsoft.com/default.aspx]. The new home page demonstrates some of the personalization/profile features that will end up on the final MSDN site in the near future.

Looks like I coded myself into a corner here...

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 05:00:00 GMT

This is the sort of thing that happens with large development teams, one team codes in 'fixes' that break someone else's work... I don't normally do this all by myself! I updated the Flairmaker to support Atom 0.3, then I updated my feeds to Atom 1.0 ... great.

See the error, laugh at the coder... or will it be fixed by the time you click this?

Just arrived for ASP.NET Connections...

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 03:26:00 GMT

Landed in Vegas for the conference, talk is on Thursday.... I'll be talking about MSDN2.microsoft.com, but more specifically I'll be covering the use of the Virtual Page Provider feature in ASP.NET 2.0, so if that type of thing appeals to you, come by and check it out!

RSS feed authoring for those without blog software or an enjoyment of typing angle brackets

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 04:56:00 GMT

Blogs and blogging software seem to be everywhere these days, and RSS has been a top buzzword for quite some time, everyone and their dog wants to take advantage of this new trend and technology. The problem is, it isn't a simple process to create and maintain a valid RSS file. If you aren't willing to run a complete blogging system or if you aren't capable of hand-editing XML, then you don't have a lot of options. For most of the folks that will read this blog entry, you probably don't have this problem, producing RSS 2.0 wouldn't be much of an issue for a developer, but there are times when we want less technical folks to be able to author their own feeds without any assistance. At MSDN we started thinking about this very problem ourselves recently when we decided that, in addition to all the feeds that come out of our content systems, there was a need to create some small feeds that didn't necessarily fit into our larger content systems. Handing off the task of feed creation to notepad or Front Page wasn't an appealing thought and that path would probably result in a lot of xml editing errors and invalid feeds.

This problem happened to line up with a sample I had been thinking of though, so I wrote a quick app using VC# Express 2005 to try and help out; a Feed Writer that allows you to create new RSS 2.0 feeds, edit existing ones, and even import entries from one feed to another. I stuck to a tried and true UI structure, tree along the left side then entry fields on the right:

This app has been developed without the general user in mind, MSDN/TechNet were the targets and because of that there are some fields in this UI that are only relevant to the needs of those groups. For example, the list of attributes you can see on the lower-right is specific to the needs of MSDN and TechNet, who need to markup the feed entries with the appropriate choices. The "Type" and "HeadlineImage" fields are also specific to MSDN feeds, I'm planning to adapt it to work with 'standard' RSS 2.0 items and the category element to make it more general purpose, but for now I thought I'd show you the version I already have running.

In a rather backwards fashion, I'm going to finish up this as a sample and write the article, now that I've finished the actual practical version of the same system... but it will all work out in the end.

Moved my .Text blog from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 04:11:00 GMT

I only recently noticed that my blog software (.Text 0.95) had atom support built in, so I added a button to my main page, and then I noticed it was Atom 0.3. Since 0.3 was recently deprecated, I updated the Atom generating code to output 1.0 instead and voila;

Much thanks to rakaz's great guide on moving from 0.3 to 1.0, which enabled me to update my code with almost no knowledge of Atom 0.3 or 1.0 :)

Some great podcasts on VB6 -> .NET and more...

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 05:35:00 GMT

I was reading the dotnetjunkies.com newsletter and I spotted these podcasts, a series of them that I have never noticed before, even though they definitely the kind of content I'd be interested in hearing.

Moving to .NET from VB6 and C++
Juval Lowy discusses the different perspectives that VB6 and C++ developers bring to .NET including the challenges each group faces with the technology. (MP3 audio, 16:32 mins.)

VB6 Glass Ceiling
.NET Software Legend Juval Lowy offers his thoughts on the non-linear relationship between VB6 application complexity and developer capabilities in this provocative interview. (MP3 audio, 16:19 mins.)
Perf Stats of the Upgrade Tools
Keith Pleas discusses the performance characteristics of the Upgrade Wizard and VB6 Assessment tool, and Microsoft Product Manager Eugenio Pace describes the status of the VB6 to VB.NET Upgrade guide and availability of the VB6 Assessment tool. (MP3 audio, 13:51 mins.)
.NET Upgrade Metrics and the Migration Assessment Tool
Keith Pleas of Keith Pleas & Associates explains how the new .NET Migration Assessment Tool provides stats across multiple projects to help measure upgrade costs. He also discusses cleaning up dead code before updating and the risks of memory pinning in a managed environment. (MP3 audio, 14:18 mins)
More Pod Casts >>

Added Atom support to the FlairMaker... my version at least

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 05:19:00 GMT

Nick, from "The Coding Monkey" mentioned that he would like to see Atom support in the FlairMaker, so ... having no real reason not to, and having an extra 15 minutes after the kids went to sleep before I started cleaning up the house, I added it...

