Oliver Sturm's weblog

Making iTunes stop that gapless playback nonsense

Here’s a problem that a lot of people are having: iTunes supports gapless playback since version 7.x. Okay, admittedly there are also people who think it’s great - to clarify, my personal negative reaction to it is not strictly about gapless playback as such, but rather about Apple’s implementation approach. Apple ...

Instant gratification for developers

If you’re a developer, you know the feeling - and if you’re not, I’m sure you can imagine it: you have just written the most amazing little piece of code, and nobody is there to kiss your feet, praise some deity for your existence and generally worship you in the ...

Stuff I use on the Mac

As I wrote previously, I’m using a MacBook now for almost all my daily work. On that post I got some comments about the quality and general availability of software on the platform, so I thought I’d take stock after using it for a while and see what applications I ...

CopySourceAsHTML and VS 2008 SP1

I tried to install the very nice CopySourceAsHTML (the link hasn’t actually been working for me since yesterday, but I had a download hanging around) plugin on my machine, which has both VS 2005 and VS 2008 (the latter including the new SP1) installed. I chose to install “for everybody”, ...

Feedback on my NxtGenUG Fest 08 session - Handling data in F#

It occurred to me today to look at the feedback that a lot of you have left for the session I did at the NxtGenUG Fest 08 event a few weeks ago. Thanks to everybody who did so, it’s always appreciated! Now, there are a few points I’d like to comment ...

Remapping Command keys to Ctrl in VMWare

On the Mac itself, I have remapped the caps lock key (does anybody actually use that thing these days?) to Command (that’s the key with the weird symbol… ah well, one of the keys with weird symbols ) . I had always done the same thing on Windows, where it ...

Blogging from my new MacBook

Would you believe it, I got a MacBook recently. It’s fantastic, there’s no other way to describe it. OS X is amazing, Windows apps seem to run faster in VMWare Fusion than they do on native Windows, and the applications are just… well, can’t find any more superlatives. Holy cow! I’ll ...

TechEd done, NxtGenUG FEST 08 is next

I’m still in Orlando now, but later today I’ll be on a refreshing (?) flight back to the UK. TechEd was very good — lots of people very interested in DX products, we won loads of awards and had a good laugh about the Telerik guys Later this week ...

BA Executive Club? Ridiculous.

I’ve had a BA Executive Club account for about 18 months. During that time I must have been on perhaps 15 BA flights - some UK domestic, some within Europe, some to the US. For quite a while I’ve also had a BA-sponsored American Express card, which pays miles into ...

F# compiler considered too linear

In my continuing efforts to make XPO work fully with F#, I found the next problem to deal with: the extremely linear way of thinking of the F# compiler. Basically, the compiler seems to read each source code file from top to bottom. Generally, things that are defined below the current ...

Null values for F# classes

The next problem I found in my efforts to make XPO work with F# is documented here: Null values for F# classes - basically, I can’t just set a variable that has a reference to another object to null in F#. The general assumption in F# is that null values are ...

gentoo/Shorewall/DISABLE_IPV6

Something I just stumbled upon. I was configuring Shorewall 4, and there’s a flag called DISABLE_IPV6 in shorewall.conf. Oh yeah, I thought, that makes sense - I don’t yes IPV6, so I’ll set that to Yes. Did so, and when I ran Shorewall it showed my lots of error messages ...

Oddities in F#/C# interaction

I have been working on getting a sample for using XPO from F#. My first sample was easily created back in January this year: #light open DevExpress.Xpo type Person = class inherit XPObject as base public new(session : Session) = { inherit XPObject(session); name = string.Empty } ...

WPF styles and default behavior

After my recent presentation at the VBUG conference, somebody sent me this question: "I have code to style a button and several triggers to change the button’s background color. For some reason, the trigger for the IsPressed property doesn’t seem to work. Why?" Here’s the style code that was being ...

Impressions from the VBUG conference

VBUG did their Spring 2008 Conference last week. In the beginning, Andy was tired , Chris was enthusiastic and Tim was … … also there. Dave was hungry and then he couldn’t get in . When he finally made it, he was the only one in Rich’s ...

DX takes all the awards plus Product of the Year

Developer Express have won each of the 8 (eight!!) categories we entered for this year’s asp.netPRO Magazine Reader’s Choice Awards. Wow! The categories we entered were Best Add-in, Best Charting and Graphics Tool, Best Component Set, Best Grid, Best Navigation Suite, Best Online Editor, Best Printing/Reporting Tool and Best Scheduling/Calendar ...

