The Brain Dump : Visual Studio

Important Updates to Live Services!

benwilli — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:58:46 GMT

from the Live Services blog : Important Updates to Live Services

Starting September 8th, 2009 the Live Framework CTP (services, SDK & Tools) will be unavailable.

The Live Framework will be integrated into the next release of Windows Live. Stay tuned to dev.live.com for more details in the future.

There are a few other items but the people I’ve worked with over the past year likely are most affected by the Live Framework change.

Please see the whole article for details. Make sure any data you need that is currently in the Live Framework CTP (not Mesh, Live Mesh will remain available to end users and is not affected) needs to be copied because “Microsoft will not retain any data and/or solutions that are a part of the Live Framework CTP offering.”

Thanks again to everyone for your participation and feedback!

.NET Extension methods from C++

benwilli — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:08:30 GMT

Extension methods are a nice little feature now available in C# and VB.NET. They allow you to tack on new methods to existing classes for which you don’t own the original code. Now C++ does not support this natively and so I recently got bit when I was translating some C# code into C++ CLI.

While C# gave me nice Intellisense

C++ did not

The method I was calling on the NetworkCredential class did not exist in C++, only in C#. Intellisense had failed me!

The answer was simple once I realized that this was actually an extension method and how they are implemented. They are static methods on a different class which C# hooks up for you automagically. In C++ we need to call it directly, and pass in the “this” reference as the first parameter.

So a quick search in reflector or the online help turned up the actual class that implements GetWindowsAuthenticationToken(). It is WindowsLiveIdentityExtension.

And voila! working code again.

Large web site project vs Visual Studio

benwilli — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:21:31 GMT

So I discovered a limit in Visual Studio. It apparently doesn't handle 1.4 GB of data in 40,000 files in a web site very well. I killed the process after it was "Validating the web site..." for over an hour. I finally figured out I needed to build a smaller Deep Zoom image for testing just to get the build time reasonable.

I wish there was a way to make it ignore that directory for the compile step.