Of course, I've just added this to my forked version of Kent's original code... so any feature I add that he likes will need to manually added into his version... bad software development practice, but hey we're just playing around here so you should be expecting too much.

Update: I also modified the code to pull the blog's title from the feed (Atom or RSS) and stick it at the bottom. Not that useful of a feature for the Coding 4 Fun version, since it is always pointing at the same feed... but useful for mine if people want to use it for their own feeds

Series of posts about how MSBuild works with VS

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 05:49:00 GMT

Neil Enns of the MSBuild team has released the first of a series of posts about how MSBuild works within Visual Studio, how VS projects are used by MSBuild and basically everything you'd want to know about how the two systems interact.

You can check out all the entries here, in order from most recent to oldest, as they are posted.

Little "Memory" game up on the MSDN Magazine site...

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 01:08:00 GMT

Check it out here...

My old guide to the Updater Application Block is up at a new URL...

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 04:04:00 GMT

Back on the weblogs.asp.net site, I had posted an article on how to setup your application to work with the Application Updater from PAG, but that URL was having issues so I have reposted it up onto this site for anyone who might be looking around for it... http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net/duncanma/articles/2812.aspx

After some discussions with Sam Ruby and others on the FeedValidator mailing list, the MSDN RSS feed validates as is...

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 02:39:00 GMT

In an earlier post, I discussed the fact that the MSDN feeds were failing to validate due to a MIME type that included parameters (charset in this case, like 'text/html ;charset=utf-8'), but I also posted a query about this issue into the listserv for FeedValidator.org. Sam mentioned it on his blog, and then went ahead and updated the validator to recognize a MIME type with parameter as valid.

In the meantime, I updated the MSDN generator to strip out the parameters :), but I still think they are technically valid so I'm glad the feed validates as it is today (with params) and as it will exist in the near future with the MIME types stripped down to just type/subtype.

VB Futures section up on MSDN...

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:32:00 GMT

Now, to me, VB 2005 is the "future", and anything beyond that is really just coffee-break information to read briefly.... but I guess I wouldn't be a very good Microsoft person if I didn't start pushing the version-after-next version of our development tools before the next version has even shipped.

So, with that in mind, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future/ which, despite my comments, is quite a good pile of info on post-Whidbey VB features and even includes a download to bring LINQ features in VB 2005. Hmm... ok, I guess with that download it seems a bit more 'current' to me ... hmph...

New MSN Developer Center is live...

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 01:48:00 GMT

I've played around with coding against the Messenger APIs before, but it seems that MSN has really gone all out now and released a bunch of information for coding against their search, messenger, mapping services, and more... check it out on MSDN as of today!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/

A public site for collecting your exception info... like Dr. Watson via SOAP...

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 18:06:00 GMT

This is an interesting idea ... http://www.exceptioncollection.com/, something that I've pondered before...

I'd have to know more about it, in terms of the privacy and security of their data collection... before I could recommend it without any pause, but I would certainly take a look if you are building a widely distributed application (outside of a single company/enterprise), and I would probably try to integrate with the Exception handling/logging block from PAG.

Doing interesting things with XSL

Fri, 06 May 2005 14:12:00 GMT

I've been messing around with using XSL to display RSS on MSDN, as a simpler alternative to a custom ASP.NET control, and while it works perfectly in the core case (display all the items in a feed in a format), there are two additional requirements that were very easy to handle in a .NET class, but trickier (for me) in XSL.

Display the top n items
Out of the full list, display n randomly picked items

For the first, it was pretty easy... <xsl:if test="position < 6"> could be used to only output the top 5 items, for example... For the second though, I was stumped for a bit... then I came up with an idea. I would write a script function that would pick n items out of the total count, put those choices into an array, then use another function that tests the current position against that list of choices... sound good? Well, I'm still working on implementing this one... I have it working, but I'm not 100% sure of my solution.

If you are interested, you can see the code running here, and pull down the xsl from here, and the backing rss file from here. Code for the page ... Code for the control it references...

IE 7 will have a new User Agent string, of course, so it might be worth checking your code...

Wed, 04 May 2005 16:07:00 GMT

This should only be an issue if you've written code that checks for version=6, instead of version =>6, but that happens so you might want read the following blog entry about this new version.

Server Intellect now has Beta 2 hosting!!!

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 18:21:00 GMT

Server Intellect, my web host and the folks that I called "the best hosting company I have ever worked with" have annouced that they now have ASP.NET Beta 2 hosting available... for free for anyone using one of their other hosting plans!

Server Intellect is proud to announce hosting support for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2!

Free 'Starter Tier' account for all Server Intellect Clients!

The first version of ASP.NET offered several important advantages over previous Web development models. ASP.NET 2.0 improves upon that foundation by adding support for several new and exciting features in the areas of developer productivity, administration and management, extensibility, and performance.

