Current Stories
Wednesday, 23. April 2008
MS Live Mesh = Replication for the Masses?04/23/2008 09:05 PM Looks like the next foot has fallen...I had wondered what was next after seeing MS' Sync Framework because it seemed like Ray Ozzie's first influence on MS.
Check out the demos and tell me this isn't Ray Ozzie's Lotus Notes-like "replication for the masses" (Groove was the first attempt at it but people weren't willing to buy it; adoption cost doesn't seem to be an issue w/ Live Mesh). Live mesh is an interesting technology that's very consumer oriented but is also a development platform.
Unfortunately, it isn't business oriented yet because it has no mesh management for businesses or encryption of files (though the network traffic is SSL encrypted) or control of what is allowed from within a company's network (picture employees drag/dropping confidential files to friends so IT folks can't just glue shut USB ports any more in the name of "security" 
(0) Wednesday, 12. March 2008
Sync Framework Limitations for Stage/Production Web Usage03/12/2008 In a previous story, I was all excited about this new MS framework, but unfortunately we've found all sorts of limitations that weren't obvious on an initial investigation. These limitations apply only if you plan to use it for peer to peer SQL server sync instead of the client/server sync (aka PDA) it was meant for.
(0) Wednesday, 27. February 2008
Hunting down "Error R6034: An application has made an attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly."02/27/2008 12:34 PM Manifest Hell (MS' replacement for DLL Hell), aka, the Side By Side (SxS) system has got to be the most annoying thing I've hit w/ a recent Windows XP Upgrade on an old Win2K machine that I didn't want to reinstall the apps on. The problem stemmed from an msvcr80.dll in the system PATH, but it was hard to find w/o Process Explorer.
(0) Tuesday, 26. February 2008
If you reinstall VS.2005 and get a cryptic "vs_setup.msi could not be opened" error02/26/2008 02:30 PM If you ever need to reinstall VS.2005 and the SP1 update on your system and you hit this error, it's because the Windows Installer thinks they're still installed even after you delete the file. There are a few registry keys to remove: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0 (VS.Net 2005) and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products
\0E8BA73496BF22242B086AF4D32E5219 (VS.Net 2005) and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Patches\C7C9F39D75BA8C44AB6D414976B4AC7F (VS.2005 SP1).
This is an unbelievably cryptic error...at the very least, it should put up an error message that says "it's already installed" instead of "could not be opened". It's almost worse than the cryptic "attempt to load the C runtime library incorrectly" from old .exe or .dll files on your system that you migrated to XP...at least MS could say which file caused it :-P
(1) Sunday, 27. January 2008
Ray Ozzie's Influence Finally Shows Up in MS Sync Framework01/27/2008 10:22 PM I was wondering when Lotus Notes replication might show up at MS since Ray Ozzie migrated over and it looks like his influence can finally be seen in the MS Sync Framework. It's a fairly impressive framework that provides a low level interface that lets you hook up file system objects and database content to a real replication engine (not the silly thing that is in MSSQL).
(0) Saturday, 22. December 2007
Upgraded to T-Mo Wing and WM6 is Less Stable than Symbian12/22/2007 The used prices on the T-Mobile Wing (HTC Herald) finally dropped down to the $200 range so I finally bit so I could get a phone with wifi support. I had hoped the Nokia E70 would come down in price, but it unfortunately stayed at around $300. I was also curious how far along Windows Mobile had come...
(0) Tuesday, 4. December 2007
64-bit DSOFile and Windows File Metadata12/04/2007 03:19 PM Some of you may be familiar w/ MS' many failed attempts at getting metadata onto the filesystem...what is surprising is that you can do this today on any NTFS filesystem. MS provides DSOFile and the source code for a DLL that lets you do this. While it was intended to be used for OLE documents, it'll also work for plain text files that are not using OLE Structured Storage.
The DLL is relatively easy to use in ASP.Net via the imported Interop, however, this ties your ASP.Net app to be 32-bit. I've compiled for 64-bit Windows w/ the following caveats:
- it can't read Date properties on 64-bit systems
- if you use it to write a bunch of times, it sometimes causes IIS to crash
(3) Tuesday, 20. November 2007
VS.Net 2008 and .Net 3.511/20/2007 11:06 AM I'm surprised this happened that quickly, but Scott Gu's blog has a good summary of the new features and links to articles on them. (0)
Ken's Blog
-