Locked myself out of Vista? Help! - Solved

It appears I’ve managed to do a pretty stupid thing - personally I rather feel like Windows let me do a stupid thing, but that’s probably a matter of perspective Anyway, I was trying out some things with UAC, looking at the way different elevation prompts are displayed depending ...

Not using the Secure Desktop?

Using Local Security Policy settings (specifically the one called "User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation"), I can modify Vista’s behaviour when showing elevation prompts, so that the elevation dialog is simply shown as a normal window on the current desktop. I like this behaviour ...

32 bit Explorer on Vista 64

There’s a pretty big problem with shell extensions when you try to run 64 bit Windows - they either come in 64 or 32 bit varieties, and each "group" of extensions will only be loaded into a corresponding host application. In other words, Windows Explorer runs as a 64 bit ...

CardWhat on the rise, Barry Dorrans reading up on it

64 and 32 bit PowerShell execution policies stored separately

Just stumbled upon this due to some confusion about the version of PowerShell I was running on my 64 bit Vista machine. I ran PowerShell from the start menu, using the context menu to bring it up as Administrator. Then I set the execution policy to RemoteSigned: Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned I ran PowerShell ...

SlickRun on 64 bit Vista

I was fighting some problems with SlickRun for a while after installing 64 bit Vista on my machine recently. I noticed issues with powershell (SlickRun was always running the 32 bit version of it, even though the path explicitely specified the 64 bit version), and when I wanted to create ...

Upcoming events - VBUG Spring conference and lots of DDDs

There are several events coming up in the next few weeks, where I’m going to be speaking. Hope to meet some of you there! If you haven’t considered coming to any of these events, now is the time to do so - there’s lots of stuff going on, and since ...

MVP Summit next week

I’m going to be in Seattle next week for Microsoft’s annual global MVP Summit. Would love to meet some of you there - if you see me around, please say hi, or contact me if you want to sort something out in advance.

Still an MVP

Granted, I’m a bit late mentioning this, but I still want to do it. Microsoft gave me another MVP award in the C# category on April 1st. I’m honored - thank you very much, Microsoft, and the various people involved. As usual, I hope to find the time one day to ...

NxtGenUG Fest 08 Registration is open

Here’s the Fest08 page, and there’s a paragraph on registration right at the top. I’ll be doing a new session there, called “Handling data in F#”. Last year this one-day event was great, I’m sure it’s going to be another day full of fantastic content this year. “Data today, data ...

Are you in Ireland next week? I am! Come along and win!

I’m going to be in Galway, Cork and Dublin next week. In Galway, I’ll do a WPF session for GMIT students on Monday afternoon, and “Functional Programming in C# 3.0″ in the evening at GAMTUG. If you want to be there, follow this link for all the details! On Tuesday I’m ...

Who puts IPv6 entries in my hosts file?

I just had a weird problem - for some reason IE wouldn’t run my XAF (eXpressApp Framework) web applications (ASP.NET) anymore. At first I suspected some sort of installation problem, since I’d just installed the new 8.1.1 version, and not long ago this used to work just fine. But for ...

F# - Things I learned today

I was playing around a bit today with F#, trying to write some real code that interfaces with WPF. Here are a few things I found - very much a “note to self” thing, but if you happen to be interested, please comment or ask. Number 1 - implementing interfaces that ...

F# - The thing with the namespaces

I just spent a little while hunting down an interesting problem in a little F# app. I had a bunch of code in a single file and I was going to structure it a bit and move certain parts into separate files. I started out from some code like this: namespace ...

Vista spooling/printing delay - new problems

I recently posted about this issue I was having with a weird delay when trying to print and I thought I’d found a solution to it. But now I’ve discovered that the solution was responsible for new problems… particularly when trying to print large files (not large by numbers of ...

Registrations are open for DDD Ireland and DDD Scotland!

Roughly based on the original concept for the Developer Developer Developer day, both Ireland and Scotland are getting their own DDDs for the first time in 2008. Some slight differences in organization, but great content and speakers nevertheless - see the agendas here for Ireland and here for Scotland. May ...

What’s wrong with the Vista start menu?