Server Intellect is giving all clients a Free Account in the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta 2 Environment!

Your own Domain Name
250 MB Space
10 GB Bandwidth
Advanced Traffic Stats
10 Email Accounts
5 FTP Accounts
Much, Much More!
This account will remain active for up to 45 days after the final release of ASP.NET 2.0

Coding4Fun, the site....

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 00:31:00 GMT

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you probably know about my column "Coding4Fun", well now there is an entire site on MSDN going by that name... to be clear, this is not a site all about my column :) ... it is a site dedicated to the same concept though, hobbyist coding.

Check it out at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun

Update: way more details on the site available at Dan's blog...

AutoIncrement settings should be applied before filling the DataTable...

Tue, 12 Apr 2005 14:02:00 GMT

I ran into a problem recently, where duplicate IDs were being generated by my offline ADO.NET code... and I had no real idea why this was happening. I had set up the primary key of my DataTable to have the following propery values:

AutoIncrement = true
AutoIncrementSeed = -1
AutoIncrementStep = -1

This is supposed to result in offline IDs being assigned as -1,-2,-3 and therefore having no possibility of conflict with any real IDs used in the database. This has worked great for me on many occasions, so it was a bit of a surprise when I finally tracked down my problem to the IDs that were being assigned to my new rows. I put a break point right after calling NewRow on the DataTable and the newly created Row had a PK value of 141. Another new row and it would have a value of 140, and so on... it seems the AutoIncrementStep was working, but the seed value was wonky.

I asked around and was told to make sure that I was setting the AutoIncrement properties before filling the table, which it turns out I wasn't doing. What I had for code was basically like this:

If table doesn't exist in DataSet, set a flag to true indicating that this is the first call to the data load
Fill the table
Check the flag and setup the table, including setting the AutoIncrement properties

With the new guidance I had received, I changed the routine to:

If table doesn't exist in DataSet, set a flag to true indicating that this is the first call to the data load
Fill the table's schema (FillSchema), to get the columns and the PK
Check the flag and setup the table, including setting the AutoIncrement properties
Fill the table

Of course, all this could be made simpler/cleaner if I built up the schema 'manually' before loading the table's data but I'm way too lazy for that.

Interested in Investigating Indigo?

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 15:25:00 GMT

Scott Seely, a former MSDN co-worker of mine and now a member of the Indigo team, is working on a new Indigo book with Brian Nantz. The book won't be out for a while, but you can get a lot of advance information (including some of the chapters), by watching for updates on www.thatindigobook.com. Should be a great way to get a free taste of some Indigo content right from someone who works on the code...

MSDN has Forums!

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 05:01:00 GMT

Looks like I have a new place to hang out and answer questions...

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/

...there is even a VB board!

My latest MSDN magazine article is online...

Thu, 24 Mar 2005 06:18:00 GMT

Remembering User Information in Visual Basic .NET
This article provides coverage of storing user-specific settings using XML Serialization

Doing uploads with BITS

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 15:02:00 GMT

I wrote a couple of articles on BITS in the past (creating a wrapper, then background copying, then digital grandma) but it was all about downloading files. Starting with BITS 1.5, you can also upload files... is that topic of interest to folks? Just FYI, you need web server support to make this work, as detailed here.

Just pulled down the CS 1.0 source... now to start working on a migration plan

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 03:38:00 GMT

Currently I'm running .Text .94 + a bunch of private modifications and some version of CS:Forums + a bunch of private modifications... so now that CS 1.0's source is out, I want to incorporate my mods into the combined package and then migrate my data and get my site up and running on the new stuff. As cool as that is, and while I'm sure it has excellent tools/scripts for upgrading, I'm not looking forward to it. It was hard enough to get my site set up now, with blogs.duncanmackenzie.net running as its own app domain and then trying to make the Forums code work when the application started at the root not at /Forums. Anyway, suffice it to say I don't expect to upgrade right away, but maybe I'll have a copy of the site upgraded and sitting on my dev box within the next week....

Anyone else gone through the upgrade/migration and have any thoughts or comments?

This may seem odd... but people kept asking for it, so here you go...

Sun, 27 Feb 2005 03:15:00 GMT

On the various programming forums I read, a common question is "how can I find out the IP address of my router"... for whatever reason (and there certainly are a few reasons that I can think of) people were really looking for their IP address on the Internet. In general, the solution was to hit one of a few publically available sites out there that display your IP when you view their web pages and then scrape the IP address back out of the HTML. Simple enough, but I thought I would make it simpler for anyone who needed this solution by creating a quick and simple web service.

I just love finding code samples :)

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 17:01:00 GMT

Aaron Brethorst has a little page of his code samples up at http://www.brethorsting.com/code/ which include a few interesting items including a software version of the Enigma machine in C#. Cool stuff. Aaron is also the author of iRooster, an alarm clock application (that uses playlists from iTunes) which also looks neat, but runs on the Mac so it isn't something that I have any real use for... :).

