Drew's BlogThe Joys of Technology ExploredComments on FedEx Aquisition of Kinko's- December 30, 2003 The air and ground transport service is acquiring business services company Kinko's in a $2.4 billion cash deal. Kinko's will provide a leg up in electronic document delivery, FedEx says. CNet News.com Hmmm... this is very interesting to me personally. CNet has chosen to put a more technical spin on it and so they're relating it to e-document printing and delivery. The thing about that is my company, Mimeo, is much better positioned in e-document printing and delivery than Kinkos is. I've...http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/30/46744.aspx The Future of Scripting- December 30, 2003 Everyone's blogging about Daniel Boyd's open letter to Microsoft regarding the future of scripting technologies on the Windows platform. Personally, I think that the new Microsoft Shell (MSH) will be the answer to these people's prayers. Here's a couple of nice articles by Jason Nadal with some specific details and examples. Also, if you're running Longhorn, you can join the MSH beta by going to BetaPlace, entering a Guest ID of "mshPDC" and filling out the survey there.http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/30/46649.aspx Can't Install XPSP2 Beta On XP-MCE- December 22, 2003 I just dl'd XPSP2 beta from MSDN Subscriber Downloads only to find out that it won't install on XP Media Center Edition. Bummer. This seems silly to me as MCE is really just a thin veil over XP Professional. As far as I know, there's no real OS changes to support media center. It's simply an application (written in .NET btw) which provides the fancy Media Center &8220;shell&8221; over the underlying OS. What a pain. I wonder if there's a build of the SP2 for MCE... I'd love to check it...http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/22/45154.aspx True Streaming Reads from ASP.NET- December 19, 2003 Simon Fell1 is venting about the lack of true streaming reads in ASP.NET. I agree, it really sucks that everything gets buffered. I'm not quite clear why this is the way it is. After all, if you look at what is basically the lowest layer of the CLR based ASP.NET runtime, HttpWorkerRequest, you can see it has a ReadEntityBody method which would appear to enable a streaming read scenario. Underneath the covers, I would imagine Microsoft's concrete implementation could reach...http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/19/44774.aspx Don Box and Chris Anderson MSDN TV Episode on XAML- December 19, 2003 A new MSDN TV episode just rolled out. This one is all about XAML. Don and Chris do an awesome job showing us once again that XAML really has nothing to do with Avalon. grin Their demo happens to be creating a custom console framework and then leveraging that framework in a XAML based application. They do an excellent job showing how XAML actually maps to CLR types, properties and events. They also show how to implement the IAddChild interface that allows you to integrate more closely.http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/18/44535.aspx Application Global Resources In XAML- December 19, 2003 Nathan Dunlap points out that resources can be defined at the application level in XAML. This enables the resources to be used across all &8220;pages&8221; in an Avalon application. He then makes the analogy between this technique and using a base CSS file for your web application. Finally, he wraps up by mentioning the BasedOn property of the Style class. This property allows you to create a new style by deriving from an existing style and overriding or extending the base style..http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/18/44534.aspx Movie Review: Hero- December 17, 2003 Sorry once again for the break in technical content, but I just saw the movie Hero, starring Jet Li, for the first time last night. Wow. I just had to make a recommendation. It's not dubbed in English, so you have to watch it with subtitles, but I like that because it would most certainly lose something if you didn't hear the original Chinese being spoken. The story has twists and turns and there are multiple story lines within the main story line, which I love. The...http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/17/44135.aspx Keep An Eye On This Avalon Guy- December 17, 2003 Nathan Dunlap is a designer on the Avalon team. If you're into Avalon and not already subscribed to the main LonghornBlogsfeed you should, at the very least, do yourself a favor and subscribe to his feed. He recentlyposted anentry about the DrawingBrush class which is an awesomelittle utility classthat lets you essentially paint anything that uses a Brush with a drawing composed of any set of Avalon visuals. Last nighthe posted an new entry about re-using content. In his sample, he defines a...http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/17/44133.aspx Saddam Captured- December 14, 2003 I don't normally blog much about non-technology related subjects, but since this one is pretty important I figured I'd make a post for history's sake.http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/14/43480.aspx Question For the VSIP Gurus Out There- December 12, 2003 Scenario Ok, I'm writing an add-in which extends solutions with custom properties. This add-in is written in C. I've created the extender provider, I'm registering it for the solution object, the properties show up as expected under the properties window in the IDE and all is well. However, for one of these properties I want to provide a custom editor. I've applied the EditorAttribute to my property, but it just seems like the IDE doesn't respect it. Strange thing is, I've applied...http://weblogs.asp.net/dmarsh/archive/2003/12/12/43264.aspx |