Darren Sim's Blog

McAfee Hindering Sync

I don't know if you guys are experiencing this, but McAfee's firewall seems to be hindering the sync between my Mobile 5.0 Device, and my computer. Initially, I thought it was kinda bazarre. But after disabling the McAfee firewall, the sync magically resumed!

Following are the specs of the devices involved

• O2 Atom running Windows Mobile 5.0
• Windows XP SP2, Installed with ActiveSync 4.2

So the work-around is just to simply disable the McAfee firewall. But if you're concerned about security, you'd want to turn off your wireless and LAN connection to the internet, to reduce the possible attack surface.

You might be thinking. "BUT FULL ACCESS HAD BEEN GIVEN TO ALL APPICATIONS RELATING TO ACTIVESYNC." ME TOO! But it just didnt sync"

Singapore Teen pleads guilty to WIFI Mooching

17 years old Singapore Teen who was Mooching his neighbour's WIFI had pleaded guilty. First guy who was convicted for wifi tapping.

Guess what? The judge actually suggested for his punnishment to be "GO TO NS EARLIER". Really nice judge, I guess. I've no actual CNA site/link that says that, but I was just hearing about that on national radio this morning.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/248094/1/.html

Just a random rant really.

White Memory Powder

VS2005 SP1 RTMed

Redmond had finally released the long awaited Visual Studio SP1 over the past weekend, available in 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and both traditional and simplified Chinese), and could be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/support/vs2005sp1/default.aspx.

So what’s really in this service pack?

• Bug Fixes
• Feature improvements through feedback from customers
• VS 05 Web Application Packs
• Design time performance optimization

So how big is the service pack?
Very big… 413 MB to download

How long does it take to update your visual studio?
30-90 minutes, depending on your computer speed, visual studio version and wad features are enabled. SP1 will run the upgrade patching process on each copy of Visual Studio 2005 it finds on your system.  So if you have VS 2005 Professional, Visual Web Developer Express, and Visual Basic Express on your system, it will run the patching process 3 times.

Upgrading from Ajax Beta 2 to RC1

If any of you guys are thinking... Jesus Christ! I'm just done with implementing and coding in MS-Ajax Beta 2, and now RC1 had changed a couple of stuff that makes me waste my prior effort!

Nah... Here's a whitepaper which describes on the changes and would guide you on transitioning to RC1. No major changes is going to be expected between RC1 and RTM.

Microsoft Ajax Library RC is Available!

The ASP.NET team had finally released the RC of the AJAX Library (previously "Atlas") and you could get a copy of it at  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=8FA6E076-582B-440F-95CB-C40ED23FDF59&displaylang=en.

One major change in the RC is that the previously Microsoft.Web.* will be now part of System.Web.* and there'd be no major changes expected between now and RTM.

Happy Ajaxing. =)

XNA Resources and the Game Technology Map

In my presentation at SgDotNet last night, I was sharing with the audience about the Game Technology Map, a key achitecture of most modern FX-Rich games. As promised, following is the GTM itself.

Click here for the bigger version (http://darrensim.com/photos/blogpics/images/106/original.aspx)

To know more about the RTM of XNA, and where you could download it, you could view my previous post at http://darrensim.com/blogs/techbits/archive/2006/12/12/xna-team-is-just-too-effecient.aspx to find out more! Cheers!

 Happy Developing...

Get drown with VSTS!

Microsoft had just introduced a series of Level 200 labs for VSTS, focusing on

• Design and Architecture
• Development and Testing
• Process and Project Management
• Team Foundation Server

Tune in (oh... i mean key in in your Browser) http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnvsts2005.mspx to find out more!

Co-existance of IE6 and IE7

If you're applied the IE7 update from Windows Update, and you're going.... "GOSH! I can no longer login to intranet applications which specifically have javascripts to check for IE5 and IE6 only!"

Well, here's the quick solution that the IE had came out with.

Situation 1: IE 7 installed and hope to have IE 6 as well

1. Download IE 6 Stand-alone installer (http://browsers.evolt.org/download.php?/ie/32bit/standalone/ie6eolas_nt.zip)

Situation 2: Currently running IE6. But hopes to have IE 7 yet still keeping IE 6

1. Download IE7 Stand-alone installer (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/default.mspx)
2. Unrar (http://www.rarlabs.com) the EXE file
3. Delete the folder that is named 'update'
4. Delete ie4unit.exe, spuninst.exe, spupdsvc.exe, install.ins
5. Create a new text file called iexplore.exe.local and save this file in the same folder
6. run iexplorer to open IE7

The above step had been adviced by TechRecipes at http://www.tech-recipes.com/internet_explorer_ie7_tips1188.html

An alternative could be found at Jon blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2005/12/28/434132.aspx.

