04 Tuesday Oct 2011
Posted in .NET Framework, Conferences, Links, Microsoft
In this post, my fellow friend, colleague, C# Disciple and MVP Marlon Grech gives a good overview of his impressions of Windows 8 and how it will affect the future of computing.
Hop over to the link to see what he thinks -> ‘the link :)‘
02 Sunday Oct 2011
Tags
.NET Framework, Extensible Application Markup Language, Microsoft, Windows Presentation Foundation, WPF
WPF XML namespaces are those fancy little cryptic strings at the top of every WPF application that you use (generally prefixed with xmlns=”..”, meaning that they are the ‘default’ namespace [i.e. no prefix required]).
But what do they mean?
Simply put, they are ‘short cuts’ to import a whole plethora of .NET WPF assemblies and make their contents available for use in your XAML file.
The most commonly used namespace is http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation, and it imports the following .NET namespaces
As you might (or might not) know, there are other XML namespaces that you can use, each represents a particular version of WPF as follows (to date):
Note that these are all mapped to the same WPF assemblies, though they implicitly define which version of WPF you are targeting.
Also, a note about winfx vs netfx: winfx was the original name that was used to refer to the W*F technologies (WCF,WPF,WF)… this was later ditched by Microsoft.
01 Saturday Oct 2011
Tags
.NET Framework, Charles Petzold, Extensible Application Markup Language, Microsoft, Windows Presentation Foundation, XamlPad
If any of you are like me, you may have read some book, or some blog, that refers to a seemingly obscure little utility called XamlPad.
I read that this was included with the .NET Framework 3.0 SDK… so, I searched high and low… but XamlPad continued to elude me.
Further research showed that XamlPad is no more, surprisingly (or not*) due to Microsoft having a lack of resources.
There are though a few alternatives running around in the wild:
* well, I say ‘or not’ here since even if Microsoft do have LOTS of developers, they are also pretty busy nowadays, so I am not surprised that a teeny tool like this would be pushed aside, considering that there are comparable maintained tools out on the market already.
30 Friday Sep 2011
Posted in Configuration
Tags
Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, SkyDrive, Technology, Windows, Windows Explorer, Windows Live SkyDrive
In this post, I will go over how to set up your Microsoft Live SkyDrive as a mount in Windows, so that you can use it normally as you would use any networked drive.
The first step is to associate your LiveID with your user account.
25 Sunday Sep 2011
Posted in Configuration
Tags
.NET Framework, Help, Microsoft, Microsoft Developer Network, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Windows, MSDN, Technology
When Microsoft released Visual Studio 11 Developer Previews (express or ultimate), the REST help query service for VS 11 was not yet deployed, therefore when you hit F1, you are sent to the dev10 (VS 2010) help service, rather than the correct VS 2011 service.
In the meantime Microsoft have now deployed the proper Visual Studio 11 help service on MSDN.
Thankfully, we can update our Visual Studio installation to use this new help service via a simple registry tweak :)
NOTE: If any of the keys are not available in your registry hive, feel free to create them.
For Visual Studio 2011 Express Developer Preview
For 32-Bit:
For 64-Bit:
For Visual Studio 2011 Ultimate Developer Preview
For 32-Bit:
For 64-Bit:
23 Friday Sep 2011
Posted in Configuration
Tags
Metro, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, rpenabled, Run command, Start menu, Technology, Windows 8, Windows Registry
If, like me, you do not really like the Metro-styled Windows 8 start menu, you can restore the Window 7 classic style menu with a simple registry tweak, as follows
22 Thursday Sep 2011
Posted in Maintenance
Tags
Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Operating system, Run command, Safe mode, Technology, Windows, Windows 8 Developer Preview
It turns out that the normal way to access safe mode is disabled in Windows 8 Developer Preview.
Instead, launch Windows, and do the following:
15 Thursday Sep 2011
Posted in Installations, Microsoft, Virtualisation
Tags
So I tried installing Hyper-V on my Intel Xeon Quad-Core laptop… one would think that this would be possible.
Turns out that Microsoft’s promise of Windows 8 running fully on hardware that can run Windows 7 does have its limitations.
I headed to the familiar ‘Turn Windows Features on or off’ dialog, and tried installing Hyper-V Core, but this was disabled… further digging around unearthed some unpleasant details.
Hyper-V Core, the integral part of Hyper-V, requires a new virtualisation processor feature known as SLAT. Microsoft has documented a list of SLAT-Capable cpus here -> http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1401.aspx
Unfortunately mine is not listed there.
So if anyone was planning (as was I) to install the Dev Preview and have a VM of Windows 7 running on it, think again, and try an alternative solution, such as Oracle’s VirtualBox.
15 Thursday Sep 2011
Posted in Conferences
Tags
Build Conference, Microsoft, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8 Developer Preview
I was unable to attend the Microsoft BUILD conference, though luckily practically all the material is available on-line (except the schwag and breakfasts and …)
Grab