Community Server 1.0 Released

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 16:10:00 GMT

Telligent Systems, the company founded by former Microsoftie (and ASP.NET whiz kid) Rob Howard, has finally released Community Server 1.0. Community Server combines the functionality of forums (based on the ASP.NET forums engine Rob worked on while at Microsoft), blogs (based on the very popular .Text engine created by Scott Watermasysk, who now works for Telligent), and photo gallery (based on nGallery, created by Jason Alexander, who's also one of the brains at Telligent).

Congrats to the Telligent team...I'm looking forward to trying out CS 1.0 for my personal blog, which is currently running on an older version of .Text.

from G. Andrew Duthie's blog....

Getting the 8.3 filename...

Sun, 06 Feb 2005 08:04:00 GMT

Quick sample (calling the GetShortPathName API) in VB.NET posted to http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/Samples/

Free XP Themed Windows Forms Controls

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 15:52:00 GMT

I bet I've mentioned these before, but the joy of rediscovery is the positive side of a poor memory... Christopher Frazier pointed to these in a email discussion today, and I thought you might be interested!

SteepValley.NET: XP Common Controls

The XP Common Controls are a collection of themed and unthemed controls that are currently missing from the Visual Studio IDE...

The new Release of Version 2.0 from Sept. 9th, 2004 includes several new features including:

New Namespace

fully editable themed properties

XPListView enhancements

new controls

more...

This project is available for free including the source code.

Server Intellect... the best darn hosting company I've ever worked with

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 06:37:00 GMT

I've mentioned it before, but it is worth saying again. When I decided to build my site up from its static beginnings and add on various asp.net-driven applications, I needed a host that provided SQL Server database access for a reasonable fee and easerve (Server Intellect's old name) came highly recommended. Turns out to be the best hosting decision I have ever made.

Once I realized the level of support and stability that this host provided, I decided to move my personal blog onto my own installation of .Text at http://blogs.duncanmackenzie.net. At the time, my blog was being used to populate the Visual Basic and C# developer center home pages at MSDN (and it is still used for the VB home page), so it was very "mission critical" for my job and for the site. The Visual Basic developer center is one of the most popular pages on a very high-traffic site; I was placing a lot of faith on Server Intellect's ability to deliver my content reliably. I haven't had a single issue with the uptime or performance of my feed since that time, so I guess my faith was well placed. At one point, due to a little bug at the MSDN side of things, my feed wasn't even being cached and was retrieved once for every single hit to the VB and C# developer centers.... so Server Intellect contacted me and let me know that they were removing my bandwidth cap to make sure I didn't run into any issues until we could resolve the issue on the MSDN side....

Anyway, enough gushing, here's my point: I'm very happy with my web host, and I don't think I would have felt comfortable moving my blog off of blogs.msdn.com onto any other company's servers.... if that information helps you to pick a web host of your own, that's great :), especially if you end up running a bunch of ASP.NET code on your new site!

Outlook Web Access team looking for developers...

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 17:33:00 GMT

The Outlook Web Access team is looking for web developers
Web-based mail is hot. Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook Web Access... They're all making headlines and showing off the richness of the web. The Outlook Web Access team is looking for solid ASP.NET developers to help build our next version. We're looking for people with top-notch development skills, who have worked with C# and ASP.NET in the past and have a solid understanding of HTML, CSS and script. We're looking for people who want to take web applications to the next level of richness while also offering a blazing fast client.

via Kent Sharkey's blog

Another little .Text update...

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 06:49:00 GMT

Thanks to a post by Nick Parker, I found out my blog site was not producing valid RSS... and now it is :)

Buy yourself a .NET Celebrity (and the $ is for a good cause)

Mon, 24 Jan 2005 17:53:00 GMT

An A-List of .NET consultants, including my friend Joel Semeniuk amongst others, are auctioning themselves off on EBay... with the proceeds going towards disaster relief in Indonesia. Check out the details (and the full list of folks) here;

Added support for the rel="nofollow" attribute to my .Text installation...

Thu, 20 Jan 2005 07:28:00 GMT

Google and various blog software vendors recently announced a method to deter comment spam by reducing its benefit to the spammer... it sounds like a pretty good idea, so I updated my installation of .Text to use this new attribute in the comment section by adding just a single line within comments.cs: namelink.Attributes["rel"] = "nofollow"; ... now, let's just hope it works ;)

I think I might enhance this a bit later, adding the idea of approved comments that don't get this attribute for their links, since I see no reason why a non-spammer's comment shouldn't give them google-juice. That feature is likely a ways into the future, but you never know.

EndIf or End If?

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 15:19:00 GMT

The recent annoucements around Visual Fox Pro 9.0 have brought up a bunch of memories, and have me tempted to install VFP for the first time in years...

