Channel 9 - Discussions by mabster

Tech Off - Linq to SQL -- modify SQL?

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:49:47 GMT

Dr Herbie said:

As always, I find an answer within a few minutes of posting a question here:

A ReadUncommitted isolation level in a TransactionScope has the same effect as NOLOCK (apparently).

See this blog entry for snippet of code ...

Herbie

Glad I could help, Dr Herbie!

Tech Off - Boot issue: no POST, no video display

Matt Hamilton — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 08:03:50 GMT

I had exactly the same problem with my PC last year - no POST but all the fans etc spun up just fine.

Took it to a hardware guru workmate who suggested it was the power supply.

I wouldn't believe him, since everything (fans, HDD etc) were coming on, but he swapped in a spare PSU (of equivalent wattage) and it booted just fine.

So I'd suggest trying the PSU if you can get hold of a spare.

Coffeehouse - Howard or Rudd?

Matt Hamilton — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 07:08:14 GMT

Custa1200 wrote:

Or is that Costello and Rudd?

Despite what the polls are saying, I believe it could easily go either way right now.

I don't like Rudd, but then I never much liked Howard either (although I agree with most of his policies). Since it looks like Costello's going to be taking over in a few years I'll vote that way.

Just keeping my fingers crossed that Costello gets in and makes Tony Abbot his deputy, purely for the name gag.

Coffeehouse - Silverlight on C9

Matt Hamilton — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:38:28 GMT

CannotResolveSymbol wrote:

Yes. An HTTP-based video would show the buffer progress, but an MMS-based (streaming) video would not. Channel 9 only appears to fall back to HTTP if the video is not available as an MMS stream.

In that case I'd much prefer that all vids were HTTP-based. The MMS-based ones stutter on low-bandwidth connections (like at home if I'm doing *anything* else on my link).

At least an option to switch would be nice. It's great to be able to pause a vid and let the whole thing buffer before you play it.

Coffeehouse - Silverlight on C9

Matt Hamilton — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 00:23:05 GMT

Ah! I wasn't seeing the dark-gray "buffer" progress yesterday, but today I am. Don't know if something has changed at the server end in the last 24 hours.

Edit: Hmm ... does it depend on the video? I see the buffer progress on the "Code to Live" vid, but not on the "Vista SP1" vid.

Coffeehouse - Silverlight on C9

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 03:34:16 GMT

Ok, thanks Sampy. I'll give it a go at home on my 512kb/s connection while I'm downloading something and see how it performs.

I love being able to pause a video and let it come down so I can watch the whole thing without any stuttering as it buffers. With any luck I won't need to if the streaming server concept works.

Coffeehouse - Silverlight on C9

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:43:34 GMT

Can I pause one of these vids and let the whole thing stream down on a slow connection, like I can on Youtube?

There doesn't seem to be any visual indication of how much has already come down, even while paused.

Coffeehouse - C# Extension Properties?

Matt Hamilton — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:14:52 GMT

Yeah, I was hoping for extension properties too:

public static TimeSpan Minutes[this int i]
{
get { return new TimeSpan(0, i, 0); }
}

public static DateTime Ago[this TimeSpan ts]
{
get { return DateTime.Now.Subtract(ts); }
}

So then I could do:

DateTime d = 20.Minutes.Ago;

No ugly parentheses!

Tech Off - Accessing MSDN forums from IE 7.0

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:07:11 GMT

I've had quite a few problems with the forums lately (and a few other Live ID sites).

At one point I couldn't open the forums at all, on several of my PCs. IE7 would just show me a white screen whilst continually "redirecting" back and forth between a few URLs.

Another time I could get into the forums, but doing anything that related to me as a user (eg creating a post or viewing my threads) brought me to the "you have successfully signed out" page.

On both occasions, finding the cookie for forums.microsoft.com and deleting it fixed the problem.

Cheers,
Matt

Coffeehouse - Euenglish

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:35:24 GMT

Lest anyone think this is a new piece, here's the original from Mark Twain:

http://www.mantex.co.uk/samples/spell.htm

Coffeehouse - how to cheat Mindsweeper

Matt Hamilton — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 03:18:49 GMT

It's faster just to play the game. My best on this PC is 81 seconds on expert. No way I could have finished it that quickly if I kept having to move my eyes to check on the colour of a single pixel!

