Random thoughts from a certified geek!

I just saw U2 in LA – from my sofa in Seattle.. ;)

2009-10-26T05:39:21Z

I’ve been to every U2 concert for the past 18 years, including concerts in Sydney, London, Dublin and perhaps the best of them all, Sloane Castle. So it disappoints me immensely that I’m unable to see them this time around in what looks like their best tour yet. Still, I managed to make myself a little bit happier tonight by tuning into the live YouTube stream from the Los Angeles concert. My only gripe was that they didn’t use Silverlight Smooth Streaming for it – that way they could have avoided...(read more)

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 released – with new and improved logo!

2009-10-24T05:36:18Z

On Monday, we released Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 to the web! Aside from all the great new features and awesome UI, one thing I love in particular is the new branding, which you can see in the logos below. These new logos seem a lot more modern and professional to me – just like the products!...(read more)

Windows 7 and Office Communicator 2007

2009-03-16T03:11:38Z

I recently installed Windows 7 Beta on my laptop, and whilst trying to run Office Communicator 2007 today I received this message: The event log showed this: Faulting application name: communicator.exe, version: 2.0.6362.76, time stamp: 0x4884242d Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7000.0, time stamp: 0x49433de1 Exception code: 0xe06d7363 Fault offset: 0x0000ae33 Faulting process id: 0x1644 Faulting application start time: 0x01c9a588af300fdb Faulting application path: C:\Program...(read more)

LINQ To SQL Designer issues

2008-08-23T02:19:13Z

Today I was trying to load a LINQ to SQL data context in my project and every time I double-clicked to open it I received this message: After trying to sort it out for a while I finally deleted the values under this registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Packages Seems that Visual Studio had decided not to load my designer tool on startup and marked it to be skipped next startup. After deleting these values, everything now works again! Hope this helps, Jason...(read more)

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 - Now Available!

2008-07-22T00:28:25Z

The Windows Home Server Power Pack 1 update package went live on Microsoft Downloads. You can check out the release notes for details, although the team blog and the community site also have plenty of details. Power Pack 1 fixes the data corruption bug as well as delivers significant new functionality including: x64 support for home computers running Windows Vista Home Server Shared Folder backup Improved remote access experience Improvements to power consumption and performance Localization support...(read more)

Buddy Knavery - Awesome Silverlight 2 Game

2008-06-07T19:15:51Z

In case you missed it - Silverlight 2 Beta 2 is now available for download. To coincide with this release and demonstrate the power of Silverlight, a colleague on my team has written a great game called 'Buddy Knavery - Episode 1 : The Killer Riffs' . It's an old school game in the style of Maniac Mansion, Leisure Suit Larry, Indiana Jones & The Fate Of Atlantis etc. I had the privilege of being one of the beta testers and I thought it was awesome. The attention to detail and the humorous script...(read more)

Accessing profile data from a web service

2007-04-26T00:05:45Z

I recently had a need to access the Profile object from a web service which I was calling from a JavaScript method using ASP.NET AJAX. Looking around on the web people said it couldn't be done. Well never one to take no for an answer, I managed to play around and work it out. Here it is: //get the profile object for the user System.Web.Profile.ProfileBase userProfile = System.Web.Profile.ProfileBase.Create("Insert Username"); //get the value string email = userProfile["EmailAddress"].ToString();...(read more)

Searching generic lists

2007-03-24T05:46:00Z

A nice article posted by Jeff on using predicates to search generic lists. This can also be applied to other methods, such as Exists and TrueForAll etc. If your experience is anything like mine, you probably have been using generics like crazy since .NET v2 hit the streets (or before if you were a beta monkey). It's so much easier to manipulate object and especially strongly typed collections. One thing I always found annoying, however, was that there wasn't an obvious way to find stuff in a List<T>...(read more)

Allow myself to introduce... myself!

2007-01-05T03:28:00Z

My name is Jason Ward and I'm a web developer working in the Developer Division at Microsoft. Whilst my team maintains it's own blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/dditweb/ , I thought it might be useful to maintain a separate blog for things I'm interested in or working on that might not necessarily be what I'm doing on a daily basis. So who am I? We let's start off with 5 facts about me and I promise to tell you more in future posts. 1. I'm Australian, although sometimes that's hard to comprehend given...(read more)