Whether or not you have a chance to give VFP 9 a try, if you are planning on getting into .NET or VB .NET specifically and have a FoxPro background like me, you'll probably find these books useful;

	Visual FoxPro to Visual Basic .NET, by Les Pinter
	Microsoft .NET for Visual FoxPro Developers, by Kevin McNeish

I came to Microsoft's development products through FoxPro (2.6 for DOS), after having worked for a couple of years doing Clipper, DBase, RBase, etc... Eventually I ended up at FoxPro, and it was wonderful... After countless hours spent writing code that manually did joins of two file-based tables, having SQL right in the language was a beautiful thing. I spent so much time in FoxPro (for DOS and Windows, and for the Macintosh), mostly working on accounting systems and a TV contract management system (that ran on a network of PowerMacs), that the experience still affects my programming to this day. Whenever I type End If in a Visual Basic program (or VBA/Access), I type "EndIf" as one word (which is the FoxPro language keyword). EndIf is not correct syntax for VB, but the editor has always, and still does in Whidbey, automatically corrected this typo for me. So, as a testament to the negative side of auto-correct, I have never really learned to type it the right way. Not that I mind, but it does make me worry about kids happily mispelling words every time they use a computer to produce an essay for their teacher, and never even knowing they made a mistake.

Visual Fox Pro has always been a wonderful product, but I never really got to use it, because by the time it came out I had started using Visual Basic, and I've never really left that language since... I did a few projects in VFP here and there, and at times it seemed leaps and bounds ahead of VB, but I didn't choose the language of my projects back then, so using VFP was never really a consideration unless the customer requested it or they already had an existing FoxPro code base and I recommended a VFP solution.

The great feature set of VFP has always been nagging at my mind though, and the recent release of VFP 9 is no exception. I know it is likely an absolutely wonderful programming environment and language... it has always been very productive and very well tuned to its core task (user interfaces to database systems, which probably describes 80+% of the business apps in the world). I doubt I'll find a project to use it on in the immediate future, but if you are like me and have a MSDN subscription, you might want to install it anyway and give it a try...

Cool GDI+ Demo with VB.NET

Wed, 05 Jan 2005 14:30:00 GMT

The demo is online, building up images dynamically and serving them up to you in a few seconds (depending on connection speed I assume)... but the code and the accompanying explanation is top-notch, so if you are interested in GDI+ info, check this out!!

GDI+, GraphicPaths, and Polygons: (vb.net, w/explanation)
Author: Terry Voss

Halo 2 Stats via RSS... an interesting idea that I think could be improved

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 04:31:00 GMT

I like that Bungie is exposing your stats as RSS (see mine here), but it would be cooler if they had added some additional elements and attributes to the feed to describe the games in a more usable format, rather than just in HTML... instead of;

				
						<item>
						

				 <title>Rumble Pit: Oddball on Ascension</title>
 <link>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey</link>
 <pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT</pubDate>
 <guid>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey</guid>
 <description>
 Game played at Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT<br/><br/>Playlist: Rumble Pit<br/>Oddball on Ascension<br/><br/> 
 <b>Gamertag (Team): Score, Kills, Deaths, Assists</b> 
 <br/>l obvious l (1): 59, 14, 9, 5<br/>ScottyAK (0): 52, 16, 10, 6<br/>
 BK Assassin (2): 29, 6, 9, 1<br/>MAXODeeZ (3): 18, 7, 12, 4<br/>
 BattlingWheel (4): 15, 10, 13, 5<br/>Festive Turkey (5): 6, 5, 11, 5<br/>
 snackasaurus (6): 0, 6, 7, 6<br/>LionWrath716 (7): 0, 1, 0, 0<br/> 
 </description>
</item>

they could add a namespace reference for Halo or Bungie.... and end up with...

<item>
 <title>Rumble Pit: Oddball on Ascension</title>
 <link>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey</link>
 <pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT</pubDate>
 <guid>http://www.bungie.net/stats/gamestats.aspx?gameid=8132172&player=Festive Turkey</guid>
 <description>
 Game played at Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT<br/><br/>Playlist: Rumble Pit<br/>Oddball on Ascension<br/><br/> 
 <b>Gamertag (Team): Score, Kills, Deaths, Assists</b> 
 <br/>l obvious l (1): 59, 14, 9, 5<br/>ScottyAK (0): 52, 16, 10, 6<br/>
 BK Assassin (2): 29, 6, 9, 1<br/>MAXODeeZ (3): 18, 7, 12, 4<br/>
 BattlingWheel (4): 15, 10, 13, 5<br/>Festive Turkey (5): 6, 5, 11, 5<br/>
 snackasaurus (6): 0, 6, 7, 6<br/>LionWrath716 (7): 0, 1, 0, 0<br/> 
 </description>
 <bungie:game>
    <bungie:datePlayed>Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:45:07 GMT</bungie:datePlayed>
    <bungie:playlist>Playlist: Rumble Pit</bungieplaylist>
    <bungie:variant>Oddball</bungie:variant>
    <bungie:map>Ascension</bungie:map>
    <bungie:players>
       <bungie:player>
          <bungie:gamertag>Festive Turkey</bungie:gamertag>
          <bungie:score>6</bungie:score>
          <bungie:kills>5</bungie:kills>
          <bungie:deaths>11</bungie:deaths>
          <bungie:assists>5</bungie:assists>
       </bungie:player>
    </bungie:players>
 </bungie:game>
</item>

still valid RSS 2.0, still works in aggregators, but suddenly useful to anyone wanting to consume this information for more than just directly viewing it...

