14 March 2007 in Events & Microsoft & Mindscape | Comments (0)

Today we knocked out the Microsoft 2007 Technical Briefing in Wellington. I had a great time, was good to see some familiar faces in my home city. For those reading who attended, just a reminder that code samples and BackgroundMotion will be made available shortly after the Christchurch event. We’ll also be making some further content available as well.

I really appreciated getting feedback from people at the event, it’s great to see people having the courage to approach and just unload what they thought about what I spoke about or to share a story. The visibility isn’t very good from the stage so I don’t often know who actually attended afterwards.

So next week is Christchurch, it’s going to be a blast. It will be the third time we’ve delivered the content so hopefully we’ll have ironed out all the kinks based on earlier feedback. I’m looking forward to it See you there!

- JD

14 March 2007 in Microsoft & Windows | Comments (1)

Just a heads up to anyone who’s loving Windows Dreamscene (like, err, me) you’ll be excited to know that Microsoft has released some updated content. Some very cool videos:

• Waterfall (my favourite)
• Rainfall
• Wildflowers
• Flames (fake)

Just do a windows update and you’ll see the additional content pack. Great

- JD

8 March 2007 in .Net & Code & Events & Microsoft & Mindscape | Comments (0)

BackgroundMotion is the website that Mindscape has developed and been showing off in the recent (and future) Microsoft 2007 Technical Briefings. Some people have been asking where they can see this site at the moment so I thought I would clarify that the site is not currently live. It will be available in the near future and I’ll announce that here when it does go live.

Further to this, we are looking to deliver the source code for the website so that everyone can learn about aspects of the system. Following from this there are plans to release video content showing why some design decisions were made and how we implemented them. Should be a great resource for learning from.

It’s been a great opportunity to be creating an awesome system that will be used by real people as well as creating surrounding documentation and content that enables people to learn more about how to do things.

- JD

8 March 2007 in Events & Microsoft & Mindscape | Comments (8)

My Auckland presentations for the Microsoft 2007 Technical Briefing are over and I’m back in Wellington. Overall I thought the event was a resounding success, there were heaps of people buzzing about the new technologies and opportunities available. It was great meeting people that I only really see online as well as meeting some new people there as well.

I’ll be posting the slides, links and extra information for people to download shortly. I’ve decided to delay it slightly so I don’t ruin the surprises for Wellington & Christchurch attendees. Several of the topics covered, especially standards related, can be found in prior blog posts so if you’re interested have a search around

If you’d like me to notify you when I do post something (and you haven’t subscribed to my RSS feed) then send me an email at jd [at] mindscape.co.nz.  Incidentally we got our initial cut of the Mindscape website up while at the event (big ups to Andrew, the third person in our trio).

Thanks to everyone who attended, it was the largest audience I’ve spoken to so I was rather nervous but thankfully nobody threw fruit

Good times,

- JD

5 March 2007 in Events & Microsoft & Mindscape | Comments (2)

Tomorrow I’ll be going to Auckland to deliver a couple of presentations on Wednesday at the Microsoft 2007 Technical Briefing. Next week is Wellington and the week after is Christchurch, it’s going to be good times

I’m delivering sessions about developing standards compliant websites as well as a joint session with Jeremy about extending the reach of your applications. Feel free to come and say hi if you see me about, I like meeting folks who read my blog.

I’ll queue up a few more posts while away…

- JD

28 February 2007 in Code & Microsoft | Comments (0)

Recently I’ve been working on a website and I need to make sure it’s standards compliant. I’ve blogged before about some tools I use to make sure that the process of standards compliance is hassle free. In the weekend I was hunting around the Microsoft site, as you do, and I stumbled across the “IE Development Toolbar“, Beta 3. So I pulled it down and installed this this week to have a play.

This is a pretty scrunched up screen shot (I really need to move to a fluid width theme):

Overall, very nice. Lacks pretty icons yet but packs a punch in terms of functionality. It’s got a complete DOM inspector, validation links (both for public pages and local), allows CSS modification and considerably more. Looks promising for when it comes out of beta and so far I haven’t had any issues with it being in beta (hopefully that means pretty icons will be added, I like them

Just thought I’d share as it’s a logical addition to my earlier post. Grab it here.