I’m really undecided about the Vista start menu… since I’ve started using Vista, I’ve had several different approaches for running applications: Some applications run automatically when I log on to Windows Some applications I run manually after most logins, like e.g. Outlook. I have icons for those in the Quick Launch toolbar. ...

DevWeek session, slides and samples and info

Thanks to everybody who attended my session at DevWeek! I hope you liked it, I certainly had a lot of fun doing it. First of all, here’s the download of slides and samples from the session: Functional Programming in C# 3.0 (718950 bytes) Second, I’ve had a little thought about that example ...

London .NET user group slides and samples

So here they are, the slides and samples of that Functional Programming in C# 3.0 session. My apologies for the slight delay - I already received a few emails about it - but my flight home was cancelled yesterday and everything was a bit chaotic. Functional Programming in C# 3.0 (718950 ...

Testing Sony Vaio support, the conclusion

The computer arrived back here yesterday, with a new motherboard and a screen cleaning cloth in apology for my troubles. Allegedly it had also been “thoroughly cleaned”, but I don’t think so - it wasn’t extremely dirty anyway, but the dust that gathers on the sides of the keys (the ...

Testing Sony Vaio support, part 3 - machine is on its way back

There was a bit of a confusion last week, when the DHL guy didn’t have all the details - apparently the Sony guys were expecting the machine to come in the next day and when it didn’t, they called me to ask why the pickup had gone wrong. Well, I ...

WPF talk at Scottish Developers

My talk yesterday at Scottish Developers in Edinburgh went fine - the meeting wasn’t huge, but I had the impression that the topic was interesting to everybody. If you were there, thank you again, and please feel free to contact me if you come up with questions! Here’s the download of ...

Microsoft shows us how to retire data

Microsoft has come up with a good example of how you should handle the process of deprecating data. Have a look at my MVP profile here. You’ll see that in a lot of profile entries for speaking engagements, the string “RETIRED — DO NOT SELECT” is shown. Why is that? ...

Basta Spring 2008 slides and samples

I apologize for the delay - with my computer dying and everything, it took me longer than it should have to make my slides and samples for the Basta sessions available here. They should also be available here (but aren’t, yet) and each delegate will get sent a CD sooner ...

Testing Sony Vaio support, part 2 - DHL

Just a short update: the DHL guy just left. He did bring a box and a plastic bag to package the machine, as I was promised by the support guy yesterday, but he claimed I should have all the information that goes on the various stickers for the package… well, ...

Testing Sony Vaio support, part 1

My Vaio VGN-SZ4 died last week while I was at Basta in Germany. One minute it was working fine, just sitting there on the table with the large external display attached, the next it was just displaying weird colorful flashing things on both screens, and it hung of course. So ...

The joy of proper command line tools

I seem to be having lots of these problems lately that somehow always come up, but never get solved. This time it was the problem of creating a zip file including a large source code hierarchy, but excluding certain directories along the way. More specifically, there are directories called .svn, ...

.NET 3 - The Game Challenge at VBUG Newcastle

I did that presentation there yesterday. I had added a piece on top, to stretch things a bit more in the direction of WCF: the Game Status Viewer uses an additional published service to query game status information and displays that in a console window. Here are the slides and samples ...

Vista spooling/printing delay - solved

I’ve been having a weird problem with printing on my Xerox Phaser 8550 from Vista. One of those issues that have been around forever, but I never found time to look into. The problem was that after a print job had been spooled, it sat in the print queue for ...

Google Maps now works in my Firefox

That’s right, in *my* Firefox - it was never a problem in most other people’s Firefoxes. I’d been having problems with it for many years, in various versions of Firefox and on several different computers. I’m thinking I might even have had this problem when I was still running Linux ...

Announcing the eXpressApp Framework

For the last two years, the majority of my time has been spent on this project, and now it’s out the door. ‘Nuff said. If you do business applications and you haven’t seen it, go have a look immediately. If you’ve seen it before, have another look - it’s changed a ...

Switching keyboard layout in Vista?

Here’s something I could use some help with… I haven’t spent a lot of time looking into things, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution. The problem is about switching keyboard layouts in Windows Vista (older versions of Windows weren’t significantly different, AFAIK, but that’s what I’m using). Now ...

Lightroom requires a Live ID to import pictures?

I had the weirdest problem a moment ago and I found a solution that I thought I’d document for myself and anybody else who sees that issue. I was trying to use Abode Lightroom to import a bunch of pictures from my camera. I was going to have the pictures ...

