Channel 9 - Discussions by Larsenal

Coffeehouse - Windows Phone 7 Games .. Looking Good

Larsenal — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:17:25 GMT

Any info on the cost of the WP7 games?

Coffeehouse - Preview the New Channel 9

Larsenal — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:49:21 GMT

I think the red stars need to be toned down quite a bit. I don't think they need as much visual weight. Instead, I'd want the content titles to really be clear.

The advertisement block needs to be toned down a lot.

The Channel9 guy isn't pixel perfect around the edges.

I can appreciate the move toward simplicity, but something still feels a little off design-wise. For example, the width of the Twitter and "What is C9?" columns feel off.

On the home page I see 3 completely different styles of horizontal rule: light grey solid, thick grey (in "Community Activity") and dotted black under the bottom headings. This makes things feel disjointed.

Coffeehouse - Win7 more expensive than Vista? Is MS really this stupid?

Larsenal — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:50:33 GMT

wkempf said:

5. Microsoft currently has an ad campaign targeting the expense of Apple products, which are seemingly successful. However, OSX is cheaper than Vista, and raising the price on Windows 7 is going to be a marketing fiasco.

Excellent point. That will blow up in their face.

Tech Off - Easiest way to install Win2008 as guest OS in Hyper-V

Larsenal — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:10:22 GMT

I have a new dedicated server. I'd like to run a copy of Win2008 on a VM within Hyper-V. Since you're already running Windows 2008, is there any quick and easy way to install the OS to the VM? I was hoping that a typical install of Windows 2008 included an ISO or something that you could use to install Win2008 on VMs.

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Coffeehouse - Office 2007 adoption numbers, anyone?

Larsenal — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:01:45 GMT

vesuvius said:

jjesse said:

*snip*

Not the best of barometers as the Office 2007 compatibility pack was released for Office 2003 that allows them [clients] to view the newer formats , I know of a few places this is used.

Office generates about the same revenue as Windows (would you believe it or not), and I don't see people intentionally bashing Office 2007 like Vista . I think most enterprises will retain their old Office 2003 machines, but on new machines you can have XP, but definitely take Office 2007. There is a tonne of business value there, unlike Vista.

While I understand while MS might want to guard these secrets, but it sure would be helpful in convincing devs to help push forward with software targeting current-version software.

Coffeehouse - Office 2007 adoption numbers, anyone?

Larsenal — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:05:36 GMT

I'd like to get a sense of the current install base. Where can I find some data? So far my google skills haven't got me far.

Coffeehouse - The US 2008 Election Thread

Larsenal — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:21:47 GMT

stun said:

phreaks said:

*snip*

There are families who are on the 4th generation of welfare, no one in their families has ever worked, that's the reality your mentality spurns.
Yes I know your frustration on this, and I couldn't agree more on this.
There will ***always*** be people who abuse the system.

These kind of people usually blame their failure and laziness on others by the following line

"Man....eff that I ain't workin' my * off to get a better life...
They are just "taking advantage" of us.
I do NOT want to give my money to those kinds of people.
I **even support** finding ways to penalize and discourage those lazy tards and reduce on their welfare and force them work and be "productive" members of the society.

Don't lecture us on your 'feelings' about the quality of life.
Taking money out of one pocket to give to another accomplishes what?
It may be a *very thin line* between caring for others and Socialism.
But, this is where and how I draw the line.

Yes I do have feelings which make me care about the people and families who are really in need of help.

Phreaks, I am not attacking you on your beliefs.
I am just trying to politely state my viewpoint.
Maybe you think I am a Socialist.

But I beg to differ. I want people to live a more fulfilling life with LESS worries.

If you feel people need help, go help them. Don't pat yourself on the back for voting for government to do it for you--if for no other reason than that government is typically 50% less efficient in accomplishing anything.

Coffeehouse - The US 2008 Election Thread

Larsenal — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:53:16 GMT

Harlequin said:

phreaks said:

*snip*

We have universal health care up here. Check what you would have paid if you were an American who has no health care. Would have been a lot more than zero.

Being comfortable with the idea that you "pay zero" is silly. It costs something. The money comes from somewhere. The people (speaking as an aggregate) ALWAYS pay when the government foots the bill.

