Entries for rhm

ASP.NET MVC documentation for Visual Studio 2008

rhm — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 19:49:20 GMT

Is there a download for this somewhere that I can't find. Installing ASP.NET MVC itself doesn't seem to add any documentation to the help browser in VS2008. It exists in the online MSDN library though:-

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.mvc.aspx

I re-downloaded and did a repair with the MSI of the VS2008 SP1 documentation set just to check, and that doesn't include it.

Direct2D on Vista? [Direct2D on Vista?]

rhm — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:19:36 GMT

I seem to remember that Direct2d was going to be available on Vista as well as Win7. Is there any news of when this is happening?

in reply to Direct2D on Vista?

Facebook Connect [Facebook Connect]

rhm — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:41:56 GMT

Just wondering if anyone here has done any programming with Facebook Connect.

in reply to Facebook Connect

Windows Explorer in Windows 7 [Windows Explorer in Windows 7]

rhm — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:48:06 GMT

Apart from making the "Navigation pane" even more convoluted (multiple treeviews or one treeview with multiple roots?), Windows Explorer seems exactly the same in Win7 as in Vista.

What is wrong with the shell team? Did they seriously think they'd done a good job with Explorer in Vista and saw no need to change it?

Wasted space - The whole title bar area is wasted. OK, the title bar doesn't do anything useful in most apps, but it's completely blank except for the windows buttons in Explorer. The 'fat window frames' style of Vista/7 doesn't help either.
The toolbar - Mostly blank in Vista, in Win7 it's acquired a bunch of new options that I don't care about while the ones I do care about are hidden in a dropdown. Of course none of this is configurable.
There is an option to enable the menu all the time, but by god does it look ugly. No wonder they wanted to hide it by default.
No horizontal scrollbar in the tree view - Seriously? I'd like to have been in the meeting where they came up with that one. They must have been pretty high that day.
No lines in the treeview - yeh, I know the lines are a bit 'Windows 95', but they work. Now in large trees it's hard to tell what depth you're at without scrolling to the higher level nodes. Oh, which you can't do with selecting the node because the auto-scroll thing that moves the pane horizontally in the absence of the horizontal scrollbar doesn't know what you want to look at without you clicking on it.
The main files pane - this deserves a list all of its own....
Explorer detects (based on the majority of file types or some other guesswork) what 'type' of folder you're in: music files, photos, other. It maintains different settings for each type. If you're old-school like me and you want all folders to use the details view and show the normal columns like file size and date, instead of meta-data that isn't even filled in (couldn't it detect that instead of showing a screen full of empty columns?), you're stuffed. Setting a folder up how you want it and then going to folder options and hitting the button to "make them all look like this" isn't going to work. Every time you go into a folder containing media files it's going to look different.
No intelligence about when to show the navigation pane and when not to - Used to be (prior to Vista), when you double-clicked to open things like Recycle bin or folders on your desktop, you'd get a view without the navigation pane. This doesn't seem to happen any more - if you have it in your main Explorer window you'll get it everywhere.
No quick way to change the navigation pane mode - Even when XP introduced the useless mode when it showed some buttons on the left instead of the treeview, you had a button on the toolbar to switch between useless mode and treeview. Now not only are those options on a dropdown, they're sub-options on a drop-down while the toolbar in Vista is mostly blank and in Win7 is full of stuff you'll never use.
No "Up folder" button in the toolbar. Which brings me onto the location bar....
The location bar can be used to move up a folder, but because you have to click on a different place depending on it's contents, it's not nearly as convenient as the old "Up folder" button. It has the very marginal utility of being able to move up more than one folder at a time, but since it's so visually flabby you can't move up an arbitrary number of levels because usually the whole path isn't visible.
The arrow between the sections in the location bar allow you to navigate without using the treeview. Why though? As a means of navigation it is inferior in every way. And duplicative.
Clicking on the background makes the location bar revert back to a textbox so you can type a path in. Great... except when you're trying to click on the last of the triangles and the whole design of the location bar changes - I bet that confuses the hell out of the computer neophytes that the dumbed down Vista is Explorer is supposed to appeal to. Oh, and you have to click somewhere else in the window to get out of text edit mode; but not anywhere, clicking in the title-bar won't help, it has to be somewhere else that can accept keyboard focus.
The location bar drop-down shares it's history with IE if you have IE8 installed on Vista. This is a VERY VERY bad idea. I can't emphasize enough how misguided and pointless this is. Doesn't seem to do this on Win7, although maybe I haven't played with it enough yet.

