Dennis "D.C." Dietrich

I was talking to one of our partners at MIX about the new security model in Silverlight. In case you're not familiar with it yet I recommend reading The Silverlight Security Model (as well as part II and III if you're interested in the details) on Shawn...

The first MediaGuardian Innovation Awards were held two days ago in London. Its motto - at least according to a big banner on their website - seems to be: "Some great ideas never see the light of day. We celebrate the ones that do." With that in mind...

Well, I published a post on Tuesday and haven't ever since (not counting the remote debugging post which I prepared before going to MIX). Turns out MIX got in the way of blogging about MIX on a daily basis ( fortunately some fellow MSDN bloggers had time...

Let's face it: Silverlight is awesome! So are the Visual Studio Tools for Silverlight. One reason why it is so awesome is that you can run your applications on Windows and Mac OS X. But what if you need to debug an application while it is running on a...

So, I finally made it to Las Vegas. However, not without a four hour delay in Portland due to a leaking lavatory which made it necessary to use another aircraft. That of course caused me to miss most of the presentation of The King of Kong meaning I got...

By the time I made up my mind that I really wanted to work at Microsoft I was already really excited about the .NET Framework. In combination with C# and Visual Studio it opened a whole new (and managed) world of programming to me. But after a while I...

The CultureInfo class and particularly its properties CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture are often a source of confusion when people are confronted with them for the first time. Many articles and blog posts about this topic have been published in the...

I finally signed up for a Hotmail Plus account. While the web interface is awesome I wanted to configure Outlook 2007 to fetch my email using POP3 and send mails using SMTP. Call me old fashioned but I prefer having all my sent and received email in my...

Today is the World Usability Day 2007 and I'd like to encourage everyone to look into it especially of course the presentations given in the MS Conference Center throughout the day which are available online. So, why do I think this is important and why...

Everyone who has worked on a software project knows the problem: Code gets written, code gets tested and before you know it bug reports start hitting the bug tracking system. Still, life is good, bugs get fixed and ultimately the software is ready to...

A disclaimer first: The following post is my personal opinion and by no means an official recommendation. And with that out of the way I'd like to share a little problem I was facing last month. I was looking for a sound card with 192 kHz/24 bit playback...

Usually you should fix all warnings you see when building your code right away and personally I'm a big fan of treating warnings as errors. Here is one more reason: Marking an assembly with the AssemblyCulture attribute using a non-empty string...

My Windows Home Server (WHS) has been threatening me to quit for the last couple of days. In its defense, that serves me right for running a pre-release build for almost half a year which I knew right from the start would expire at some point. So it's...

So how can you verify that a given class raises an event? Well, you can simply write some code that registers an event handler and then cause the target to raise that event. Now, how do you verify that a given class does actually handle an event raised...

I received some feedback on my previous post A good reason for calling GC.Collect() basically saying that I omitted certain details on the garbage collector and weak references. I won't argue that - it is certainly true. However, it wasn't my intention...

You've probably heard that you should not call GC .Collect() and generally speaking this is absolutely correct. Yes, there are probably exceptions to that rule but unless you know for sure that calling GC .Collect() will improve the runtime behavior of...

In Debugging of and error handling for synchronous Commands I explained why you can't handle exceptions thrown during the execution of commands and how to get around this limitation. Yesterday I was reading through some posts on Eric White's blog including...

Today the Windows Home Server team announced the availability of the Home Server Release Candidate ( Release Candidate goes live! ). I've been using earlier pre-release builds of the software for many weeks by now and personally I can't wait for the final...

Ricky Tan wrote a really cool post for the Acropolis Team Blog titled Extending the Notepad sample with a Web Browser View . Since the Notepad sample is available both as a C# and a VB.NET project we decided that it would be a good idea to publish his...

"Hello World" code samples are a long tradition whenever you're trying to introduce someone to a programming language. While Acropolis is actually a framework and not a language – XAML extensions aside – it's still great to see that Ezequiel Jadib from...

One of the features of the Parts Portal is that it supports the instantiation of parts which have service dependencies despite the fact that the Portal doesn't know anything about the services that will be required at runtime. Normally we could simply...

So you might have your first Acropolis application up and running and everything works just fine. Except for that little problem in one of your commands that you have missed. How could that happen? Well, if an exception is thrown during the execution...