Same thing with tax on business. In a certain sense, there is no such thing as a tax purely on business. You always tax people. Imposing tax on a business just makes them unwilling tax collectors; and though it go through any number of middle men, you're always taxing the labor and innovation of people.

Costs of goods and services are not as simple as the cash out of pocket at the time of the sale.

Coffeehouse - The US 2008 Election Thread

Larsenal — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 19:13:51 GMT

HumanCompiler said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

I won't try to sway your vote for either, but I would sway you to vote for either Obama or McCain. Every vote that's not for either of them is a vote taken away from the person you would've chosen between those two (since one of them will win).

IMO, the electoral college softens this argument somewhat. Yes, there's always the chance that the polls mean nothing and Dems won't take my state (CA) by a huge margin. Given that reality, my single vote has less significance than those votes in swing states. Obama will win CA.

Coffeehouse - OpenID in LiveID

Larsenal — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:56:17 GMT

jjesse said:

blowdart said:

*snip*

I agree with Blowdart. The problem is we don't need more openid providers, we need more openid consumers. Channel9, MSDN forums, hotmail, Facebook, and Google should all consume open ids.
The problem is that then we store some of our profile informaiton elsewhere and they would lose out on that.

www.identi.ca the open source twitter clone is a consumer of openid, so I use my open id from Ubuntu (launchpad.net is a provider and their wiki's are conumser's) to authenticate against identi.ca and all of the Ubuntu sites.

Now if i could just standarize against one open id provider (whether Yahoo, MS, or someone else) and sign in across the board then I would be excited.

Jonathan

"I agree with Blowdart. The problem is we don't need more openid providers, we need more openid consumers. "

True. But more providers will hopefully push the adoption those considering whether or not to make their apps consumers.

Coffeehouse - PDC content

Larsenal — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:40:33 GMT

Duncanma said:
There are sessions from yesterday up though, like this one: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC12/
or

http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL47/ (VS2010)

Definitely need to surface these items better. Maybe I'm missing the simple listing of published sessions.

Coffeehouse - OpenID in LiveID

Larsenal — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:25:19 GMT

I agree that it's pretty cool. Hopefully they'll give us some nice libraries to work in the OpenID world.

Coffeehouse - C# 4.0 and VB10. WOW

Larsenal — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:24:23 GMT

Looking for more details on VB . If there are any VB details that have come out of PDC, I've not seen them yet.

Coffeehouse - PDC Predictions

Larsenal — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:08:53 GMT

Let's collect our best guesses and wishes for PDC announcements. I'll start with a few of mine:

1) We'll get a proper version of BigInteger in the core .NET framework.

2) Windows 7 will boot in less than 10 seconds out of BIOS.

3) Some sort of magic whereby traditional WinForms/WPF can be deployed and consumed in a sort of hybrid Silverlight / Virtual Machine setup so that the exact state of your app is shared among devices. Something beyond the typical Terminal Services approach.

4) Yet another programming language... functional, verbose... like F# for VB programmers.

Tech Off - Potential SSL problem

Larsenal — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:26:12 GMT

I'm trying to get to a particular website (myopenid.com). My browser keeps showing "Connection Interrupted." Digging into the TCP packets, I see that the checksums are incorrect. My guess is that's part of the problem.

In a "corporate" type of network, what are some of the things that I should check?

Coffeehouse - Students @ PDC

Larsenal — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:32:56 GMT

Are there any special programs to promote student attendance at PDC? For students in the area, it would be neat to have even limited access to the event... maybe just the keynotes or something.

Does anything like this exist?

Tech Off - Japanese localization

Larsenal — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:16:19 GMT

CannotResolveSymbol said:

Larsenal said:

*snip*

edit: Channel 9 is eating my code!!!

Your server isn't sending a character set for either file, so Firefox has to guess the character set. By default, Firefox uses the same character set as the page that's serving it (miraculously, Firefox is detecting this correctly ).

You can fix this issue in three ways:
(1) Make your web server send the correct character set in the HTTP headers. Read the Apache docs on how to do this.