Gosh, I thought this list was going to be much longer than that.

What bugs me most about Explorer is that the occasional or non-techy users that the Vista style Explorer design is meant to cater for hardly ever use Explorer and yet people like me who spend half their day finding and moving files about in Explorer windows get something that's far less useable than the Windows 98 style explorer that was used up until Vista. AND WIN7 FIXED NOTHING.

I would really love it if Channel 9 could get someone from the shell team on camera to explain why on earth Windows Explorer is the way it is in Vista/7. I don't expect them to go through my list of complaints or anything, I just want some answer to whether they really thought this was all a good idea or did it all come out of a focus group (full of hairdressers) or something.

in reply to Windows Explorer in Windows 7

Portal (Orange Box) Xbox 360 version [Portal (Orange Box) Xbox 360 version]

rhm — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:39:31 GMT

Hey, I know this is an old game, but Tesco had it for £10 so I thought I'd get it even though I've already completed it on the PC (for achievements and just generally to relive the experience).

Anyway, there's this one level - Testchamber 18. The last part of this is really the only 'action' part of the game because you have to reposition the portals while flying through the air. It's pretty tricky on the PC with the mouse, but I got it done eventually. I spent ages (well, an hour or so which is a long time for me and a game!) trying to do it with the joypad, but it seems impossible. Has anyone got any tips they want to share or is this something only people who play Halo/COD 16 hours a day can hope to achieve?

in reply to Portal (Orange Box) Xbox 360 version

Silverlight streaming - really poor performance. [Silverlight streaming - really poor performance.]

rhm — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:38:50 GMT

OK, I don't know what's up with this, but when I try and stream video from Channel 9 using the embedded silverlight viewer, it takes ages to buffer and then frequently pauses to rebuffer during the video. It's like I'm looking at RealVideo in 1999!

My ADSL connection is pretty fast - if I download the file using IE, I get 1MB (that's one million bytes) per second just fine - way way more than you need to watch video. I'm told that the downloads and streaming come from the same server, which makes it non-obvious where this problem is, but but it's definitely there, in either the IIS config or Silverlight itself. All I can say right now is that the silverlight experience on Channel 9 blows.

in reply to Silverlight streaming - really poor performance.

Outlook 2007's IMAP interface is kinda flaky [Outlook 2007's IMAP interface is kinda flaky]

rhm — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:38:59 GMT

I wanted to get a ton of mail off my PC and into Gmail and was looking around for a tool to do that when I read on a blog that Outlook could actually do it by itself - just open your gmail account in Outlook using the IMAP interface and drag/drop the mail from your PST into the Gmail folders. Awesome.

Would have been brilliant if it worked. I was using Outlook 2003 until I started on this quest. 2003 managed to open my Gmail account, but segfaulted after about 1500 headers read from the server. Repeatedly.

No worries though, I can download Office 2007 from MSDN and install that - been meaning to upgrade for ages anyway. OK, so Outlook 2007 takes much longer to load a chews a ton more memory, but hey, at least it can download all the headers from Gmail without crashing. Yay for Outlook.

I guess IMAP is a really hard protocol to implement or something though, because Outlook frequently hangs during the copying of mail messages. The progress dialog just freezes. Who knows why. One time it popped up a message box saying the network connection failed while it was updating headers (oh noes!) which reappeared immediately as soon as you clicked OK. Had to kill Outlook to get out of that as well.

So in summary: It's nice that Outlook can do what it's trying to do here (drag/drop mail into IMAP servers), but maybe it would be better if it didn't let you so you could move straight on to finding a tool that can actually get the job done.

btw. I have to say, now I've finally had a chance to play with them, I think the ribbon bar in Word and Excel is a work of genius and everybody that slagged them off is an idiot. Just my humble opinion :)

in reply to Outlook 2007's IMAP interface is kinda flaky

explorer.exe [explorer.exe]

rhm — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:22:11 GMT

On my PC right now I'm watching a 796kbs H.264 in an IE page and IE is using an average of 6% CPU. Explorer.exe is using 30% and doing what exactly?

