February 2007 - Posts
Yesterday i've delivered a Developer's ToolBox presentation in front of the Oracle .Net Forum, during the presentation i've prmised to publish an updated version of the presentation online so here it is...
Click on the following image to download the updated presentation.
I wanted to install some tools for my presentation about Developer's Toolbox at the Oracle .Net Forum and one of the tools that I wanted to show was Roy's regulator.
The regulator was developed and packed via the Visual Studio 2003 Setup Project and the the msi included dependency on Framework 1.1.
Currently I'm using Vista which includes .Net Framework 2.0 (in most cases it is compatible with .Net Framework 1.1 assemblies) and I didn't want to install .net Framework 1.1 on my vista machine.
If I had the binaries at had it would have been simple job as to redirect .net 1.1 binaries to .net 2.0 framework you can just add the <supportedRuntime> and <requiredRuntime> to the application configuration (more info on that here) but my problem was that I didn't have the binaries and only composed msi which doesn't read any configuration file and does let me install it as it include restriction inside.
I had to do some low level moves... using Orca msi editor I was able to open the msi file... scroll down to the last msi table and remove the restriction and walla... I was able to install the msi on my vista machine... and yep its working perfectly.
When you are working with Smart Client Software Factory SCSF or any other Microsoft Software Factories which are based on the Global Automation Toolkit it might happened that sometime during the development you'll have a Visual Studio crash which afterwards you will find that you no longer able to see the Right Click pop-up menu of the software factory.
In order to enable back the Software Factory in your specific solution use the Guidance Package Manger which is located under the Visual Studio Tools menu, when you open the guidance manager click the Enable/Disable Packages and choose the desired guidance package (i.e. Smart Client Developments in our case)
As soon as you exit the manager you'll have the pop-up menu and other extensions working back on you IDE environment.
On Monday 26.2.2007 i'll be lecturing at the Oracle .Net Forum about .Net Developer's Toolbox - lots of toolד that every .net developer should have on his desktop.
Other lecturers during the forum meeting are Getting Started with Oracle & .NET, Builder Applications with a light framework (using Spring.net) and O/R Mapping methologies (Using NHiberante)
Free Registration is open over here
The Microsoft VPC 2007 - which is working perfectly on my Vista machine with support for hardware virtualization has been released to manufacture !
Download it out over here
With the success of the MVPs week and the Microsoft Developer's Academy I'm going to deliver next week ( 27-28/3 ) a Two-day seminar providing an in-depth, hands-on coverage of Microsoft’s Composite UI Application Block (CAB) at John Bryce College - TelAviv.
The seminar will begin with an overview of the driving concepts behind the CAB: aspect oriented programming and design patterns. The core architecture of the CAB will be discussed as well as the advantages provided by it.
Each major area of functionality will be discussed in-depth and extending/customizing the CAB will be covered.
Hands-on labs using the CAB are integrated throughout the seminar.
For more information regarding agenda, cost etc... contact: Info at Experts4d.com
Microsoft released today HID - Non-User Input Data Filter as part of the windows update service ... I've just updated my Vista machine and boom.... the Screen saver started to work !!!
Well it is about time... It took Microsoft 3 Months to fix this bug ! way way way too long !
You have no idea how joy it is to someone to finally been able to see his screen saver when his mouse stays connected to his laptop ! (Until today I had to disconnect the mouse whenever I left the comp running or start the screen saver manually)
If you own a Microsoft Mice specially the 6000 series Mice's update your Vista machine and install the 'Microsoft - Other Hardware - HID Non-User Input Data Filter'
Note this is an optional update !
Read about the prob. history in my pervious blog post here
If you own a Thinkpad Notebook you probably aware of the cooling fan noise annoyances, if you suffer from the noise and want to have a quiet life and gain control of the fan speed take a look at the Thinkpad Fan Controller.
The Thinkpad Fan Controller allows the user to control fan activity based on the system temperature (or manual of course...)
This Visual C++ project controls the fan via port IO to the embedded controller.
p.s. though it was build for the T4x series... its working great on my T60p.
On the 24.1.2007 Microsoft Israel hosted John Carddock & Sally Storey who gave some cool sessions about Building End to End Infrastructure Security.
