WPF Presents

Tunnel-vision

Peek under the hood of .NET 2.0's new Hosting APIs for the CLR

I was reading my trusty August 2006 MSDN Magazine and came across a jewel. Common Language Runtime (CLR) program managers Alessandro Catorcini and Piotr Puszkiewicz have a great nutshell piece that covers many of the knobs that developers can now use to fine-tune their apps for the CLR, using the new hosting APIs.

So if you're interested in unmanaged hosts able to control very fine-grained details of the internal workings of the CLR, you now can. Using the new .NET Framework 2.0 hosting APIs, a host can, in fact, place itself between the CLR and the operating system and broker any request from the CLR.

Read on!

Get the special TechEd 2006 book on Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 for FREE

At TechEd 2006, a 200-page book was passed out to attendees, 7 Development Projects for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. If you didn't make it to Beantown, you can download the entire book in PDF format.

Preview of Visual Studio Tools for Office v3 - March CTP now available

Last week at the Office Developer Conference in Redmond, Bill Gates announced the availability of the March Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio Tools for Office 'v3'. 

Please do note upfront, this CTP only works the Beta 1 Technical Refresh of Microsoft Office 2007.  If you don't have the Beta 1 Technical Refresh of Microsoft Office 2007, there's a note below with more info; bottom-line is you'll have another shot later this spring.

If you want to get a hands-on tutorial that covers the VSTO 'v3' CTP, you can find it here.  Kathleen McGrath's blog also has a video that shows the CTP in action.

The CTP is available here for download. It installs with an existing Visual Studio 2005 installation. 

And some blurbs from the the official announcement:

Tides turning

Implicit in this article, and mainstream economists are the first to admit, is the idea that there’s tremendous uncertainty and an unknown territory when it comes to modeling and estimating the costs of pollution, climate change, and natural disasters.

Yet sometimes in the assumed belief that free markets address most issues big and small, we fail to realize that in reality there are significant limitations and staleness with the economics discipline and free markets, particularly when dealing with uncertainty in complex, open systems with unknown transaction costs.

This is despite Nobel economist Ronald Coase’s work decades ago on transaction and social costs, that is, when property rights are fixed and defined, it was possible to “internalize externalities” like pollution. While it was a good starting point it was only for closed systems (two parties) with known transaction costs.

Unfortunately, meanwhile many have come to assume that mother nature is a trash collector that works for free, when it’s that we just don’t know how to accurately measure such externalities so it’s as if such costs don’t exist, even when it does and is often quite visible for show like Katrina.

To get a good sense of the limitations with Coase’s theorem as it applies to externalities like pollution, see A Critique of the Chicago School of Economics: Ronald Coase and the Coase Theorem

Virtual Server 2005 R2 installation detour

A really fun part of my job as Developer Evangelist is coding and figuring out how things work. And of course sometimes that involves installing new pieces of software that doesn't perform as expected. Since a lot of my time is spent with a lot of virtual machines I've been thinking about trying the recently released Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. It's suppose to be a faster virtual environment than Virtual PC 2004 and easier to manage multiple virtual images with. All-in-all I've heard good things about it, so today I decided to give it a whirl.

Installation seemed like a breeze - at first. Towards the end of the install just when I thought I was home free, an ominous error popped up, "Error 1402: Could not open key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0\CLSID.  Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.”

To say the least, it felt like an interesting geek detour had surfaced for the day. :)

I proceed to crack open good ol' Regedit and try to open that registry key. Access denied. Tried to delete it. Access denied. Tried to change permissions to Full Control. No luck. It sounded like there was a lock on this key so I reboot into safe mode and tried Regedit again to delete it. Dang it, same thing.

Ended up downloading a command-line tool from the Windows Resource Kit, Subinacl.exe, and put together a .cmd batch file with two lines of script:

subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f

subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=system=f

After running that batch (still as Administrator), I was able to delete the registry key references. Woohoo :) I ended up ridding all entries containing  Msxml2.xx.4.0. Now, MSXML 4.0 needed to be downloaded and reinstalled, which I promptly did, without a hitch.

Almost an hour later, everything started looking up, and I was ready to try my luck again with Virtual Server. Went and started the install package, and voila, it worked! Now I'm running my virtual machine image of Windows Workflow Foundation and the performance is noticeably a whole lot better, with 600MB of RAM allocated for this instance and less than 15% CPU utlization on average just performing standard compile and debug tasks. I was impressed. The web interface and remote control client took a little getting use to; just spent 10 minutes figuring out how to navigate & configure VMs and it really was a breeze to work with after that.

While the first thing I did notice right off the bat was how much faster it was at running VMs, it also solved a thorny problem I was having with my home PC running Virtual PC 2004 SP1: There was a blue screen inside the VM everytime it was shut down, and the resulting memory dump faults the PC's AMD x64 chipset.

Now, everything runs without a hitch on Virtual Server so far. Next I'll probably try loading a couple VMs side-by-side on my laptop and see how things fare. Hopefully everything will run decently on a 2.13GHz Pentium M with 2GB of RAM running on a separate disk spindle.

It was an interesting hour or so, and at the end of which having become rather fond of Virtual Server, I've decided to use it with all my future dev work and customer demos. Maybe you will too.

A beginning

This is going to be my first technical blog, and as a Microsoft Developer Evangelist dedicated to the Communications Sector, I spend quite a bit of time with developers in the telcos and media & entertainment space. What to focus on is always a challenging question. For now, I've decided to take a stab at all things data (primarily ADO.NET) and workflow (Windows Workflow Foundation). Of course, that doesn't mean I won't focus on other areas or the occassional basketball or football reference, just hopefully on the whole I'll be able to talk about these two technology areas that I'm most interested in. And go Seahawks! :)