Bearing in mind this is a quad-core CPU as well. While I'd like to take this as another opportunity to bash the awefulness of the Vista shell, I would also like to know if there's any way of stopping explorer doing this.

Details: Vista 64 SP1 (with all the patches as per WU). No 3rd party virus or security software is installed.

in reply to explorer.exe

ADO.NET Entity Framework documentation [ADO.NET Entity Framework documentation]

rhm — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:19:53 GMT

I've got VS 2008 SP1 installed (including .NET 3.5 sp1), but I can't find any documentation for Entity Framework in the local MSDN installtion. Does anyone know if it is included and if not, if it can be downloaded as a CHM from anywhere. I found the relevant section in the online msdn library, but I prefer local help where at all possible.

in reply to ADO.NET Entity Framework documentation

IE8 address bar [IE8 address bar]

rhm — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:58:35 GMT

God I hate IE8. Not quite enough to be bothered to uninstall it, but it's close. The worst thing about it is the address bar. Why put History and Favourites in the drop-down? They have their own place in the UI. When I open that dropdown I want the addresses that I typed in.

The IE8 address bar drop-down only displays 12 typed addresses plus the other stuff that shouldn't be there. There's no scroll bar like there was in IE7. I know that more than 12 typed addresses are stored because sometimes (and I've no idea how or why) IE8 doesn't display History and Favorites in the drop-down and shows 24 typed addresses instead and they're all things I typed, so I know it is storing it, it's just only displaying the 12 most recent most of the time. When did UI designers start thinking it was a good idea for software to get in the way of the information we want. It would have been so easy to add an 'expander' to the Typed Addresses section of the drop-down (like the History and Favourites sections) have, but they didn't.

Anyway, has anyone else seen this happen? Is there a trick to get the drop-down to just display typed addresses?

I won't bore you with all the other ways IE8 is a useability step-back from IE7 (which was also a step back from IE6). I'm going back to FF (not brave enough to try Chrome).

in reply to IE8 address bar

Silverlight player enhancement [Silverlight player enhancement]

rhm — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 03:07:34 GMT

A simple enhancement that would be nice: Use a cookie or isolated storage or something, to remember the current playback position on a video by video basis. BBC iPlayer does this (as well as tracking your recently watched videos) and it makes a surprisingly big difference for such a small feature. Not only does it get you out of a hole if you accidentally navigate away from the page during playback, but it also means if you need to go and do something that involves shutting down the browser during playback you don't need to try and remember where you left off, etc. Anyway, just an idea...

in reply to Silverlight player enhancement

Silverlight working on Ch9 in FF at last. [Silverlight working on Ch9 in FF at last.]

rhm — Thu, 22 May 2008 01:02:12 GMT

Yay! What did you change? Cos I certainly didn't change anything at my end.

I thought it was the javascript detection on the page rather than the silverlight plugin not working in my browser because when I went to a site that didn't bother with detection code I got silverlight in full force. But silverlight never worked on Channel 9 for me in FF until today (to be fair I don't visit that often so it might have been any time in the last week)

in reply to Silverlight working on Ch9 in FF at last.

Instantiating ASP.NET user controls by name [Instantiating ASP.NET user controls by name]

rhm — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:09:53 GMT

Hi,

I'm wondering if it's possible to instantiate an ASP.NET control by name at runtime and have the ASP.NET system look for the .ascx file and compile it into an assembly if necessary?

To clarify, I want to write a function that will take a string that is the name of a control and return an instance of that control without having to compile that control into an assembly in advance. I also want it to get the lastest version of the control automatically if the .ascx file is updated on disk. Is anything like this possible?

in reply to Instantiating ASP.NET user controls by name

Looking for 3rd party XAML implementor [Looking for 3rd party XAML implementor]

rhm — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:41:28 GMT

Someone used to post to channel9 about XAML and Avalon and they either wrote or worked for a company that wrote their own implementation of XAML that ran on older versions of .NET. I remember that their avatar had a screenshot of one of their demo apps (a colour selector) and they had a link to their companies site in their contact details. Anyway, I can't find any of those old posts despite searching through tons of threads with "XAML" in them, so if you are that user or remember who it was, can you add here please.

in reply to Looking for 3rd party XAML implementor

How to create a web service from a WSDL file? [How to create a web service from a WSDL file?]

rhm — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 10:14:22 GMT

Hi there,

I'm consuming web services and writing new ones fine with VS2003 in VB.NET. But I've been asked to use a web service that I have the WSDL file for, but haven't been given access to yet. I figure I've got the time to write an 'emulator' for this web service that just spits out dummy data, but what I need to know is:

Is there a way to create an equivalent web service based on the WSDL file?