(2) Specify the character set in the tag. See http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/struct/links.html#edef-LINK

(3) Author your document using UTF-8 instead of Unicode-16. UTF-8 is backwards compatible with the ASCII character set (meaning you don't have to do either of the above) and can represent all characters in the Unicode character set. In my opinion, this is the "right" way to do it.

Thanks for all the help. Problem solved.

(Yesterday, I only skimmed this helpful post, but should have read it thorougly as it would have cleared up the issue.)

Tech Off - Japanese localization

Larsenal — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:29:35 GMT

Sven Groot said:

Larsenal said:

*snip*

That shouldn't be a problem. Could you check (with Fiddler or something) if the server is indicating a charset for the CSS file?

Very odd. I didn't see any charset anomolies in the raw HTTP traffic.

Check out my test page in FF. I've only tested in FF3 so far, but I'd venture to guess this isn't a new behavior.

Tech Off - Japanese localization

Larsenal — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:31:12 GMT

CannotResolveSymbol said:

Larsenal said:

*snip*

Also of interest may be Expression Web 2: it supports Unicode correctly and it has full-blown support for PHP (with proper highlighting and intellisense!).

What happened to my CSS file?

So I throw up a simple little HTML page with some Japanese copy... saved it as Unicode and uploaded to server. Strangely enough, FF3 now mangles the external CSS file. The page renders as if no styles are applied. Firebug's Net tab shows the contents of the CSS file... and it's all in (presumably) Japanese. IE handles it fine. I don't know whether this another case of Microsoft's graceful "non-compliance" or whether I've mucked something up.

It's likely that the CSS files (which someone else did) and JS are all ANSI. Is it incorrect to mix ANSI and Unicode (in different files, of course) for a single page rendering?

Tech Off - Japanese localization

Larsenal — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:06:57 GMT

Duncanma said:
I'm assuming (because of the editor question) that you are creating copies of the actual web pages in these different languages, not localizing strings in a database or in a resource file or something like that...

Honestly, Notepad will do it.. but only if you are careful to always save as unicode... for some reason, it seems to default to ASCII ... and that just really sucks. I'm sure something like Visual Studio Express (web) would handle it as well...

Hmn... tried notepad, but when I paste from Excel (which is where they have the side-by-side copy) I still get the blocks. Made sure it was being saved as Unicode, but no luck.

Tried VS2005, and it shows up fine. This will be a rare opportunity to edit PHP in VS2005.

Thanks, Duncan!

Tech Off - Japanese localization

Larsenal — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:10:53 GMT

I'm localizing a site into Japanese( and French).

First, what's a good text editor for this sort of thing? I've been using EditPlus for years, but it renders the Japanese text as the ugly boxes.

Second, having never done a Japanese site, is there anything tricky to getting a page to display Japanese correctly?

Tech Off - BlogEngine.NET -- any good?

Larsenal — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:57:56 GMT

Has anyone tried BlogEngine.NET? Is it any good?

Tech Off - TSQL question... name of primary key

Larsenal — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:20:52 GMT

Matthew van Eerde said:
You could use INSERT/EXEC to dump the table into a temporary table, select the name into a local variable, and print the local variable.

Sounds reasonable, but not sure how to do that. If it's not a big hassle, could you point me in the right direction? Otherwise, I don't mind googling a bit more.

Tech Off - TSQL question... name of primary key

Larsenal — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:31:21 GMT

Given the name of a table, I want to PRINT the name of the primary key for the table.

sp_Pkeys nearly does the trick except that it returns a table. I just want to PRINT the column name.

Thanks in advance.

Tech Off - App Architecture Feedback

Larsenal — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:56:46 GMT

figuerres wrote:

Larsenal wrote:
One possible issue is the size of the data. In many cases, we need to get a response to the client very quickly. Tossing 20 MB around may be a little slow. That's one of the reasons I just have all the folders sitting around without centralizing them in a DB or something.

sorry but this sounds like a common misconception...

done right a sql database will be faster and better in 99.99% of cases.

even if you have data that is not a good match you may still get benefits from storing some data in a sql db.

Ok, that's helpful. I'll have to run some perf tests to see how well it does.