My DDD double session - not a repetition

Several people have asked me this now: is that double session I’m doing at DDD 6 a session with two parts or is the second part a repetition of the first? The answer is, it’s a real double session, so if you’re only there for one of the two parts, ...

DDD 6 Registration is open!

I’m probably not the first to report this, but let’s help the community: Go here to register for DDD 6 on November 24th. Quickly, it’s bound to fill up until the end of the week!

DDD 6 Voting is open

I don’t think I have to explain to anybody what DDD is about - just go there now and vote for your favourite sessions!

Optimizing Vista performance

I stumbled upon some ideas yesterday to optimize Vista performance - with a focus of running it on UMPCs. Reading through this thread here, I got the impression that my laptop could very well benefit from the same approach, seeing as the performance of hard drives in laptops is not ...

WPF targets in Windows Forms project

I might be the last person to find this out, I don’t know - in that case, regard it as a note to self. I was working with a Windows Forms project, using an ElementHost to embed a WPF control. I was trying to create a WPF UserControl and it just ...

VBUG Conference 2007 drawing closer

October 17th and 18th this year, the VBUG conference 2007 takes place at Microsoft Campus in Thames Valley Park in Reading. Here’s the official info PDF about the conference. I’ll be speaking there about LINQ as well as WPF, and if you’re interested in Developer Express technology, this is the place ...

C# track chair for Basta! Spring 2008

Another new thing to mention: for Basta! conference Spring Edition 2008, I’m a member of the advisory board as well as the track chair for C#. Should be very interesting, not least because C# will play a very important role in that conference in February. A call for papers is ...

C# Corner column in dot.net magazin

If you’re in Germany, here’s (hopefully) interesting news: starting from issue 11, my column “C# Corner” will be a regular feature in dot.net magazin. I’m looking forward to writing articles for that, on new and interesting things going on around the C# language, as well as best practices and whatever ...

Lots of fun at Basta! - slides and samples downloads

I just got back yesterday from the Basta! conference in Germany. It was a great event, very busy for me but also lots of fun. My sessions all went very well and I had a great time talking to people at the Developer Express booth. Thanks to everybody who stopped ...

DDD 6 calls for speakers

I might be late to the party, but I’ll still try to help spread the word: DDD 6 takes place on November 24th this year, and the call for speakers has just been opened. If you’ve always wanted to find good event to do your own session at, this might ...

On my way to Basta!

I’m now at Edinburgh airport, on my way to the Basta! conference in Germany. Yeah, I know it starts only Monday, but I’m staying with a friend for two days first. Turns out Basta! is going to be extremely busy for me… I already knew I was going to be ...

Visualizing (.NET 3.5) Expressions

It’s a problem, when you work with Expression types in any way, to understand the structure of complex expressions and possibly recreate them. After all, there are 46 entries in the ExpressionType enum, many of them corresponding to their own Expression-derived type, all of those with their own specific properties… ...

Installing AUCTeX in EmacsW32

I’m posting this mainly to remind myself how I did it, when the time comes to do it again. I added some detailed instructions (like where to cd to and so on) in case somebody else is interested in these instructions. So let’s see: I downloaded AUCTeX 11.84 from http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex/download-for-windows.html I also downloaded and ...

Great time at NRW 07

I was at NRW 07 last Friday and had a great time. For Developer Express I did a mini “booth” there and had a chance to demo some of our products to interested attendees. I also did my .NET 3 - The Game Challenge session again, which went fantastic this ...

DDD 5 Feedback

I received the feedback list for my DDD 5 sessions yesterday. Let me summarize, with comments: Session 1 with Ian, Bluffers’ Guide to C# 3.0 - most people thought it was great. The only criticism that touched this session was more about the combination with the second one, see below. Session 2 with ...

Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 is available

After a few pre-announcements beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 is now available. Go here to get it! No info yet that I could find about updating beta 1 to beta 2… I’ll have to find out, since I’ve got beta 1 installed on my laptop at the moment.

How do you manage complex appointments and timelines?

I like my Outlook for appointment management, I really do. But it lacks certain functionality I would really like to have. This functionality, in my case, has to do with event management, but I guess there are a number of other scenarios where one might have the same problem. Consider this: ...

Windows Help not supported on Windows?