Winners of the Channel 9 "Summer of Express" contest annouced!!!

Mon, 18 Oct 2004 17:30:00 GMT

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/express/ for full details, but here is a quick list of the winners:

All winners have been notified via email. The Channel 9 page will be updated to show the winners shortly and the code for all entries will be made available in the coming weeks.

I'm leaving the MSDN Content Team...

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 05:55:00 GMT

Recently I transitioned the C# Content Strategist role over to Frank Redmond, but that was only the first of several changes for me at MSDN. Today, my boss made the rest of the changes public, so now I can talk about it :)

I'm going to be leaving the Content Strategy team completely and joining the development group within MSDN, focusing on the tools and infrastructure that MSDN runs on, instead of the content that it publishes. This is a pretty major change for me, after 3 years on the content side of MSDN, but it seems that this is the time for change. Anyway, Matt is looking for a replacement for me, someone who can fill the shoes of a Content Strategist for Visual Basic. Check out his blog entry for a full job description and information on how to contact him if you are interested and you think that you are what he is looking for.

Wanted: VB Content Strategist

Congratulations to Duncan for the life-changing event. But Duncan has decided to make another change as well and will be moving into a full-time development position here within MSDN (although I believe we will still be hearing from him in the way of articles and blog entries). This means that I am looking for someone to replace him.

But before you send me your resume, let me tell you what I am looking for. First of all, the job entails technical writing, so if you don't have some writing experience, you will probably be on my "review later" pile. Second, I want someone who knows VB, C# and even C++ but is passionate about what Visual Basic has to offer. I’m not looking for someone to lead the language-war battles, but just someone who understands the VB audience and what this awesome product offers them. Also, while VB will be the initial and probably biggest focus, at some point in the future you will be dealing with at least one other technology.
(check out the full post for more)

New MSDN RSS feeds are live...

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 04:56:00 GMT

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had written a new system for producing MSDN's RSS feeds, and those feeds are now live at the same URLs as the previous versions. You might get some duplicates in your aggregators, (since these are new feeds but with some overlap of items from the old feeds) but that should be temporary. Anyway, check them out (here is the one for VB) and let me know what you think.

Some people have asked why I haven't gone into a lot of detail about how we generate these feeds. Basically, I haven't talked about it because it isn't all that difficult to write out a RSS file... the trick is usually how you obtain the data that you wish to write out and that part of the system isn't interesting (IMHO) to the general public as it is just SQL queries against our database full of content... the process that generates these feeds runs daily, and then static xml is posted to the site... all in all, not that exciting :)

Getting the .NET Framework Installed as part of your application's setup

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 15:10:00 GMT

I'm working on the bootstrapper chapter for my upcoming ClickOnce book and it occured to me that a lot of people probably haven't heard about the bootstrapper for Visual Studio .NET 2003...

Visual Studio .NET Framework Bootstrapper Plug-in
The Visual Studio .NET Framework Bootstrapper Plug-in modifies the behavior of the Setup project's Bootstrapper property to include the .NET Framework bootstrapper as well as the Windows Installer bootstrapper.

Got a .NET app? Need to get the Framework onto the user's machine? Check out the bootstrapper!!

I've been working on a new RSS generation system for MSDN for the past little while

Mon, 27 Sep 2004 04:19:00 GMT

... and it is almost ready to ship....

The new system will result in a few changes to the MSDN feeds, the most notable of which is that our feeds will no longer reflect a certain time span (they currently contain all of the appropiately attributed items from the past 30 days), but will instead contain a certain # of items. They also have a bit more data in them, including the author of the article (in the dc:creator element) and a collection of category elements containing all of the attribution that we have applied to that article in our back end system.

If you check out a sample feed, available here, you'll see the changes described above along with one other new 'feature'. We will have a stylesheet added to the top of the feeds, which is primarily targetted at folks who do not already use RSS feeds. When people in the past have seen our RSS buttons on the various MSDN sites, clicking on that button showed them the raw XML... with no real context or explanation of what they were being shown. This new format, using the style sheet, should help improve the experience for those customers.

Please let me know what you think about these changes (feel free to post your thoughts in the feedback section of this post), they aren't released yet so this is the time when I need to hear any and all feedback you have!!

