An article on socket programming in raw C++ on the Windows platform

Over the last few days, I've been trying to get my TFS system upgraded with some customizations that members of my team have requested. TFS is a very well-designed system, but unfortunately the out-of-the-box process of customizing your processes leaves a little to be desired.

It took me a couple hours of tinkering, but I figured out how to add some new statuses to the MSF for Agile templates, as well as new fields and UI for tracking the steps to reproduce a bug. I'll be posting those modifications in a bit, but in the meantime, I've assembled some of the resources that I found helpful on my Custom TFS templating journey. I hope they're useful.

• Bulk editing work items using TFS Power Tools "templates"
• One method of adding new statuses without breaking reports
• Dave McKinstry's Guide to TFS Process Customization

And some other cool TFS Stuff:

• Vista Sidebar Gadgets for TFS
• TeamDef - Time Management for TFS
• CoDE Magazine - Data Dude Meets Team Build
• Microsoft Office Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (using structured Word documents to populate a TFS database with requirements and work items)

I'm stepping up the use of TFS on my team for project management, so as I come across more resources that I find useful, I'll post them.

THE telco is eight weeks ahead of schedule with its information technology transformation known as TR1, with TR2 waiting in the wings.

I'm in Barcelona this week for TechEd EMEA. The talk I gave today was about getting Windows Workflow Foundation hosted in ASP.NET. It was based on a quickstart sample that we built a couple of months ago and was recently updated to run on Visual Studio...(read more)

Justin Angel is giving away free MS Press books as part of a 5 minute developer screencast competition he's judging in, along with Guy Burstein and Oren Eini (Ayende).

I'd say that's pretty cool! Submission phase seems to be until the end of this month (his post did not specificy an end date - Justin -fix it...)

Here's the full rundown of what to do (in Hebrew).

We just published some new whitepapers discussing high level concepts of .NET Framework 3.5 which I hope you will find useful. Introducing the .NET Framework 3.5 by David Chappell This paper drills into each of the new features added in the .NET Framework...(read more)

This article shows how the page and user controls within the page can communicate together with a little more work. It shows how the use of interfaces or custom page classes can make the application more efficient and reduce code. Read more......(read more)

about a year ago Microsoft bought a small Israeli Company called Secured Dimensions. They had an interesting solution to the problem of protecting your .NET code. Basically they would help you choose which parts of the code you'd like to protect and then run those parts of hte code in a special virtual machine encrypted environment (in memory).

Recently Microsoft released a set of products that seems to be based on SD's technology, and that's a good thing. There aren't many good solutions to protect .NET code. SD's solution is closer to protecting real IP as it gets as far as I can see.

 

[via vitaly] - (BTW, Vitaly- you have a configuration bug in your blog. just try accessing a specific post by url and you get a nasty error)

A way to combine concurrency with mutual exclusion in low-lock programming

Have you ever had the need to generate images on the fly in your ASP.NET applications? You could use GDI.NET to do this directly, but we think we have an easier way. Enter ImageTemplate.NET. ImageTemplate.NET lets you configure an image template in an XML file and then change the image that is generated by passing parameters in the URL. This is great for dynamically generating images based on database content. ImageTemplate.NET can help you: - Rotate Images Generate Animated GIFs dynamically Generate...(read more)

This article explains how to extend the standard .NET event and delegate mechanism with extra features

During the last couple of weeks I've been experimenting applying Microsoft's Managed Services Engine (MSE) to SOA Governance scenarios that I've typically addressed with HP-Systinet2 , SoftwareAG and SOASoftware . Although still in very early stages (the first CTP was just announced couple of weeks ago) we can already appreciate some of the core ideas behind this technology. So why am I so excited about this effort? The first reason is that I am a strong believer on the possibilities of a SOA Governance...(read more)

We published another version of the .NET Framework common Namespaces and Types poster . It's an XPS format file which prints over 16 individual pages. This will allow you to put the poster on your wall, with the help of some tape and scissors....(read more)

Explanation of the use of undocumented app_offline.htm file in asp.net.

Over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.internatiomnal newsgroup, Norman Diamond mentioned:

Since Office XP is no longer supported, code pages 1.25012511252125E+26 and 2.50125112521253E+25 are obviously old ones not new ones. I wonder why I never heard of floating point code pages before.

