Channel 9 - Discussions by bwill

The Sandbox - Vista Sidebar Gadgets: persistent settings

bwill — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 02:43:09 GMT

Here is a question that seems to pop up with some regularity on the sidebar newsgroup: "Why doesn't the weather gadget remember where I live, if I close it and then add it again to my sidebar?"

The answer is that every time you add the weather gadget to the sidebar, you are creating a new 'instance' of the gadget; and every instance has its own associated location. So the newly-added weather gadget has settings that are completely distinct from the settings on the one you closed. This makes sense when you start to think about having three or five weather gadgets running at the same time - they should each be able to show the weather at a different location.

Having said that, you may choose to make a different design choice in your gadgets. Unfortunately, the sidebar does not offer a built-in mechanism for sharing settings between gadget instances. When asked how to do this by other gadget developers, my first response was: "you can use a shared file to share settings between gadget instances."

To make life easier for everyone, I decided to write a javascript library that encapsulated that work, and exposed a simple API for reading and writing shared settings. In the process of writing the library, I discovered that just saying "use a shared file" vastly oversimplifies the effort involved. *grin*

Here is the result of my efforts; the attached ZIP file contains a code file persistentSettings.js, and a README.TXT that describes the API.

Coffeehouse - How do you screenshot Windows Security screens?

bwill — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 05:48:46 GMT

a camera.

Coffeehouse - Self-Taught Developers and Microsoft

bwill — Sat, 14 May 2005 02:52:01 GMT

Here's the thing about both a degree, and experience - it gets your foot in the door. Note that you don't have to have a job to accumulate experience.

Write a program. Get some people to use it. Use their feedback to make it better. Get a programmer you respect to review it and use that feedback to make it better. Even better if you can get a Microsoft dev to look at your stuff - having someone at Microsoft say good things about you is another good 'foot in the door'.

I don't have a degree. I was programming before I went to high school, before I went to college. I will say that a good college CS program will give you some excellent insights into the issues behind the more difficult problems you will see as a programmer.

I completed more than three years toward a degree at Rice University before I went to work for a startup company during the internet boom. My three years of dev work there helped me get my foot in the door at Microsoft; as did a friend I had working here. I started as a contract worker, and after proving myself for six months I interviewed and came on as a full time employee. I've had a successful career here ever since.

I have another friend I work with who has a PhD in geology. He worked in the oil industry for a while, but now he's into computers. The interview is where he really proved himself, but that PhD and work experience - even in an unrelated technical field - was his foot in the door. What's yours?

Coffeehouse - VoIP - Is it worth it?

bwill — Sun, 06 Mar 2005 03:04:07 GMT

I'm already paying for cable modem, so the incremental cost of Vonage wasn't much for me; certainly much cheaper than a regular land line with long-distance costs. I have nothing but good things to say about it - it was easy to hook up, I've had no problems with performance and availability, and I really like their on-line options. (For example, I get a copy of my voice-mails in my hotmail inbox.)

Coffeehouse - Longhorn 64 Bit?

bwill — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 03:16:41 GMT

Well, 64-bit Longhorn will be a different set of binaries than 32-bit Longhorn, so in that sense they'll be different - probably ship in different boxes, etc; although I'm sure that type of decision hasn't been locked down yet.

Multi-die processors are a different story - if your die has two 32-bit processors on it, it should run 32-bit Longhorn just fine.

Coffeehouse - Help with this code please!!!

bwill — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 16:23:05 GMT

I'm glad you were able to figure it out!

Coffeehouse - Help with this code please!!!

bwill — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 17:08:41 GMT

I'm guessing that IIS has port 80 locked up. Try using a different port, or stop IIS and try your test again.

Coffeehouse - error

bwill — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 00:25:18 GMT

You've probably got a driver or hardware problem, then. Check your drivers and make sure they are up-to-date. Not sure what you can do if you've got bad hardware.