Update: Luc Cluitmans noticed that the feed was not displaying correctly in Firefox... but I believe I've fixed that problem now, please let me know if you still notice problems with the display. I get only text in Opera, but I think that is due to the fact that XSLT is not supported by Opera... let me know if I'm wrong on that one...

Amazon Web Services 4.0 ... what are you using them for?

Sun, 19 Sep 2004 06:10:00 GMT

I took Scott Watermasysk's 'book control' and modified it recently to display more than one book (moving it to VB.NET along the way), and I reduced the file it pulls from down to just a list of ISBN #s.... but then I wasn't able to display the title of the book as a tooltip (like the original does)... so I signed up for Amazon's web services and added some code to pull the book's info through the web services and cache it for use in the control.

Neat, yes... simple to code, even.... but totally illogical.

It would have been much better to build the use of web services as part of creating the source xml file... and store the book info (title, link URL, image URL) along with the isbn right into that file. That way the web services calls would be reduced to once when adding a book, not every few hours (depending on your caching choices). Normally, when I'm thinking clearly, I like to always go for the cleanest/simplest solution and that is certainly not what I did in this case... but it got me to thinking, now that I've tried these web services, how could I use them in a useful manner on my site?

I didn't come up with any ideas.

Do you use the Amazon Web Services? What for?

If you are an MSDN Magazine subscriber, then you already saw this....

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 14:23:00 GMT

My Advanced Basics column from the October 2004 issue is now up online...

Building a Progress Bar that Doesn't Progress

and if you think that title is odd, here is what Chris Sells had to say when he first heard it... (comments used 100% without permission, but I figure he won't mind)...

"I can’t wait to read 'Building a Progress Bar that Doesn't Progress.' I assume follow on articles will cover 'Building a Button that Doesn't Butt' and 'Building a Status Bar that Doesn't Stat?' : )"

yep, it is great having him on the team...

Creating a VB.NET Windows application using the command line

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 05:27:00 GMT

Juanito27 posted this question to the VB.NET forum on GotDotNet last week...

Command line compile Windows vb app
I need to have someone show me how to compile via command line a vb.net windows app. Could someone show me the minimum code to get a window/form up with maybe a label or button on it.

so I posted up a sample to the samples page on my personal site that shows creating two programs via the VB.NET command line compiler... first a console application, then a Windows Forms app... this page is a draft version of something I'm putting together for MSDN so let me know if you find it useful...

Like Code? Like FxCop? Then you should read David Kean's blog...

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 05:29:00 GMT

I was reading an entry from David Kean about some inconsistencies in 2.0 Framework classes, and I decided to jump up a level and read through some of his others posts... holy code samples, Batman! Seriously, almost every post includes a code or XML sample of some sort... that is a high signal-to-noise ratio folks... all on fairly interesting .NET topics, including quite a few discussions of FxCop... you should definitely check this blog out (link below)....

Managed from down under (David Kean)

14 part "Soup-to-Nuts" webcasts on Windows Forms...

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 06:23:00 GMT

I can't find any other landing page for this, so check out the blog entry from Georgeo Pulikkathara for all the details...

Soup to Nuts – A Webcast Series for Windows Forms Development
Tune in and learn how to build Windows Forms applications and smart clients in .NET. We’ll take you through all the steps to building an application, from start to finish, as we cover object oriented concepts and delve deep into .NET. During this series of webcasts, you will learn how to create rich user interfaces and access data, and see industry-proven ways to get Windows Forms applications to market quickly. And after viewing the webcasts, work hands-on in the MSDN Virtual Lab.

oh... and you can be entered to win an XBox, just by attending... as if that would make a difference....

Interesting quote from a GotDotNet discussion on .NET Shareware...

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 00:04:00 GMT

Anytime people talk about developing shareware with .NET, the discussion centers around the download/install of the Framework, because that is the issue that seems like the biggest hurdle to non-corporate developers... I could go on and on about the various methods of getting the Framework installed in 1.1 and in 2.0, but I like what Nick posted to the forum;

...your audience will judge your app based only on the advantages it offers, its price, ease of use and generally things that are used as criteria for every other app, .Net based or not. If the app provides real value for the $buck$, the vast majority of users won't really mind downloading the framework...

Check out the full discussion by clicking here

[Listening to: Fallen - Sarah McLachlan - Afterglow (03:47)]

Time to revist "laziness.net"

Mon, 06 Sep 2004 21:47:00 GMT

I created a Pocket PC remote for Windows Media Player, but I only had speakers right next to the music system... so the remote wasn't all that useful... but I just picked up this wireless speaker;

and suddenly it is time to install that software again ... my wife now puts the speaker wherever she is during the day, but having to go into my office and login to change the music is a small annoyance, so I hope the visual remote helps make it easier.