Reference:
http://www.microsoft.com/japan/office/ork/three/inte03.mspx

Screenshot:
http://www.geocities.jp/hitotsubishi/ms_code_pages.png

Well, for the record, Office XP, while no longer in regular support, is in extended support until July 12, 2011. So support will in fact be supporting the product for a little whole yet, in terms of the full product lifecycle....

But that page Norman pointed to is rather amusing, all things considered, given the data in the table related to code page coverage within fonts....

When you consider entries like 932936950 for MingLiU, which are clearly meant to be 932, 936, 950, the exact number meant by 1.25012511252125E+26 vaguely suggests 1250, 1251, 1252, 125<cut off by the incorrect parsing as a number), which is lucky since none of the code page functions take anything other than integers....

Worthy of a chuckle, in any case, right? :-)

 

This post brought to you by リ (U+30ea, a.k.a. KATAKANA LETTER RI)

Thanks to everyone who attended my first (but not last) geekSpeak webcast yesterday. We had an awesome turnout and a lot of great questions and interaction.

I'll be posting the source code to the shell application with all the demos I used (including the 5 or 6 demos we didn't get to) after I add some comments and instructions to make the code a little more tutorial-like rather than just a brain dump of the end result. I'm still waiting for the geekSpeak guys to put together the webcast in a recording so once that's done I'll put the code up with a link on Channel 9 to the webcast (you won't have to register for it, you can just watch/download it). I'll also include my own answers to the questions asked during the webcast as I have a capture of those and a few things were skipped over or missed during the session.

Thanks again and here's to more geekSpeak sessions in the future!

PS And no, I wasn't wearing any pants during the session.

PPS The photo of me used was taken in Florida during a DevConnections I presented at last year so that's not snow behind me but rather it was white sand.

This article describes how to implement a .NET Windows Service that can have multiple instances installed on the same machine.

Over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup, JohnD asked:

Hello all,

I have an interest in calling KbdLayerDescriptor.

Michaels blog here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2004/12/22/329657.aspx

reports that the return of KbdLayerDescriptor is defined in "kdb.h".

I've downloaded the "Windows Driver Kit for Windows Vista", but I cannot find kbd.h or anything relevant in there.

Where can I get kbd.h? Is it part of one of the other Microsoft SDKs/DDKs?

Thanks in advance.

/john

If JohnD had asked in the blog's Suggestion Box or as a reply to that post (%WINDIR%\system32\kbd*.dll) I probably would have seen the question sooner!:-)

Anyway, I have had several of the various DDK/WDK packages installed plus being enlisted in various source code projects at Microsoft, so here are three reliable places to find the file:

• If you are internal to Microsoft and work in a source code project that picks up the NT Publics, it can be found at oak\inc\kbd.h.
• If you have MSKLC 1.3 or 1.4 installed, it can be found in the MSKLC installation directory, at inc\kbd.h.
• If you install the Windows Driver Kit, it can be found in the WDK install directory, under inc\api\kbd.h (sample projects using it can be found in the WDK install directory under src\input\layout).

There are other DDK/WDK type installations that also have it, so in all likelihood if you have one installed some casual spelunking through inc directories might be worth a look.

John had a follow-up question a few days later after he found the file (on his own, via the third bullet point above):

Am I correct in assuming that typedef KbdLayerDescriptor returns a struct tagKbdLayer?

This is a great time to look at those samples I mention above -- with the exception of conceptual topics, code is always the best documentation, dontcha think? :-)

I must admit that I am always curious about what people are trying to do when they want to call a keyboard layout DLL directly. It has come up probably about 15 times over the last five years, in all but one case it was not really what was needed....

 

This post brought to you by ᢤ (U+18a4, a.k.a. MONGOLIAN LETTER MANCHU ALI GALI ZHA - a letter that is not on the Vista keyboard for Mongolian, for hopefully obvious reasons?)

The WPF NavigationWindow is a very cool way to develop apps that expose a browser-like user experiences:

As you probably know, you can also host Windows Forms controls within the pages:

the screenshot shows a WinForms usercontrol that contains a label and a textbox. This is the second page, as denoted by the "Back" button being enabled now.

However, while you're typing on the textbox, if you press the backspace key...

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