Coffeehouse - Planet Earth

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 02:42:46 GMT

Is it true that they redubbed over David Attenborough's narrative with Sigourney Weaver's voice for the US broadcast? What a travesty.

Tech Off - ShowDialog() return values (in C#)

Matt Hamilton — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 06:36:05 GMT

Simply set the form's DialogResult property:

this.DialogResult = DialogResult.OK;

Then you can close the form using Close() as normal.

Coffeehouse - Here's a wish of mine for C# 3.0

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 03:20:37 GMT

Yeah, even a "Contains" method (similar to the one in String) would be handy, so you could do something like:

if (someEnum.Contains(Enum.Value)) { ... }

Coffeehouse - Neat IE 7 feature idea...

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 03:23:21 GMT

In previous versions of IE you could drag the system menu (the small icon at the very top-left of IE) onto the desktop and it would create a shortcut to the current page. That doesn't seem to work any more.

I figure if you drag a tab to the desktop (which currently you can't do) then it should have a similar effect - create a shortcut icon to the page currently loaded in that tab.

Coffeehouse - Movies/Shows via XBOX Live

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 03:04:36 GMT

I wonder how much (if any) content will make it to Aus. God knows who has the rights to these shows locally, and it's unlikely that Big Media down under would be visionary enough to allow this sort of distribution.

Tech Off - Help with regex's

Matt Hamilton — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:14:03 GMT

Chuck a question mark in after the hyphen to make it optional and see if it works:

^\d{3}\-?\d{4}$

Coffeehouse - New Windows Live Mail Build.

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 10:08:09 GMT

Can you use it without a "mail enabled Live ID account" yet? I downloaded an earlier build and couldn't even start it because my passport account isn't a Live Mail or Hotmail account. [C]

Coffeehouse - IE7: searching feeds

Matt Hamilton — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:21:42 GMT

Y'know, if the answer to this is "Windows Desktop Search", then that might be the one reason I would install a desktop search tool.

The ability to search within feed items in the Common Feed Store would be awesome.

Tech Off - Change the Profile Path in WinVista

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 05:31:01 GMT

Yeah, that'd be awesome. I went to a lot of trouble on my XP box to change the user profiles to point to "D:\Profiles\username" rather than "C:\Documents and Settings\username". It'd be great if it was something I could specify at setup time.

Coffeehouse - Microsoft Web having a bad day or just me?

Matt Hamilton — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 07:36:06 GMT

Yeah, the recent flakiness of blogs.msdn.com has been quite frustrating. I like to read the aggregated blogs via the site itself, in case I see interesting posts by people whose individual blogs I'm not subscribed to.

Tech Off - Microsoft Update and Windows Genuine Advantage

Matt Hamilton — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 11:24:20 GMT

For those interested, a poster on the windowsupdate newsgroup found the solution.

Turns out it was some incompatibility between the WGA tool and the nVidia IDE driver! Uninstalling the nVidia driver and rebooting fixed the problem for me and others.

Check his post here.

Very strange indeed. I wonder whether MS or nVidia are at fault here.

Tech Off - Microsoft Update and Windows Genuine Advantage

Matt Hamilton — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 21:53:08 GMT

Interesting. A bunch of folks with this problem have posted their hardware on the newsgroup thread, and we all seem to be running Athlon64 and nVidia video cards.

One of the guys has posted to the AMD forums, but I don't think he'll get much of a response from there.

Anyone out there running an Athlon64 on an nForce mobo who can access Microsoft Update without any problems?

Tech Off - Microsoft Update and Windows Genuine Advantage

Matt Hamilton — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 07:58:35 GMT

Thing is, I'm not looking for a workaround. I want either a working Genuine Advantage tool, or a way to roll back to the previous one that worked just fine.

Check out this thread - I'm not the only one with this problem.

Until this is fixed, I can't use Windows Update. That concerns me. And from what I've read from others with the same problem, reloading Windows doesn't help - as soon as the latest WGA tool is installed, everything stops working again.

Tech Off - Microsoft Update and Windows Genuine Advantage

Matt Hamilton — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 01:33:35 GMT

SlackmasterK wrote:

Do you have WindowsUpdate v3 installed? You may be able to download that from microsoft.com/downloads without going to WU. This may help.

Is that a stand-alone version of Microsoft Update? Sounds like a good workaround to not being able to get to the web site at least. Got a direct URL?