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October 2008 - Posts

Friday, October 31, 2008 3:43 PM

A new version of Hard Rock Memorabilia – and my new favourite zoom

Last Friday we did a re-run of the MSDN Roadshow in London and MikeT covered off Silverlight, including a demo of deep zoom using the Hardrock site. I hadn’t realised the site had recently been updated to include over 500 items – but what I liked was
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, October 31, 2008 3:20 PM

A new logo for .NET – hmmmm

While on holiday they have changed the logo for .NET. That means a whole new bunch of business cards :-) (Or maybe not – as I always forget to carry them with me). What do you think? Looks like the “wave” is meant to be a N to me. The old logo: The new
Posted by Eric Nelson | 4 Comments
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Friday, October 31, 2008 3:11 PM

WPF Performance issues? Then maybe this tool can help…

I am seeing more interest in building richer UX in WPF of late which is great. Since WPF is very powerful and very flexible, we are beginning to see developers hit UX performance issues as they build increasingly rich and exciting UI. The good news is
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Friday, October 31, 2008 3:01 PM

WPF Datagrid is now available

I have been following the arrival of the Microsoft Datagrid for WPF for sometime (my interest driven by the number of times I get asked about it!). I am pleased to say that this week we released v1 of the Datagrid over at http://www.codeplex.com/wpf along
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, October 31, 2008 2:51 PM

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and 4.0 Poster Available

We have released a nice summary of what we added/changed in 3.5 SP1 and what 4.0 will bring. This is available as a download and as a deepzoom .
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
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Friday, October 31, 2008 2:38 PM

Just back from holiday … and PDC session #1 = Babysmash

I had a great week rebuilding the bank of a stream, watching the neighbour butcher a deer in his garden and learning what it feels like to be out walked by my 16 year old son up a mountain (which he called a hill!). A holiday was my way of handling missing
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Friday, October 24, 2008 12:12 PM

ZoomIt from Sysinternals

I have been using ZoomIt during my recent spate of MSDN events to magnify and draw on the screen. It works great – and many of you have dropped me an email asking what tool I have been using. Enjoy!
Posted by Eric Nelson | 2 Comments
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Thursday, October 23, 2008 10:06 PM

MSDN Flash Poll: Will you take a dependency on 3rd party controls or libraries?

We seem to have a small hiccup with the polling software we normally use in the UK MSDN Flash . Zoho polls to the rescue… I am interested in whether you will happily take a dependency on software developed by a company other than Microsoft as part of
Posted by Eric Nelson | 4 Comments
Monday, October 20, 2008 9:28 PM

Last of our MSDN events this week – and http://blogs.msdn.com/ukdevevents/

We have our last of our current batch of MSDN events this week and I have just been working out what that actually means in terms of travel. It starts out well then goes a little downhill at the end. Wednesday I only have to drive 20minutes to a venue
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008 1:30 PM

Do you fancy a development job with Microsoft in Dublin?

EDIT: ONLY contact me direct if you already know me. Otherwise just apply through the site. Thanks all. Hey, we have job vacancies, lots of them! Better still… they are in Dublin which is an awesome place to work. Vacancies span right through from Development
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008 9:49 AM

Q&A: How can I use LINQ with new data types in SQL Server 2008 such as the geospatial types?

This one has come up a few times. LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities in V1 do not currently support the newest types added to SQL Server 2008 nor do they support your own User Defined Types. More specifically: LINQ to SQL does not support the hierarchyID,
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, October 15, 2008 8:04 AM

Q&A: How do I debug ADO.NET Data Services?

It is great that so many folks have started investigating Data Services and the Entity Framework as a result of the MSDN events we have been delivering. Which does also mean I keep getting asked “Why doesn’t mine work?” kind of questions. The good news
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008 5:13 PM

Q&A: How do I use ADO.NET Data Services with LINQ to SQL and enable read/write

ADO.NET Data Service gives you the ability to do: Read/Write with ADO.NET Entity Framework Read only with LINQ to SQL The reason it is read only for LINQ to SQL is that Data Services needs to object model that it is exposing to implement IUpdatable. LINQ
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Tuesday, October 14, 2008 4:41 PM

Q&A: Multi targeting and Visual Studio 2008, how do I ensure I only use the available APIs?