- JD

26 February 2007 in Microsoft & Windows | Comments (30)

A while back I made a post about Windows Vista memory requirements and saying I didn’t think it was the issue that some people thought it was. Now I’ve been using Vista RTM for a few months I thought I should do an update on my experience in terms of memory consumption.

First off, I’m using Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. I’d consider myself a bit of a power user, typically I have the following things running at any one time:

• IIS 7
• SQL Server 2005
• Two instances of Visual Studio 2005
• FeedDemon
• FireFox (with about 10 tabs open)
• Internet Explorer 7 (with about 10 tabs open)
• Live Messenger
• A smattering of open directories

Until recently I used to always run my taskbar as a 2 row height just to allow me to easily see everything I leave open. The reason I raise this is to say that I’m probably not a normal user in terms of memory usage, the applications and services listed are just those I use constantly, often there is about 30 processes running relating to just applications I’m using.

I’m running Vista on two machines, a home machine with 1GB of memory and my laptop which has 2GB of memory. My home machine gets much less of a workout and is more for browsing, gaming with occassional development (which means it is running VS 2005 and IIS). The following figures are my “under load” figures. It’s important to note I wasn’t especially scientific, I just keep an eye on memory usage and these have been the common figures I’m seeing.

Home Memory Useage: 70%, 720MB
Laptop Memory Usage: 60%, 1.2GB

Personally I don’t think these figures are too high. Sure, I’d love everything to be written in tight assembler and have the entire system to sit there using 100MB of memory but it’s simply more important to me that my environment is performing well.

When I consider these figures I would still recomend 1GB of memory for any home user to ensure a comfortable time with Vista and certainly 2GB for any developers out there. I’ve tried to be balanced and give my figures when I’m actually using the system (rather than after a clean boot which would be unrealistically low) but do take them with a grain of salt – most of my issues, when I experience them, result from some applications just bleeding memory everywhere and this isn’t something Vista can really control.

- JD

23 February 2007 in .Net & Code & Microsoft & Tools & Windows | Comments (3)

I’ve been developing an ASP.NET solution and was starting to get some odd behavior on my development machine (Vista Ultimate). We’ve written a custom HttpHandler for managing user authorisation and when running the solution up against the ASP.NET Cassini web server (the “built in web server”) everything ran fine however when running against IIS7 authorisation wasn’t working correctly. Some debugging and it became evident that the handler wasn’t even executing when running within IIS7.

IIS7 provides a whole swag of great new functionality so after some hunting around I found that the module wasn’t registered with IIS7.

How do you register a custom module in IIS7?

Fire up IIS Manager

Select your website you want to add the module for (IIS will inspect the Web.config of the site to get the modules)

Open up “Modules”:

You should find that your modules will be of Module Type “Managed” if you’re writing them in .NET, check it’s not already listed

Click “Add Managed Module…” on the Action pane

Type in the name of your module and select it from the drop down list (IIS will populate this from what it finds in the web site, if the module isn’t listed then you’ve made a mistake somewhere

Click OK and you should now find that your custom HttpModule works

Another way

Some of you will already know that IIS7 configuration is now XML and you can configure IIS7 from the web.config. This was recently demonstrated at a local .NET User Group in Wellington by Jeremy. It’s a pretty kick ass change from how things work in IIS6 and earlier and makes explaining some of these things easier. After adding the Module reference I noticed Visual Studio warned me that the Web.config file had changed so I took a look at what it had changed and, sure enough:

<system.webServer>
<validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />
<modules>
<add name="CustomAuthModule"
type="Mindscape.ResearchProject.Website.Infrastructure.CustomAuthModule" />
</modules>
</system.webServer>


So you could just drop this block into your Web.config and get the same module registration that I detailed earlier. Fantastic.

- JD