Jeff Klawiter

The Reliability Monitor is a good way to see any msi packages that have been uninstalled. It aggregates information from the Event Log into an easier to consume interface for installs, uninstalls, errors and warnings.

It can be found at "Control Panel\System and Security\Action Center\Reliability Monitor"

There is a major bug with the Windows Phone 7 April Refresh that prevents it from loading any code signed assemblies that are not part of the Windows Phone 7 SDK. There is a work around

http://www.manyniches.com/windows-phone/signed-assemblies-bug-in-the-windows-phone-tools-ctp-refresh/

 

you have to do this for nearly every control you add outside of the base sdk. Even standard silverlight dlls like System.Windows.Browser.dll

 

Jeff:

There is another bug with your app in the new refresh. They got rid of the TopLevelNavigationService property alltogether. I haven't been able to find an alternative so your global error handler breaks.

I can try to answer a few of those

 

1. Help loves to search and index new content when launching.

2. To keep customers happy and keep the press down about "the new windows breaks applications"

3. See #2. VB6 runtime comes with Win 7

 

Well I may not have a parallel printer anymore but I work with hardware that uses serial and parallel ports for an interface. It is very common in the Point of Sale world to still use those interfaces. Things are slowly moving to USB or IP based connectivity but sometimes that is just overkill for a low power, low bandwidth interface like RS232.

Yes with C# unsafe you can achieve all the pointery goodness you can do in VB and C/C++. Hell you can even execute Assembly code in C# when compiled in unsafe. PTR's, Marshalling and other structures existin .NET/C# to support this type of situation. It's one of the things I love about C# the most, it's versatility. It can be a modern garbage collected language with LINQ, Delegates and Parallel extensions thrown in or you can write it like cleaner C++ and do some crazy native type stuff.

In the Twin Cities we are about to have our 7th code camp. It has turned into a wonderful conference with many in depth talks. Our local MS office is stepping up as well and have started a local Techmasters group. The entire focus is doing public speaking with a tech focus. We also have many user groups where people have many chances to hone their speaking skills in front of more forgiving audiences. I currently attend the local XNA UG, Languages UG, Developers Guild, .NET UG, Mysql UG and Silverlight UG. My work hosts the Mysql UG and the Python UG.

One thing I've noticed lately is the quality of the the larger local/travelling conferences has been declining. The last few, that I actually paid for, I was quite dissappointed in the materials presented and how in depth they went. I go to Code Camp and the local user groups to get into how you actually get things done instead of "here's an overview of the new features and little code/implementation".  When I go to an event that the speaker is getting paid for and I'm paying for it, I expect some good content. This may be the fault of the organizers or the speakers themselves.

I've recently begun speaking at Code Camp and user groups. I've been giving internal tech presentations at work for a few years now. Having the chance to do a free event where money isn't on the line is a big plus. I'm able to get more experience and do something that I enjoy. One day I hope I can travel and give talks. Whether or not I get paid for them is the big question.

I think there will be a place for speakers getting paid in the larger conferences but the days of a professional speaker that is not getting paid by their main employer may be over. I think it's more than the competition of the code camps. I think the explosion of sites like Channel 9 and other tech related webcast sites in recent years. You can find both general overview and in depth videos without having to look to far or leave your couch.

<shameless_plug>I will (probably)be doing a talk on Visual Studio 2010 Extensions at the Twin Cities Code Camp 7 this October. The session list isn't finalized yet. I'm also checking into doing that talk at the Developers Guild or possibly a talk on SQL CLR</shameless_plug>.

SIMD (Single Input Multiple Data) is a CPU term of instruction set extensions. MMX was the first widespread extension followed by SSE, SSE2, 3DNOW and so on. What they have been working on at the Mono project is taking advantage of these instructions where appropriate and exposing an API to call them specifically. It's a logical step since the JIT has knowledge of what hardware it's running on, why not actually optomize for that hardware as much as possible. The performance gains in the situations where it makes sense is quite enormous and this is one of the places where XNA games could see the largest vindication.

As for GPU offloading, I'm unaware of managed work to do it. I'm sure using unsafe bindings hitting up CUDA or GPGPU (Ati needs a better name) could be used.