It's a pretty complex WSDL file as well, so it's not really practical for me to create it by hand in the time I have available.

Thanks in advance.

in reply to How to create a web service from a WSDL file?

IIS in XP Pro - for the love of god WHY? [IIS in XP Pro - for the love of god WHY?]

rhm — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:36:36 GMT

WHY did Microsoft not back-port IIS6 to run on XP Pro?

WHY did Microsoft cripple IIS5 in XP Pro so it can only handle 10 connections at once?

OK, the answer to the first one could be that they just weren't that bothered about supporting ASP.NET development on XP Pro. I'm having trouble pursauding my bosses that we need to install Windows Server 2003 on all our workstations, but it seems obvious to me that if we're going to debug stuff we need to be running the same version of the web server that's on the production servers.

As to the restrictions, that's just petty. Has Microsoft got so little confidence in it's server products that it has to cripple the workstation version incase people decide to serve actual sites from XP Pro machines? It's not like you can't run Apache on XP Pro and serve as many connections as you like. All that 10 connection restriction does is p1ss off ASP.NET developers.

Now I bet a lot of you are wondering why that 10 connection restriction is a big deal - it probably seemed quite reasonable back in the days of NT4 Workstation when we were just talking about serving from 'classic' asp pages. But no, now we've got massive ASP.NET apps that use lots of web services. Some of those web services call other web services. If I have all these web services running on my workstation so I can debug them easily, I run into 403.9 errors pretty soon. We've got some scenarios we cannot debug at all on XP Pro machines because of this. All because some bean counter decided that Microsoft might lose 0.1% of server licence sales if IIS wasn't crippled on workstation versions of Windows. Well done Microsoft.

in reply to IIS in XP Pro - for the love of god WHY?

Why do... [Why do...]

rhm — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 12:49:17 GMT

...so many people create threads with useless undescriptive titles like this?

in reply to Why do...

Problem installing Visual Web Developer Express 2005 [Problem installing Visual Web Developer Express 2005]

rhm — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 10:28:04 GMT

It downloaded all the stuff and created a new installer shortcut on the desktop and then bombed out with a non-specific error. I've rebooted and run that installer again and it just comes up with a messagebox saying "A problem has been encountered while loading the setup components. Canceling setup."

I have had VS2005 betas on this machine before but I uninstalled all that stuff as directed by the downloader part of the install. I hope there's a way to fix this as re-installing XP isn't really an option. Anyone got any ideas?

in reply to Problem installing Visual Web Developer Express 2005

How not to start a presentation. [How not to start a presentation.]

rhm — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 21:47:46 GMT

I thought I'd find out what biztalk server is about so I started viewing the video of the launch event on this page. Skip past the video (of a video, neat, not). The host starts to introduce the VP responsible for biztalk by reading out his canned biog. I don't know if the VP asked to be introduced this way or if it was just the result of an obsequious subordinate, but it was the longest, most tedious introduction I've ever heard. Then the guy comes on stage, has a problem with his radio mic, and then one of his first remarks is "it's interesting to hear your biography" and I'm thinking "interesting for you maybe, hellishly tedious for everyone else".

They didn't get to the point after 10 mins (it's a 1+hour presentation) so I've still only got the vaguest idea what biztalk server does. Still, I think the presentation was intended for management types and they only really need the vaguest idea of anything tech related (so it seems).

in reply to How not to start a presentation.