Ok... so suddenly Avalon seems relevant to me :)

Fri, 27 Aug 2004 22:07:00 GMT

With the recent annoucements, I get to check something off of my personal wishlist.... Avalon (and some connected systems thing... "purple" I think it's called...) will be available on WinXP!!

I mean, Longhorn seems cool and all... but I just wasn't all that interested in a UI technology that wouldn't run on anything but the very latest OS, especially considering the very wide deployment of XP that will exist by the time Longhorn ships. I've often thought though, that if they made it run on XP, then I'd be interested, and I guess I wasn't the only person hoping for that!

From the press release;

At a meeting today with several hundred of the company’s top developer evangelists from around the world, Microsoft also announced that the Windows WinFX developer technologies, including the new presentation subsystem code-named "Avalon" and the new communication subsystem code-named Indigo, will be made available for Microsoft® Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 in 2006. This availability will expand the scope of opportunity for developers by enabling them to write applications that can run on hundreds of millions of PCs, resulting in enhanced experiences for users of those operating systems.

New Coding 4 Fun Column up... "Rotating Is Fun"

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 20:05:00 GMT

Rotating Is Fun
Duncan Mackenzie
Microsoft Developer Network
Summary: Duncan Mackenzie describes the creation of a simple "content rotator" in ASP.NET. (8 printed pages)

Stuck on a problem opening vbproj or csproj files...

Mon, 19 Jul 2004 11:18:00 GMT

On my home dev box I couldn't seem to open any of my projects (VB or C#), and whenever I tried I got this useful error;

The application for project 'C:\Documents and Settings\Duncanma\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\ConsoleApplication1\ConsoleApplication1.vbproj' is not installed.

Make sure the application for the project type (.vbproj) is installed.

All I could find on the internet was the suggestion that I must have just C# Standard installed and therefore didn't have VB available... but that wasn't it (I have VS.NET Enterprise installed)... I was basically out of luck until I finally found this newsgroup discussion through .NET 247 (link). Even though I had completely uninstalled VS.NET and reinstalled, I followed the reinstall instructions from Mark Smith in that newsgroup post and it worked perfectly. It is possible that uninstalling and reinstalling the .NET Framework SDK would have done this for me as well (I wasn't doing that in my normal reinstalls, I was only dealing with VS.NET 2003), but Mark's solution was easy to try out and it worked...

Anyway, if you run into this problem... try following those steps and see if that helps!! If that fails, I'd considering calling PSS directly.

"Express Paint" article up...

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:56:00 GMT

This article, by John Kennedy, discusses the creation of an image editing application completely built with C# Express Edition.

ExpressPaint
Summary: Use C# Express to create an image processing application that's ideal for putting the final touch to your digital photographs. This program is easy to expand with your own unique touches. (6 printed pages)

Enjoy!

Generics in VB 2005 Article now live on MSDN...

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 05:40:00 GMT

Defining and Using Generics in Visual Basic 2005

Harish Kantamneni
Visual Basic Team
Microsoft Corporation
July 2004

Summary: Provides an overview of the generics feature in Visual Basic 2005, and explains the basic concepts involved in defining and using generics and their usefulness to the Visual Basic developer.

Webcast today on the new features of VB 2005...

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 18:39:00 GMT

In case you didn't notice this on the /vbasic home page...

MSDN Webcast: New Features for Visual Basic 2005 Developers
Friday, July 02, 2004 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada)
In this webcast, you'll learn about the new features in the language, and in the Visual Studio .NET environment, including the My namespace, IntelliTasks, new exception-handling features, data binding support, generics, operator overloading and more.

Cool new MSDN TV (on creating a RSS reader that runs as a tool window in VS)

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 08:31:00 GMT

Building Tools Using the Visual Studio Automation Model
In this episode, Craig Skibo uses the Visual Studio .NET 2003 automation model to build a tool window hosted within Visual Studio that allows you to read blog postings.

Another new article posted yesterday... "What's New In Help for VB 2005"

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 19:53:00 GMT

What's New in Help for Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1
Find out about the newest Help features in Visual Basic 2005 Beta 1, including distinguishing Visual Basic from other languages, more task-oriented topics, and an emphasis on code examples.

Operator Overloading in VB 2005

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 19:21:00 GMT

Matthew Gertz, Dev Lead for the VB Compiler, Editor & Debugger team has written an article on operator overloading in Visual Basic 2005...

Operator Overloading In Visual Basic 2005
Operator Overloading, new to Visual Basic 2005, simplifies the use and development of complex types by allowing you to specify your own implementation for standard operations such as addition and subtraction.

A sneak preview of Visual Basic 2005 (article) is up on MSDN...

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 23:13:00 GMT

This new article from Ken Getz provides an overview of many of the new features in Visual Basic 2005, including "My", "Edit and Continue", "AutoCorrect", "Just My Code" and more...

Check it out here