Have fun! Cheers!

Updates:

• (IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine) From the IE Team Itselft!
  http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/11/30/ie6-and-ie7-running-on-a-single-machine.aspx
• IE 7 Readiness Toolkit (if you're a developer/tester, you'd love this)
  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D13EE10D-2718-47F1-AA86-1E32D526383D&displaylang=en

XNA Team is just too effecient!

I was just playing around with XNA Beta 2 couple weeks back when Christina's Team released the RTM version of it! Gosh! That's fast!

In fact the first time that I withness such a quick transition from Beta 2 > RTM. But anyways, GREAT JOB!

• XNA Game Development Environment: http://msdn.com/xna/gse/
• XNA Documentation: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/95e61722-ebb2-9ca8-e185-331035c60b1.aspx

 What's more? The XNA Team had also launched the Game Creator's Club. It would cost you US$ 99 per year for that suscription. But this would allow you to share games** and write games for your XBox360. Visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/creators/ to learn more!

 By the way, I'd also be presenting on XNA, Game Development Techniques tomorrow at Microsoft Singapore, under the SgDotNet UserGroup initiative. you could visit http://community.sgdotnet.org/blogs/microlau/archive/2006/12/13/Dec-2006-_2300_31-UG-Meeting-.aspx to learn more & register.

Cheers!

XNA Download Resources

Firstly, I'd like to acknoledge the students whom attended the "Walk the successlane seminar" yesterday. I bet you definitely had a well spent Saturday afternoon, learning more about Microsoft Technologies as well as getting some insights on how to condition yourselves for the working world.

As promised during my presentation, following are some links which you could go about to start install the XNA Framework as well as the Game Development Environment to start your first games.

1. Visual C# Express Edition
•  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=51411&clcid=0x409
2. XNA Framework (Beta 2)
• http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EB14D73E-E6D8-4132-8032-3CB828DB5EFC&displaylang=en
3. Game Studio Express (Beta 2)
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/gse

If you've some doubts about XNA, you could also take a look at the FAQ at http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/xna/faq/. But definitely, you could add a post comment here or drop me an email at darren@darrensim.com should you have any further queries. 

I'm sorry, slides for the presentation & demos would not be uploaded as there are come contents in there that're for presentation only and not for re-distribution. However, no frets! I'd definitely post the slides up as soon as the information could be "re-distributed".

 Happy Coding!

VSTS Level 200 Training for FREE!

I'm currently attending a VSTS DeepDive Level 300 training at Microsoft, and my interest for VSTS had been increasing by the day.

It's a really nice solution for software project management. But I guess I'd have to read more about it and possibly go for the certification for MSF..

Happened to browse through Boon Tiong's Blog and found this really cool link!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=527E2A17-1DEA-4D0B-9484-6AE43D00E570&displaylang=en

You could download a Level 200 VSTS Training for free, but beware, it's a huge file... couple of Gigs.

Office 2007 InfoPath Managed Object Model

If you're looking to develop something for InfoPath in Office 2007, following is a link the Managed Object Model class diagram which you'd definitely appreciate.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/9/c/09cda3f2-6d3d-4082-aec5-9a62b7679ecf/InfoPathObjectModelMap.pdf

Microsoft Ajax ScriptManager Javascript Issue

Last week, when I was conducting a Hot-Labs for Microsoft Singapore, I got a question from one of the attendees.

"Does ScriptManager actually stores itself in the CACHE? Else I'd have to have it on multiple pages, and that could suffer quite a fair bit on bandwidth"

Re: Does ScriptManager actually stores itself in the CACHE?
Yes, It's stored in the Browser Cache. Thus even if you have ScriptManager on multiple pages, performance is just once.

Re: Else I'd have to have it on multiple pages, and that could suffer quite a fair bit on bandwidth
Through my understanding, when you develop an AJAX enabled page, you should not actually have too many physical pages. Instead, you should have only a couple of pages (one for pre-login and another for logged-in view), as the data/information are pulled in, to the updatepanel, thus having the entire page refresh.

Finally the Search Engines are picking up

Finally the search engines, Google, MSN & Yahoo, are picking up my web-site URLs. Days ago, when I search for "Darren Sim"/Darren Sim, only Google and Yahoo has it, but it's in the bottom, in terms of results.

Now, finally all the 3 search engines are picking it up, and guess what? It's within the first 3 results. =)

yay!