C++ allocation operators [C++ allocation operators]

rhm — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 21:34:39 GMT

Has anyone got any idea why a class would implement the new and delete operators but not do anything special with them? I've got a whole load of code and every class has the following code at the top:-

public:

    void* operator new(size_t,void* anAddress)
      {
        return anAddress;
      }
    void* operator new(size_t size)
      {
        return Standard::Allocate(size);
      }
    void operator delete(void *anAddress)
      {
        if (anAddress) Standard::Free((Standard_Address&)anAddress);
      }

Is this just a waste of time or is there a point to it?

in reply to C++ allocation operators

custom cursors in winforms apps [custom cursors in winforms apps]

rhm — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 22:36:21 GMT

Using VS2003 I've got a C# app I'm writing. I want some different cursors (mouse pointers really) from the usual ones contained in the Cursors class. So I add a cursor item to the project and that brings up the image editor toolbar, but the "Set hotspot tool" remains stubbornly greyed out. Has anyone got any idea why this is and how I go about setting up the hotspot otherwise?

in reply to custom cursors in winforms apps

MSN Desktop search - waste of time [MSN Desktop search - waste of time]

rhm — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:08:25 GMT

Whew, long time without visiting channel 9.

Just popped back in to say what an absolute steaming crock MSN desktop search is. I've had it installed for over 3 months now and after all that time it still says "building initial index". Despite churning away at my harddrives constantly and pushing the temperatures up when I'm not using the machine it has never actually scanned all the files. What the hell is it doing?

In addition it screws up the shutdown of the machine - one process always fails to exit cleanly and has to be terminated. And sometimes when you go to use it says "Windows Desktop search Engine is starting up. Please wait" even though the machine has been running and logged in for hours. It just sits there, it's clearly not going to start.

Right now all I wanted to so was look for an email. I'd have the answer in a second when I had 'Lookout' installed. Why did MS take the developers of a great product and incorporate them onto a team that produced a pile of junk like MSN search?

Guess it's time to give Google's desktop search a go. Just thought I'd mention my frustration on here since Microsoft is supposedly interested in customer feedback these days.

in reply to MSN Desktop search - waste of time

Multiple MDI client areas [Multiple MDI client areas]

rhm — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 22:41:01 GMT

This is a long-shot cos I doubt anyone else has tried to do this (Google didn't turn up anything) but I'm trying to make a Windows Forms app that works like Visual Studio right down to the multiple tab groups.

Now I found a component called DotNetBar which implements all the menu, toolbar, docking window functionality required. It even comes with a sample that is very like VS in that it's an MDI parent window that starts the MDI child windows maximised and has a tabstrip along the top of the client area with the child window names on the tabs. So it's close, but VS has a thing where you can split the MDI child area multiple times.

That DotNetBar sample explicitly cretes the MdiClient control on the form and sets it's Dock property to Fill. VS doesn't document the MdiClient control at all because what you're supposed to do for MDI is to set the IsMDIParent property of the form to true and it will create the MdiClient at runtime, but creating it explicitly adds some extra control.

Anyway, you can add more than one MdiClient control to a form and use a splitter between them. If you do this the MDI child windows are created in the first MdiClient's area. There doesn't seem to be any way to move them into the other MdiClient's area though. MdiClient has a property called MdiChildren but that just gets an array of Form refs so is effectively read-only. Since MdiClient is derived from Control, you can get an instance of ControlCollection from it's Controls property. You can use that to enumerate the same information as you get from the MdiChildren prop, but if you try and use any of the methods to change the contents of it you end up with a null reference exception.

Any ideas?

The obvious alternative for me now is to not use MDI at all. I can just make the document windows into UserControl classes instead and provide my own Window menu logic. I wondered if this is what VS does as well, but according to the VSIP documentation, document windows are proper MDI children, so VS must be doing some serious messing with the MDI mechanism to work the way it does.

in reply to Multiple MDI client areas

Backup software [Backup software]

rhm — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 16:53:17 GMT

I'm wondering what backup software people use at home and work (if any at all).

So far I've just been manually copying important files to an external drive which is a bit casual for my liking. However every time I looked at backup software it would always be really expensive and geared towards server backup to tape which isn't what I want. I want to backup a single machine to either DVD or external drives/network drives.

I think I found the product I'm after in Symantec LiveState Recovery Desktop. It backs up to various media as well as having a ton of other neat features. It's also quite inexpensive (insight are selling it for £47 in the UK). So I went to their website to find out more and on the Trial page they state "IMPORTANT: Please note, this is an Enterprise product. This product is not intended for home computing."
What's up with that? I guess they just don't want to support a bunch of clueless home users at that price, but is there any reason why I couldn't use it at home? Has anyone here got experience of this product?