I had the need to write some code on my Mac (actually I was too lazy to open up the Win7 laptop) and being that I did not want to torture myself by writing it in Xcode, I decided to try the Mono project and write the code in C# instead. I haven't looked...

Most WCF developers will use MEX at some point in their projects. It is a convenient way to expose and consume metadata about your WCF service. Normally you can use the built-in MetadataExchangeClient class which was made specifically for consuming a...

Just came across this nice little nugget from the Microsoft DevLabs. They have a new programming language called Small Basic which is a simplified set of the traditional BASIC language. They have even created a stripped down IDE which is simple to use...

Just stumbled across this neat new free offering called Microsoft Tag which allows you to give users with camera-enabled phones quick access to detailed information directly on thier mobile phone. You create a tag like the one below and then put it on...

I have a Mac Mini at home which I use from time-to-time for doing some development on OSX. I also have Ubuntu Linux on another box for that matter, but that's a story for another day! I decided to setup the beta of Windows 7 on the Mac Mini just to do...

If you use Outlook 2007 as much as I do then you probably have a gazillion emails across 4 - 5 email accounts so the Outlook search feature is something you might use pretty often. This feature works really well but every now and then I won't find what...

Did a presentation of the new Windows Azure cloud computing service at the November 2008 meeting of the NJ Microsoft Developers User Group in Iselin, NJ. My esteemed collegue Dmitry Lyalin also did a session on Live Mesh . Got a lot of good feedback...

If you are experiencing garbled with the sound in Windows 7 on motherboards with the built-in SoundMax chip, try downloading the drivers here: http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/vista-sound-drivers/ First un-install the existing SoundMax drivers (that were...

Recently I had to write a peice of ASP.NET code that would check if the current IIS application is protected by a client certificate. The reason for this check is to do some conditional logic in the application that would bypass certain custom authentication...

With all the AJAX development going on these days, one problem you are bound to hit is the dreaded 'File not found (404)' error when the browser makes a GET request for the WebResource.axd file. The problem here is that the WebResource.axd is a virtual...

If you use remote desktop a lot, here is a tip that will save you lots of frustration. Most of us like to connect to the Console instance when connecting to a remote server. We normally use a command like: mstsc /console But if have Windows Vista...

I do a lot of WCF development on my laptop and I noticed that connections to my test services on my laptop were suddenly taking a really long time to execute. Further review showed that it was the initial connection which was taking up all this time ...

At least 3 developers have approached me recently with a very common issue when hosting a service via WCF. They follow all the steps in the sample to get the simple 'Hello World' service working – but when they browse to the SVC file to view the Contract...

As most of you know, the ASP.NET runtime in IIS6.0 uses threads from the CLR ThreadPool in order to process requests. As requests come into IIS, they are dispatched via the ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem static method which basically queues the unit of...

If you develop programs using Windows Workflow (WF) it is very common to use the Tracking service which automatically tracks activities – specifically the SqlTrackingService which logs all of this into a nice little database. However there is one issue...