If you've been to the event and want to see the demos again or if you haven't been there and would like to see really good sessions about End2End Security checkout the following video sessions
P.s. The Videos are in English through in the first session there is a small intro in Hebrew :-)
Is Your It Infrastructure Secure ? [ 1hr 26min 1024x768 627kbps ]
Securing Your Network [ 1hr 20 min 1024x768 548kbps ]
Locking Down Servers and Workstations [ 1hr 22 min 1024x768 548kbps ]
Vista Technologies [ 55min 1027x768 596kbps ]
I've been working all night to complete some work and as usual I was goggling allot but since 5:30am my ISP has some problems connecting to Google and it brings me back to the ages where Google wasn't on the planet.
As I don't have much choice it is time to give a shot to some other search engines... say Live.com ... but what can I say... I keep on searching for stuff and I just don't get the relevant answerers that I used to get with Google... seems like live.com is much much back after Google in finding me the relevant sites for my needs.
Well I do hope that Google will be back soon as I still got some things to finish before I call it a night... (and its almost 8am here...)
Every developer should have tools like FileMon, RegMon etc... installed on his machine
And now its easier then ever as Microsoft grouped together the Sysinternals Troubleshooting Utilities to a one single suite.
Download the SysInternal Suite from here (7.6 Meg of the best tools in town)
One thing that I really hate about IE 7 is that whenever it crashes it doesn't bring back the URLs I was watching... and unfortunately IE7 does tend to crash much more often the Firefox !
IE7Pro add-in among other cool features has a crash recovery feature just like in Firefox :)
Finally you can return to the sites that were lost during the crash.
Download it over here
When I'm working (it happens from now and then...) I always tend to open lots and lots of explorer windows as I Google for answers to questions that come along while coding...
When I used XP and Win 2003 it always bothered me that as soon as I opened 15-17 Internet explorer windows my system got stuck so hard that even right click context menu wouldn't seem to show up.
When I migrated to Vista I though that finally someone in MS will fix this limitation but I was disappointed to find out that it still there...
Well after looking and looking... searching and hacking ... I found the answer !
Its all about the desktop heap !
Following is Desktop Heap Tweak:
Because it is an undocumented registry tweak I take no responsibility regarding implementing this tweak ! It worked for me and if you choose to tweak your system you are doing it on your own risk.
Longtime Windows users are familiar with the desktop heap, a memory space that Windows allocates for desktop objects such as, well, windows.
Each open window or other desktop object uses up a certain amount of the desktop heap. In older versions of Windows the desktop heap was very small, and objects weren't always disposed from the heap correctly.
This was a good part of the reason for the Incredible Shrinking Resource Heap problem that plagued the 16 and hybrid 16/32-bit versions of Windows.
NT fixed this problem by devoting a far larger chunk of memory to the desktop heap -- but the fact that it had a far better memory manager than Win 3.x or Win9x, and a pure 32-bit architecture, didn't hurt either.
The desktop heap limit affects the NT/VISTA family of systems, Hitting the limit is manifested as either a DLL initialization error for USER32.dll or an out of memory error.
Fortunately, the limit it tweakable, the default settings are low enough that the limit is easily hit.
To tweak the limit, take a look in the registry at HLKM/System/CurrentControlSet/Control/Session Manager/SubSystems
(cranked up a bit if you find yourself manipulating a lot of desktop objects.)
Within that key is a subkey called Windows, which contains in it, among other things, the value "SharedSection=1024,3072"
Changing the SharedSection entry to "1024,3072,512" (note the comma and the value)increases the size of the "hidden" desktop heap.
If that doesn't work, try increasing the second of the comma delimited values (e.g. 3072 -> 4096) which is the size limit of any particular desktop heap.
Microsoft's Developer Academy was held last wendsday in Israel at the Cinema City, during the event we had lots and lots of sessions from .net 3.0 to team system to composite ui and more.
Large part of the lecturers at the event were Microsoft MVPs.
Myself, Jackie Goldstein, Udi Dahan, Leon Langlayben, Justin Angel, Roy Osherove, Alon Phlis & Ami Levin.
My part in the event was 2 sessions about the Microsoft Composite UI application block, Developers panel & a Video Arcast with Ron Jacobs about the Composite UI (CAB) in real world applications.
As the event was held in the Cinema City Microsoft Israel prepared for us movies and posters that made us all feel like movie stars for a day :)
