Jan 26 2006
Check out the soon-to-be-released Origen AE S210 which among many other features has bays for 12 HDD’s, and a 12″ touchscreen LCD! Not sure on the damage it will cause (£££), but if its reasonable, then I would need to find a business case when Vista ships to get my hands on one of these 
.
Jan 19 2006
Got this via one of the Avanade communities (thanks Wes), and is just funny – does not matter if you are a geek or not – you need to see the Crash Difference video detailing out some experiences of using and owning and loving a Mac!
Jan 17 2006
I have been eyeing the CLR via C#, Second Edition, I don’t have the first edition, can anyone comment on how good/bad would it be? Of course it will be published next month, and I suppose I can get more reviews then.
Jan 15 2006
We have just started to look for a house – why build someone else’s equity when you can build your own. I got to admit its a drag! And the fact we just started and people go on for months doing this, I don’t know how. It is just a big pain in the butt. My sympathies to all those going through the same thing. If you do know good areas in London where we can live please let me know? I need it to be close to Tube and preferably within Zone 2.
Jan 07 2006
Stephen Toub at Microsoft warns about a scam where people have been getting mailings (not emails) offering them MSJ – this a scam as MSJ is not published anymore! Don’t send them your hard earned money.
Jan 06 2006
If you go to the Computer Management tool in Longhorn (Dec CTP), then you will something called the System Stability Chart, which shows you how stable the system has been including Software Installs/UnInstalls, Failures (including Apps, Drivers, Hardware, Windows), etc. Its pretty cool and should help narrow down cause of failures – quite helpful in a corporate environment. Here is a screen shot from one of my VMs.
Jan 05 2006
Charles talks about how installing WAIK on a functioning VS 05 or TFS system will fail and screwing up the .NET 2.0 runtime bits; best to avoid doing that for now.
Jan 05 2006
Contract inheritance (via CLR interface inheritance) is pretty cool allowing you to support versioning and contract aggregation in WCF, the catch though is if you have a Duplex interface then the callback interface must follow the same hierarchy. So if your primary interface say is IMyInterface which inheritances from ISomeInterfaceOne and ISomeInterfaceTwo, then the callback interface also needs to have the same chain or you will get an InvalidContractException. Here is an example from MSDN:
[ServiceContract(CallbackContract = IACallback)]
interface IA : IB {}
interface IACallback : IBCallback {}
[ServiceContract(CallbackContract = IBCallback)]
interface IB {}
interface IBCallback {}
Jan 03 2006
If you are writing high-perf. managed applications, all the old-world advice from the days of good old COM is still valid. But you do need to think of a few other things such as how the CLR JIT would change things, or the Exception Handling, or Threading and syncing up, or possibly the GC and Allocation Profiles? While this MSDN article is old (now), it still is excellent Food for Thought when it comes to writing high-perf. apps.
Jan 01 2006
If you wanted to use the ThreadState property (which should only be used for debugging and not sync.), to find out if a thread is running. Since the Running state has a value of 0, you cannot do a bit test to discover this state. But you could do something like this to get the same result:
if ((state & (Unstarted | Stopped)) == 0) //yea, its Running!
