April 2006 - Posts

• Reason #4983 Why .NET 2.0 is so f'ing cool

  I had a nice picture I really wanted to turn into a poster by printing it over multiple pages (I seem to have been futsing a lot with pictures these past 2 weeks for some reason ). None of the software I had on my machine seemed to be able to do this Read More... Posted Saturday, April 29, 2006 11:28 PM by Shahar | 1 Comments

• Using Excel Services CloseWorkbook call asynchronously

  This post discusses how to call CloseWorkbook asynchronously to increase performance. It also discusses when not to use it. Read More... Posted Friday, April 28, 2006 8:51 AM by Shahar | 1 Comments Filed under: Development, Excel Services

• Hidden feature of the day – AutoToolboxPopulate

  For some reason on all 6 machines where I do development (<GeekMoment>Home machine, laptop and 4 dev machines at work</GeekMoment>) this option is turned off. Not a big deal of course since there are workarounds, but for my side projects (where Read More... Posted Monday, April 24, 2006 2:44 AM by Shahar | 1 Comments Filed under: Development Related

• I am a dad for the first time!

  Last night my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Dani she was so cute that we decided to keep her! See why? :) Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 19, 2006 4:55 PM by Shahar | 9 Comments Filed under: Touchy Feely

• New utility - TrayRadio - for all of you who hate it when opening a movie stops your radio

  At work and at home, I constantly listen to radio from Israel (Galgalatz, if you are interested). Everytime I open any media file though, the radio stops and I need to restart it. Annoying. This utility comes to solve that. Read More... Posted Monday, April 17, 2006 10:26 AM by Shahar | 4 Comments Filed under: TrayRadio

• Why do I need Type.MakeByRefType()?

  This was asked on one of our DLs. Basically, the question is, "I am trying to invoke a method that takes a reference to a structure (i.e. void MyMethod(ref TimeSspan span) ) - how do I create this type so that I can call the method?". The answer is that Read More... Posted Friday, April 14, 2006 11:23 AM by Shahar | 0 Comments Filed under: Development

• The undetectebility of C++/CLI gcroot<> template references.

  In recent builds, we have been having an awful memory leak in our system. Silvio was debugging it and noticed that we had way too many instances of a specific type in our appdomain (where there should have been zero copies of this item when the system Read More... Posted Thursday, April 13, 2006 12:48 PM by Shahar | 0 Comments Filed under: Development Related

• Session State vs. Global State in UDFs

  Excel Services provides ways of doing Session-Scoped and Global-Scoped caching in your UDFs. This post explains how these work. Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:06 AM by Shahar | 6 Comments Filed under: Development, Excel Services

• Excel Services UDF, be not synchronous

  Excel Services UDFs can use any dirty trick in the .NET book (as long as not blocked by the admin). In this post, we will show how a UDF can greatly increase performance of multiple calls made to web-services. Read More... Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2006 9:30 AM by Shahar | 29 Comments Filed under: Development, Excel Services

• Abusing my poor pregnant wife. Pictures Inside!

  My wife is at the last stages of her pregnancy - and she's HUGE. We decided to have a bit of fun before the little creature that's inside her tries to claw it's way out. This is what we came up with: For my homies who root for Hapoel Tel Aviv: This is Read More... Posted Monday, April 10, 2006 9:58 AM by Shahar | 4 Comments Filed under: General

• Update to the Nmag utility - it can now resize too.

  I added the ability to resize images to the Nmag utility. Read More... Posted Friday, April 07, 2006 2:07 PM by Shahar | 2 Comments Filed under: Nmag

• Environment.TickCount returns negative numbers - MSDN doc error

  This one just bit us a today. The documentation for TickCount on MSDN say that this value is always positiove: <Quote> The TickCount property handles an overflow condition by resetting its value to zero. The minimum value returned by TickCount is Read More... Posted Friday, April 07, 2006 11:05 AM by Shahar | 5 Comments Filed under: Development Related

• UDF Rules and guidelines

  A description of what's supported (type wise) in Excel UDFs. Read More... Posted Thursday, April 06, 2006 3:26 PM by Shahar | 6 Comments Filed under: Development, Excel Services

• New utility for working with Galleries on blogs.msdn.com

  A new utility for streamlining the management of Gallery Posts. Read More... Posted Wednesday, April 05, 2006 1:30 PM by Shahar | 0 Comments Filed under: Nmag

• How UDFs work in Excel Services - a Primer

  UDFs (User Defined Functions) are a great way to extend Excel Services' capabilities. This post describes the basics and shows you how to create a simple DNS Lookup application with Excel. Read More... Posted Tuesday, April 04, 2006 8:52 AM by Shahar | 16 Comments Filed under: Development, Excel Services

• Short Session Timeout and Session Timeout in Excel Services - Part 2

  This is the second of two posts about Session Timeout and Short Session Timeouts in Excel Services. This second post gives ideas about when you may wish to adjust these two values. Read More... Posted Monday, April 03, 2006 9:15 AM by Shahar | 0 Comments Filed under: Excel Services

• Finally out of NDA – Excel Services integration with Xbox 360!!!!

  Ever thought how cool it would be to integrate Excel Services with Xbox360? Well, we have. Here it is! Read More... Posted Saturday, April 01, 2006 10:36 AM by Shahar | 4 Comments Filed under: Development, Excel Services