CEO Steve Jobs says the company’s hit phone will open up to third-party applications and that a software development kit is coming.

Glenn asks:

Hey Michael...

I have a question about the culture info and these settings in the registry. Seeing you have posted a lot of info about this on your blog I was hoping you could help me out a bit :) The question :

I was wondering if I could somehow change the settings of following Registry : HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Internation by means of the use of a CultureInfo I've created in C# using a LCID ?

In other words can I manipulate this through use of any .Net class ? Or do I really have to copy all values ?

Any thoughts ?

Greets
Glenn

There is no .NET way to modify this account's settings (basically the LocalSystem account), though there is one programmatic way: if you have code running in that account you can call SetLocaleInfo (which does really stink but can be useful in this scenario) to update settings.

Note that this will only work for the "current user" of the LocalSystem account, which is what this registry key contains. And although the registry is undocumented, the SetLocaleInfo functionality is not.

Of course, impersonation is (generally speaking) out of the question for security reasons, so you do have to be running within the account; perhaps you were there anyway. Though caution is warranted in that case, because you are exposing the surface area a bit in case there is any flaw or vulnerability in your code. So be very careful about running as such a privileged user!

 

This post brought to you by ƺ (U+01ba, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH WITH TAIL)

I was reading an old post by Simon Guest about removing the intimacy to create services and thought he had a great analogy comparing real life to SOA solutions.  I love these types of posts because they provide concrete examples which explain system interactions in a straightforward manner.  Gregor Hohpe posted something similar to this in Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit post.  It's a great read. 

I would like to take Simon's post a few steps further.  Continuing on his example, let's add a few more features such as:

1.  Message Correlation
2.  Message Expiration
3.  Concurrent Orchestration
4.  Policy-based security

When person A approaches person B to borrow $5, B must first make sure that he (1) knows who A is and (2) can trust A with this transaction.  Even though A looks like who he says he is, and he even knows B's name and address, B has a strict "policy" that A must provide a state-issued ID (federated security) which B scans into his security manager to verify A's identity. 

After his identity has been verified, B looks up A's record and current outstanding balance.  B will check if his business rule stating that no one person can have an outstanding balance of more than $100 has been violated (business rules engine).  A promises to return B's money in 7 days and that's fine with B's business rule. 

In B's orchestration engine (his brain), he creates a new long running transaction where he listens, waiting for A to return his money, on or before today + 7 days.  He creates an alert in his process manager (his Blackberry) to send himself and person A an alert if he has not received the “money returned” message by that day.  If no message comes in by this time, a new process will be instantiated to mitigate the situation (the sendTonyToBreakLegs process) which receives a violatingEntityIdentifier message as its input message.

B is a very generous guy and let's a lot of people borrow money.  He may have several long running transactions going on at any given time. In fact, person A could be going through some hard times and may have borrowed money several days in a row.  Each transaction is assigned a unique value so that when A starts paying back, he can start applying it the one closest to expiring.

When you look at daily life, it's really one big integration project.  Orchestration, coordination, services, long-running transactions and asynchronous operations are all around us.  How well individuals deal with it is largely dependent on individual's internal processing engines as well as accessibility to tools that specialize in the management of these processes (Blackberry, Outlook etc).

Sometimes, it is easier to explain a concept in layman terms. Came across this post which discusses the difference between Object Oriented design and SOA. This topic has been beaten to death by almost everyone! I like the way this interesting topic has been explained using a simple analogy.

Here is the post: http://blogs.msdn.com/smguest/archive/2004/01/29/64871.aspx

Good one there Simon.

Thanks! 

 

Learn how ASP.NET 2.0 makes it simple to implement Web site navigation by combining Menu and TreeView server controls with SiteMap data controls. Also discover how to associate client behavior with a server control using the ASP.NET AJAX extender framework.

Setup a simple and cheap computer controlled watering system using VB.Net and a parallel port relay controller.

A simple implementation of .Net 2.0's SerialPort class for Modbus communications

This is a WebControl that provides an easy way to prepare an ASP.NET GridView to be paged and printed in the browser.

Back in February I blogged about some of my thoughts on the experimental languages Microsoft Research was playing around with.
Today, Soma announced the formation of a team to move one of those languages, F#, from the realm of research to the realm of practitioners.

For those of you who complained that there wasn't enough differentiation between .NET languages - this will be fun :-)

This Application demonstrates how .NET Reflection can be used to Query and Invoke Any Assemblies Methods.

A very efficient reader-writer lock class in C++ that is similar to the .NET ReaderWriterLock one

Using ASP.NET, C#, Framework 1.1 to show a master/detail grid with javascript to expand & collapse.

Kyle just finished up a series of posts on remote pairing and remote working. He's working on our Smart Client project from the Bahamas while we're stuck here in Calgary as the winter months start to show their ugly face. It's a great series and wraps up with some tips (although I have to wonder what he does now as the last few sessions he's been awfully quiet). Now I know the truth.

Top 10 reasons to work remotely:

1. You can frag people in Halo 3 during a design session.
2. You can frag even more people in Halo 3 during the morning Scrum.
3. Did I mention Halo 3?
4. Fuzzy slippers! (although I have these and wear them at work anyway, but for those basement geeks here's your big chance to get comfy)
5. Halo 3 anyone?
6. Matchmaking on Halo 3 while your remote pair compiles
7. Waiting for the Matchmaker to pair you up when someone breaks the build and you can't check in anyways
8. Uhmm... Halo 3?
9. Halo 3 r0ck$!
10. And finally you can play Halo 3 without disturbing your co-workers

So as you can see Kyle gets a tremendous amount of work done remote working with us, and you can too! All you need is a pair of fuzzy bunny slippers, a house in the Bahamas and a copy of Halo 3 (oh yeah, and an XBox 360 helps).

Here's one that some of you may have seen before, but I thought I'd post it to save some time to those who didn't.

Today we were trying to debug some client-side code and we needed to quickly wire the click event of a button. So we did this, without thinking too hard:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <title>Stack overflow</title>
    <script type="text/javascript">
    function onclick() {
        // do stuff
    }
    </script>
</head>
<body>
    <div>
        <input type="button" value="Click me" onclick="onclick();" />
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Can you spot the stack overflow? We were so focused on the "do stuff" part that we didn't see it at first, thinking it came from there. But of course, it just comes from onclick="onclick();". When JavaScript resolves the name "onclick", it looks first on the current context before it goes up the scope chain and finds our global function (which it never does). The current context here is the input element, which happens to have an "onclick" attribute, which executes "onclick", etc. Crash.

So the valuable lesson we've learned here is to adopt a naming convention for our event handlers that can't conflict with the name of the event. I usually choose elementIdOnEventName. For example here if the input's id is button1, we'd go with button1OnClick.

Tips to integrate ASP.NET app with legacy ASP, PHP, RAILS, JAVA apps

The .NET Framework 3.5 is shipping later this year at the same time as Visual Studio 2008. The .NET Framework 3.5 is an additive release, meaning that it adds functionality in terms of classes in assemblies to the previous versions 3.0 and 2.0 of the...(read more)

Today I spoke at the Heartland Developers Conference on why ASP.NET developers should care about Windows Server 2008. If you were at the session or just want to know more about what's in store for you as an ASP.NET developer, check out the following resources. Windows Server 2008 Developer Training Kit - this set of Hands-on-Labs and PPT files demonstrate several of the features you can take advantage of on the Windows 2008 platform. There are labs for Transactional NTFS, Windows Eventing 6.0, Powershell...(read more)

javascript+AJAX solution for inline edititng in grid.