Coffeehouse - error

bwill — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 00:40:04 GMT

You're not giving us much to go on. I'll go out on a limb and assume this is referring to memory that doesn't get paged out (typically kernel memory). In what sort of error message are you seeing this?

Coffeehouse - Another company making money off of Open Source freebies?

bwill — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 00:52:45 GMT

harumscarum - it depends on the license the software uses. I know you could take any GPL software, repackage it and sell it. I believe many other open source licenses are the same, although if I were you I would do my legal 'due diligence' before selling open source software.

Coffeehouse - Another company making money off of Open Source freebies?

bwill — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 00:49:22 GMT

http://galactic-patrol.blogspot.com/2004/11/how-many-people-will-work-for-free-to.html

Coffeehouse - Whats after NT kernel?

bwill — Mon, 25 Oct 2004 16:34:13 GMT

Over the years, I've seen Microsoft Research work on several interesting OS projects - see http://research.microsoft.com/os/ for an example. Realistically, I would expect any compelling innovations they produce to be integrated into the existing Windows product, for backwards-compatibility reasons; but if for some reason we really needed to start over with a completely new kernel, I'm guessing that the roots of that new kernel would rest on the work our research folks are doing.

Tech Off - .Net Remoting ... does it have a future?

bwill — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 18:09:16 GMT

.NET Remoting will be in .NET 2.0. Where did you hear that it might not be?

Coffeehouse - More IE Wierdness

bwill — Mon, 23 Aug 2004 19:44:21 GMT

I saw this on the movie "Sneakers" - a little symbol on the screen of many web sites, that secretly gives you superuser control and access to that site. I Didn't know that we built that technology into IE though.

(That was all a joke, really - we don't secretly control the pentagon and big business.)

(really.)

Coffeehouse - Feature request for Virtual PC

bwill — Thu, 15 Jul 2004 18:24:57 GMT

Sounds like a good request to post in the Channel 9 Wiki.

Coffeehouse - The next version will fix things, we promise

bwill — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 08:18:34 GMT

You'll find its not just Microsoft that makes promises about the 'next version' - in fact, you'd probably be hard-pressed to find a software company that doesn't.

Having said that, if you have particular things that you think absolutely must be fixed in a service pack instead of the next version, please feel free to call shennanigans on us and tell us exactly where your pain-points are.

Coffeehouse - The poll!

bwill — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 00:15:45 GMT

Maybe they are just suffering from a lack of creativity or time - how about if folks post their ideas for poll questions here; maybe the channel 9 folks will start a quicker rotation with your suggestions!

Tech Off - C# dice Roller

bwill — Thu, 20 May 2004 00:50:10 GMT

I haven't tried your code, but the approach looks reasonable.

I'd move the "new Random()" call before the "for" loop; creating a new one every time is just wasting time.

The string constructions at the end (with .Clone and casting to a string[]) seems a little wacky to me. I'd just accumulate the dice roll string inside the for loop; on each loop add the current roll to the end of the string, and then tack the total on after the loop exits.

There are a bunch of "coding style" things I'd do differently, but they don't effect functionality so I'll leave them alone.

Let me know if memory size or program speed are important; for this application I assume they are not, if they are there are other things you can do to improve the code. (Such as using StringBuilder as someone else suggested.)

Tech Off - "My"

bwill — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 22:50:30 GMT

Then the library isn't targeted at you. Its intended for the opportunistic programmer who perhaps doesn't have time to learn the breadth of the framework, but does appreciate the fact that most of the common stuff can be accessed with 'My' and Intellisense.

I don't work on the 'My' team, so don't take my comments as the final word; just my understanding. I'm am sure that the 'My' team would love it if everyone (and not just a subset of developers) found the 'My' tool useful.

Coffeehouse - PDC 2004?

bwill — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 21:19:15 GMT

I haven't heard of any PDC plans for 2004, and if we were doing it this year I'd probably have heard about it. (Planning starts way in advance for those things.) Having said that, I'm not in charge of the PDC planning, so don't sue me if there is one after all.