4 days ago Blogengine.net 1.4.5 was released. A good time for me to upgrade to the newest version since i wanted to split my weblog up to a part to store my messages about my private life and my posts about software development.

Upgrading to 1.4.5 was pretty easy except 1 error i ran into. I'm using blogengine.net together with mysql since my provider doesn't have mssql and I didn't really like the xml based blogging. After setting everything up i kept on running into System.Threading.SemaphoreFullExceptions. After posting this on the Blogengine.net codeplex site some people mentioned this was a bug in the mysql.data.dll version 5.1.6 and if you upgrade to 5.2.2 everything should work fine again. So i did and you can see the results now.

I've also upgraded the layout of my weblog and added a http://life.vdcruijsen.net section to store my weblog about my life when I'm not developing software but am going out on vacation, trips or have something else to blog about.

Tnx to the Blogengine.net team for this great piece of software!

Geert van der Cruijsen

Hello again.

Today a really small post from me about a really simple thing i found out today. Ofcourse a lot of people know this but i also know lots of people dont know this while you are using it quite often. When you are developing for SharePoint for example you'll have to debug by attaching your debugger to the right w3wp.exe process. When i did this i always selected 1 and hoped it was the right one. Today i was debugging together with a collegue and then he selected more processes at once and i was like *DOH*!!!

This discovery can save a lot of time if you always pick the wrong w3wp.exe process like i did :)

so for everyone who didnt know this use this option from now on. I will do it for sure!

Geert van der Cruijsen

Today Microsoft launched the public beta of Internet Explorer 8 at MIX'08. As i posted in a blogposting yesterday the big change in Internet Explorer 8 is the render engine which is running in "super standard mode" instead of quirks mode that IE7 uses. You can download the public beta here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/default.mspx

One thing microsoft learned about the release of IE7 was that after the first Beta release of IE7 there were so many reactions, complaints and idea's send by people that it was almost undoable to do something with all the input. With this release of IE8 Microsoft opened up there bug database to the public so everyone can see the known bugs and people can even help prioritize these bugs.

One of the new feature in IE8 apart from the render engine is the use of "webslices" (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/webslices.mspx) these webslices look like a sort of rss technology where you can subscribe yourself to a part of a website instead of an rss feed and the webslice technology will let you know when the data changed.

Microsoft also released the beta of Silverlight 2.0. Scott Guthrie made a nice post about that on his blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/22/first-look-at-silverlight-2.aspx

There are also some nice video's on the website of MIX 08. These video's and part of the website are made with silverlight 1.0 so check it out:

mix website: http://visitmix.com/2008/default.aspx

mix videos: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

Geert van der Cruijsen

Today Microsoft promised Internet Explorer 8 will use the 'super standard mode'  rendering mode by standard instead of the IE7 version 'Quirks mode' that was planned earier.

Because of this People will be forced using the W3C standards OR add a special tag so the browser knows it should render the page in IE7 mode. Hopefully this will help to have 1 standard html which every browser will show the same way. More information about this: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/03/microsoft-s-interoperability-principles-and-ie8.aspx 

With this change IE8 will be able to pass the ACID2 test but guess what the "Web Standards Project" released the ACID3 test today which is supposed to test Ajax and other dynamic content in browsers. IE7 get's a score of 5 out of 100 while FireFox is getting the current best score with 50/100. Still a long way to go for every browser to pass this test. You can find the test and more information here: http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid3/

Geert van der Cruijsen

Almost 1 month ago Microsoft showed us their first technology preview of Volta. Volta is a new technology by Microsoft which makes it possible to change code to run on the server or client by only changing 1 line of code.

Imagine the possibilities on proof of concept projects where you don’t know where the bottlenecks will be. With this technology you can just build a test application and when you’re finished you can change pieces of code to run on the client or server to increase performance. Go and download the Volta technology preview on the live labs site now.

Another thing I wanted to show you is Seadragon. Seadragon is another technology by Live Labs from Microsoft. Seadragon is a technology where really high resolution pictures are stored on a server and you can zoom into them on the client. This makes it really easy to watch really high resolution images without having them on the client location. The Server application only sends the information that the client can see to the client application. These generated images are far less big in size as the original images are on the server.

Photosynth is another technology made by Live Labs and it is using the Seadragon technology to stream the images to the client. Photosynth is a tool to view a collection of images based on the location of where the images are taken. Photosynth can scan through a big collection of images of for example a big building and make up a 3d model of this building by using the images in the collection. You can view the building by selecting the angle of a specific image and the application will load that image with the Seadragon technology. From this new angle on the building you can zoom or select another image and you can take a virtual tour around the building like that.

You can test Photosynth on the live labs website with a few collections off famous buildings/objects like the NASA space shuttle Endeavour or Piazza San marco in Venice.

I found a really nice video about Seadragon and Photosynth on Youtube. If you want to see what is possible with these new technologies you really have to check it out.

I really think these technologies can grow big if you combine it for example with sites as Flickr so you can get a really new experience browsing through pictures.

Geert van der Cruijsen

I think most people heard about Microsoft Surface. (If not check http://www.microsoft.com/surface/) This machine will cost around 5000 to 10000 dollars but hey it's a really cool device. Now on my daily journey surfing the internet I came across a really cool project that everyone can try at home if you have knowledge about .net and own a Nintendo Wii to create your own multi touch user interface!

Since the Wii remote is using a Bluetooth connection towards it’s remote it’s also possible to connect it to your own pc. The Wii remote has an infra red sensor which can sense multiple infra red light sources at the same time.

How this all works is explained at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

There is also a C# sample code how to connect your pc to your Wii remote and how you’re able to do cool stuff with it. If I have enough time in the coming weeks I’ll try to test it myself if I can get my hands on some infra red LED’s.

Have fun!

Geert van der Cruijsen

Hi everyone,

Welcome to my first blog. The reason I’m starting to blog is that I’ve recently started working for Avanade and I’m coming across a lot of new things in the Microsoft world and i would like to share those things with you.

I’m trying to keep up with all the new things Microsoft is throwing at us and I’ll post some experiences when I try them out.

About myself: my name is Geert van der Cruijsen and me and my girlfriend live together in Uden, The Netherlands. I started to work for Avanade the first of September this year and I’m going to work on my MCPD-EA certification this year. From the Microsoft technology my experience lies in SharePoint 2007, C#, asp.net and Webservices.

Thanks for reading my first post and enjoy!