Unfortunately, we’ve been without power at our home since 10PM last Friday night due to storms and tornados. Not only is the power out in our area of the city, but a big tree fell on our specific power lines, ripping everything away from the house. So the weekend has been spent calling utility companies, contractors, waiting, and reading. Our family lives far away, so we’ve really appreciated our friends who have welcomed us into their homes, shared their meals with us, and let us type blog posts from their laptops. (Thanks Shawn!)

If you’re going to TechEd and want to meet up, drop me an email at aaronlerch at gmail or tweet me on twitter. I’ll be at Party with Palermo on Monday night.

See you in Orlando!

Head on over and register! And leave a comment here if you’re going – we could all have lunch together.

If you didn’t know, Microsoft commissioned some amateur photographers to capture live-image backgrounds. I think that’s a fantastic idea, as there’s some real talent out there (in many disciplines, not just photography) that hasn’t made the decision or had the opportunity to go professional. Long Zheng of istartedsomething.com has more details on the process and the results.

If you enjoy the shipped Vista backgrounds, you’ll be glad to know that Hamad Darwish, one of the amateur photographers has released an additional pack of Vista backgrounds that didn’t make the Microsoft cut -and they’re fantastic. You can get the download links from his website.

The easiest way to view all the possible images without selecting each one individually via the “Browse…” button is to unzip the images to the public pictures folder, typically located here: C:\Users\Public\Pictures

They should show up under the “Public Pictures” option in the Location drop-list.

Enjoy! Unless you agree with Jeff Atwood, then you should never see your background image anyway.

And thanks, Hamad!

// Sample for the Environment.UserDomainName property
using System;

class Sample
{
    public static void Main()
    {
    Console.WriteLine();
//  <-- Keep this information secure! -->
    Console.WriteLine("UserDomainName: {0}", Environment.UserDomainName);
    }
}
/*
This example produces the following results:
(Any result that is lengthy, specific to the machine on which this sample was tested, or reveals information that should remain secure, has been omitted and marked "!---OMITTED---!".)

UserDomainName: !---OMITTED---!
*/

You heard it here first, folks! When you use the Environment.UserDomainName property, you’ll get !—OMITTED—! as the result. Why couldn’t they just put in an example domain for us?

The real problem here is that I didn’t fully read the documentation. Further down the page, under “.NET Framework Security” it specifically says that it reads the value from the USERDOMAIN environment variable. I wasn’t sure whether the return results would be “aaronlerch” or “aaronlerch.com”, for example. If I would’ve read it all, I would’ve seen that I could verify by looking at $env:USERDOMAIN.

P.S. I’m not slamming the doc folks, I think doc is so important and gets very overlooked at many companies – I’m glad Microsoft does pay a lot of attention to it, overall.

Microsoft is opening up to VSIP partners the Visual Studio 2008 Shell, something the SQL Server 2005 Management Studio has taken advantage of for a while (with Visual Studio 2005′s shell). The part I found most interesting is this:

Q: How much will the Visual Studio Shell cost?
The Visual Studio Shell will be freely available as part of the Visual Studio SDK starting with the release of Visual Studio 2008. Building and deploying applications based on the Visual Studio Shell will be royalty-free.

A completely free, proven application shell. That’s nothing but good. Any company offering any sort of “designer” (such as the example in the image) could leverage this shell for a relatively quick time-to-market application that “grandfathers in” all of the usability features the Visual Studio team has gathered and implemented over the years.

Microsoft is also offering an “integrated” mode (what I just mentioned would fall in the “isolated” mode). Integrated mode means that your shell components will integrate into Visual Studio 2008 itself.

Here are the key benefits as Microsoft sees them (from the linked page):

• Faster Development. The Visual Studio Shell accelerates development by providing a base integrated development environment that can host custom tools and programming languages.
• A Familiar Environment. Developers can build on the Visual Studio platform and provide end users a familiar user interface, speeding the learning curve for both.
• Optimized for Languages & Tools. Created in response to requests from our partners, the Visual Studio Shell gives you the option of integrating your tools with Visual Studio or creating an isolated, custom-branded application.

Other people have noticed this also, and responded by posting “how-to” explanations. There’s even one on YouTube. I’ve been using Vista and Office 2007 for a while now, and I can attest that the experience with opening the packaging is worse than the experience with the OS, but c’mon–sometimes packaging innovation is more harmful than helpful. If your package prevents people from getting at your product, you’ve got a serious problem. I may not be a typical user, but when I open software, the packaging gets chucked and the media gets put into a 150 CD holder.

If you need “how-to” instructions just to open the box, you’ve lost the game already. I just got a MacBook Pro (and iPod and Printer–hooray for student discounts!) yesterday, and couldn’t be more impressed with the difference in packaging between Microsoft’s products and Apple’s. This classic video says it all. Apple rules the packaging space.

Check out the wiki at http://msdnwiki.microsoft.com/

I already went through and added the comments I felt were appropriate for HttpListenerResponse.SendChunked and HttpListenerResponse.ContentLength64.

Good for you, MSDN!

A co-worker was having a problem with his in-process HTTP server written using the very cool HttpListener class available in .NET 2.0 (on Win2k3 and WinXP SP2 only). In his code he was attempting to enable chunking of the response by setting the HttpListenerResponse.SendChunked property to true. Great! But it didn’t chunk. Why? Because his code looked like this:

HttpListener listener; // Created elsewhere
HttpListenerContext context = listener.GetContext();
// Open a file/stream/whatever, etc.
System.IO.Stream stream; // = …
context.Response.SendChunked = true;
context.Response.ContentLength64 = stream.Length;
// etc.

According to the documentation, there’s nothing wrong with that. What they don’t tell you, however, is that SendChunked and ContentLength64 are mutually exclusive. Setting one negates the effect of the other. After a couple of minutes of reflection (both mentally, theoretically, and most importantly programmatically) on the subject, this fact started rising to the surface.

To me, that’s worth putting in at least a comment in the documentation.

I attended the VS 2005 launch event in my hometown today (Indianapolis), and at the “Meet the Experts” session afterwards, I presented a similar problem to the one I mentioned previously to the VS.NET 2005 expert. Well, long story short, Bill Steele found the solution to my problem (thank you!). It was that the disco generated by the web service on the server (a 3rd-party web service) was incorrect, it was redirecting the WS consumer to an invalid URL (hence VS.NET wasn’t able to auto-generate the reference to it). Well, about 10 minutes later, on my way home, it hit me like a smack in the face that the issue I previously had was with the same WS provider, and that I never did test my “issue” in my own controlled environment. Geez. I feel like a moron! I would bet extremely large sums of money that it was the same issue then that I am seeing now. (the old URL is now defunct, so I can’t test it against their server, and I don’t feel like taking the time to prove it since I’m so sure of what the problem was) I will keep my old blog post around just to remind me to always hunt down ALL avenues–I had left one unexplored last time (and this time) and it happened to be the one place the error existed.

So thanks to Bill! You really are the expert!!!