I was just going to look something up in the help file for Putty, and this window popped up: So, it’s happened - Windows Vista can’t read Windows help files by default. Wow. This page here explains Microsoft’s reasoning, basically that “… the Windows Help program has not had a ...

WPF and Silverlight sessions at the .NET Developer Network

In October I’m going to be in Bristol at the .NET Developer Network, doing talks to introduce WPF as well as Silverlight. I’m looking forward to seeing some of you there! Guy has described the sessions on the group’s web site, much better than I could So click here ...

DDD 5 slides and samples - C# 3.0 sessions

I finally made it Here are the files with slides and sample code for the sessions Ian and I did at DDD 5. Bluffers’ guide to C# 3.0 10 cool things to do with C# 3.0 - Ian’s stuff 10 cool things to do with C# 3.0 - Oliver’s stuff Finally, the ...

Back online

I was away from home for a week, and on the first day of my absence I noticed that my web server wasn’t running for some reason… several of you sent me emails when you found the same problem, thank you very much for that. Unfortunately I couldn’t do anything ...

DDD 5 was a blast

It happened last Saturday, and feedback from attendees as well as organizers seemed to indicate that it was another major success. I was pretty busy on the day myself. Ian and I did a double session on C# 3 and related features, which was received really well, although the presentation ...

Lots to do at DDD 5

The agenda for DDD 5 is up (registration is open as well, in case you hadn’t heard!) now, and I find that I’m going to be really busy on the day. Ian and I are doing a double presentation about C# 3 and all the fantastic things you can do ...

DDD 5 registration is now open!!

Go here quickly to register, before everybody else does! In case you’ve been living under a rock in the past few years, here’s a link to the DDD web site, where you can find all sorts of information about it.

NxtGenUG Fest 07 just around the corner

In case you haven’t heard about it before, the event takes place on May 23rd at Microsoft Thames Valley Park in Reading. Rafal Lukawiecki, who was voted best TechEd speaker for 7 years running, is the headline speaker. He does two sessions, and he’s joined by other interesting speakers like Lorna Brown ...

AudioTron with Vista file server

I was just trying to connect my AudioTron to a Vista machine that has my music collection on it. The network connection didn’t work, because the Audiotron is using an old version of the relevant network protocols. This is just a “note to self” type post to remind me what ...

.NET 3 - The Game Challenge

I did a presentation recently at the NxtGenUG in Oxford, where I introduced WPF and WCF in a combined session. I created a network enabled implementation of Connect Four to do this. Here’s the download of the demo solution, as requested by some of the attendees: ConnectFour.zip (30668 bytes) If ...

Stupid error message in IIS

I was trying to run the default website in a default installation of IIS on Vista, and I got this error message: What the …? Who comes up with crap like this? Unbelievable… even the error code is useless to search for, as apparently there are hundreds of other error ...

Weird thing installing SnagIt on Vista

Just came across this, and I thought I’d document it for myself and others. I was trying to install SnagIt on a newly installed Vista system and every time the installation just stopped right after the first wizard page, giving me a “Fatal Error Message” with the detail information “Installation ...

Expression Web is a developer tool after all!

Wow, Microsoft learns! It’s taken them awhile, but now they got it (nearly) right: Expression Web is now part of all Premium level subscriptions. In case you hadn’t heard, it came at an extra cost so far, regardless of what you were already paying for your existing subscription, with ...

MVPs.Add(this);

Heard this today: I have received Microsoft’s MVP award “Visual Developer - Visual C#” this year. Thanks to Microsoft, and also thanks to everybody who helped this along, you know who you are. Now I just have to wait and see whether I’m still an MVP tomorrow, or rather an April’s ...

WPF: IntSequence helper class updated, including dependency properties

This struck me right after my recent post about binding to arbitrary sequences: my helper class was implemented with traditional .NET properties, which isn’t optimal for use with WPF. One thing specifically isn’t good for my purpose, which is the fact that a “normal” property can’t be the target of ...

WPF: Binding to a sequence

In certain contexts I have always found it useful to bind to a sequence of numbers, or sometimes even just a dummy collection with a certain number of elements. It’s like a for-loop, just for data binding. I’ve found three good ways of doing that in XAML, as the following ...

WPF: Bottom dwelling with an ItemsControl

Here’s something I just stumbled upon. Not quite intuitive, so I thought I’d write it down. Consider this piece of XAML (you can paste it into XamlPad to try it out):