This question has come up a couple of times in the last few weeks as developers move to Visual Studio 2008 but need to continue to work on Visual Studio 2005 projects. The good news is we have a comprehensive solution for this thanks to the Code Analysis/FxCop
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 14, 2008 4:28 PM

My low tech polls: show of hands at the UK MSDN events

I have been asking a few “raise your hand” questions at the MSDN events we are currently delivering in various parts of the UK. I thought they would be worth sharing. What language do you code in? C# – around 60% VB – around 40% Something else (normally
Posted by Eric Nelson | 0 Comments
Monday, October 13, 2008 12:24 AM

If you liked Microsoft Surface at FOWA – then try Touchless

The Surface demonstrator at the Future of Web Apps was a huge draw – but did you realise you can start playing with multi touch development right now? Check out the Touchless SDK on codeplex – all you need is a Webcam. Enjoy!
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, October 08, 2008 6:35 PM

Do you have Silverlight Beta 2 code? Then you really need to test with RC0.

[EDIT 14th October: Silverlight 2 has now released - but the detail in Tims post below still holds for getting Beta 2 code working on the final release BUT you can publish your updated code straight away] Tim has done a great job of explaining in lots
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, October 08, 2008 6:17 PM

Links for Visual Studio event in Manchester October 7th

A big thanks to everyone who showed up at Manchester and for your patience with the challenges the venue presented. Hopefully you still found it to be useful way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. All the links are up on our new event blog that we are currently
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Wednesday, October 08, 2008 10:58 AM

I feel better already…

Sometimes a post just helps. This post has helped me…
Posted by Eric Nelson | 4 Comments
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Monday, October 06, 2008 9:03 PM

Distractions, distractions, distractions…

I set out this evening to do two specific things. Two hours later I have done … neither of them :-( I have done lots of useful things, looked at lots of code snippets, surfed lots of sites – but, those two specific actions remain. Which reminds me – check
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
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Monday, October 06, 2008 8:36 PM

Entity Framework mapping scenarios

One thing I like to get across when I talk about the ADO.NET Entity Framework is that in V1 the Designer does not support all the capabilities of the underlying Entity Data Model (EDM) – and hence you will sometimes need to “roll up your sleeves” and
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Monday, October 06, 2008 7:45 PM

Q&A: Can I use LINQ with .NET Framework 2.0?

This question from one of my MSDN sessions has stumped me for a while. I know the new language features in Visual Studio 2008 (e.g. LINQ!) are compiler magic which ultimately spits out CLR 2.0 code – but what about the supporting assemblies? Hence… I
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Monday, October 06, 2008 7:15 PM

Q&A: How to return multiple result sets from a stored procedure using LINQ

This one has come up for both LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities. The scenario is a reasonably common one. How to handle something like this: CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[ReturnMultipleRS] AS select * from customers select * from products .csharpcode, .csharpcode
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
Monday, October 06, 2008 12:13 AM

Q&A: Deciding between LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities

I keep getting asked this one. I have my own way of answering which ultimately ends up with “LINQ to Entities is the right choice for majority of scenarios, just expect a little pain”. In slightly more detail: If you only care about SQL Server AND you
Posted by Eric Nelson | 2 Comments
Friday, October 03, 2008 9:50 PM

ReMix UK 08 videos online – including me…

Mike dropped me an email to say the ReMix videos are now online. That is a lot of video as ReMix was 4 tracks over the two days - I missed a lot of great sessions! You can watch the videos online now. I certainly recommend you take some time to watch
Posted by Eric Nelson | 3 Comments
Thursday, October 02, 2008 7:33 PM

Links from VS2008 SP1 event 2nd Oct 2008

The links from the session today are over on a new blog we are trying out to get all our post event resources in one place. Check it out . Thanks to all who attended and the great questions during and after. Feedback always welcome – and do let me know
Posted by Eric Nelson | 1 Comments
 
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