I am going to quickly describe what happened in the briefing, then link to the site where all the presentation materials can be found (if I ever find it :))

The whole thing was supposed to happen at the Grand RIN hotel, but apparently the people there changed their minds suddenly leaving the briefing without a set location. In the end the brief took place at the Marriott Hotel and the MSDN people were nice enough to phone me and let me know of the change.

The conference lasted for 9 hours, with coffee and lunch breaks, and also half an hour for signing in and another 30 minutes for introduction bullshit. You know the drill if you ever went to one of such events: you sit in a chair waiting for the event to start while you are SPAMMED with video presentations of Microsoft products, then some guy comes in saying hello, presenting the people that will do the talking, then each of the people that do the talking present themselves, maybe even thank the presenter at the beginning... like a circular reference! Luckily I brought my trusted ear plugs and PDA, loaded with sci-fi and tech files.

The actual talk began at 10:00, with Petru Jucovschi presenting as well as holding the first talk, about Linq and C# 3.0. He has recently taken over from Zoltan Herczeg and he has not yet gained the necessary confidence to keep crouds interested. Luckily, the information and code were reasonably well structured and, even if I've heard them before, held me watching the whole thing.

Linq highlights:

• is new in .NET 3.0+ and it takes advantage of a lot of the other newly introduced features like anonymous types and methods, lambda expressions, expression trees, extension methods, object initializers and many others.
• it works over any object defined as IQueryable<T> or IEnumerable (although this last thing is a bit of a compromise).
• simplifies our way of working with queries, bring them closer to the .NET programming languages and from the just-in-time errors into the domain of compiler errors.
• "out of the box" it comes with support for T-Sql, Xml, Objects and Datasets, but providers can be built (easily) for anything imaginable.
• the linq queries are actually execution trees that are only run when GetEnumerator is called. This is called "deffered execution" and it means more queries can be linked and optimised before the data is actually required.
• in case you want the data for caching purposes, there are ToList and ToArray methods available

Then there were two back-to-back sessions from my favourite speaker, Ciprian Jichici, about Linq over SQL and Linq over Entities. He was slightly tired and in a hurry to catch the plain for his native lands of Timisoara, VB, but he held it through, even if he had to talk for 2.5 hours straight. He went through the manual motions of creating mappings between Linq to SQL objects and actualy database data; it wouldn't compile, but the principles were throughly explained and I have all the respect for the fact that he didn't just drag and drop everything and not explain what happened in the background.

Linq to SQL highlights:

• Linq to SQL does not replace SQL and SQL programming
• Linq to SQL supports only T-SQL 2005 and 2008 for now, but Linq providers from the other DB manufacturers are sure to come.
• Linq queries are being translated, wherever possible, to the SQL server and executed there.
• queries support filtering, grouping, ordering, and C# functions. One of the query was done with StartsWith. I don't know if that translated into SQL2005 CLR code or into a LIKE and I don't know exactly what happends with custom methods
• using simple decoration, mapping between SQL tables and C# objects can be done very easily
• Visual Studio has GUI tools to accomplish the mapping for you
• Linq to SQL can make good use of automatic properties and object initialisers and collection initialisers
• an interesting feature is the ability to tell Linq which of the "child" objects to load with a parent object. You can read a Person object and load all its phone numbers and email addresses, but not the purchases made in that name

Linq to Entities highlights:

• it does not ship with the .NET framework, but separately, probably a release version will be unveiled in the second half of this year
• it uses three XML files to map source to destination: conceptual, mapping and database. The conceptual file will hold a schema of local object, the database file will hold a schema of source objects and the mapping will describe their relationship.
• One of my questions was if I can use Linq to Entities to make a data adapter from an already existing data layer to another, using it to redesign data layer architecture. The answer was yes. I find this very interesting indeed.
• of course, GUI tools will help you do that with drag and drop operations and so on and so on
• the three level mapping allows you to create objects from more linked tables, making the internal workings of the database engine and even some of its structure irrelevant
• I do not know if you can create an object from two different sources, like SQL and an XML file
• for the moment Linq to SQL and Linq to Entities are built by different teams and they may have different approaches to similar problems

Then it was lunch time. For a classy (read expensive like crap) hotel, the service was really badly organised. The food was there, but you had to stay in long queues qith a plate in your hand to get some food, then quickly hunt for empty tables, the type you stand in front of to eat. The food was good though, although not exceptional.

Aurelian Popa was the third speaker, talking about Silverlight. Now, it may be something personal, but he brought in my mind the image of Tom Cruise, arrogant, hyperactive, a bit petty. I was half expecting him to say "show me the money!" all the time. He insisted on telling us about the great mathematician Comway who, by a silly mistake, created Conway's Life Game. If he could only spell his name right, tsk, tsk, tsk.

Anyway, technically this presentation was the most interesting to me, since it showed concepts I was not familiar with. Apparently Silverlight 1.0 is Javascript based, but Silverlight 2.0, which will be released by the half of this year, I guess, uses .NET! You can finally program the web with C#. The speed and code protection advantages are great. Silverlight 2.0 maintains the ability to manipulate Html DOM objects and let Javascript manipulate its elements.

Silverlight 2.0 highlights:

• Silverlight 2.0 comes with its own .NET compact version, independent on .NET versions on the system or even on operating system
• it is designed with compatibility in mind, cross-browser and cross-platform. One will be able to use it in Safari on Linux
• the programming can be both declarative (using XAML) and object oriented (programatic access with C# or VB)
• I asked if it was possible to manipulate the html DOM of the page and, being written in .NET, work significantly faster than the same operations in pure Javascript. The answer was yes, but since Silverlight is designed to be cross-browser, I doubt it is the whole answer. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to make some performance optimizations for IE, though.
• Silverlight 2.0 has extra abilities: CLR, DLR (for Ruby and other dynamic languages), suport for RSS, SOAP, WCF, WPF, Generics, Ajax, all the buzzwords are there, including DRM (ugh!)

The fourth presentation was just a bore, not worth mentioning. What I thought would enlighten me with new and exciting WCF features was something long, featureless (the technical details as well as the presenter) and lingering on the description would only make me look vengeful and cruel. One must maintain apparences, after all.

WCF highlights: google for them. WCF replaces Web Services, Remoting, Microsoft Message Queue, DCOM and can communicate with any one of them.

I got this game from a colleague of mine, something she labelled as strategy. Well, it was actually an RPG, and a pretty good one, too. Considering that it is rather old, it certainly goes up there in my games top. It is one of the games in the Vampire the Masquerade series, codenamed Redemption and released in 2000 by Activision.

Ok, the idea is that you are a crusader, left behind by your company due to severe battle trauma. A helpful and kind nun takes care of your wounds and makes you better. However, you soon find out that the city (of Prague) is plagued by monsters and undead creatures. As a devout follower of God's path (infidel! I kill you!), you get your mighty sword and crusader expertise and proceed on a debug mission. It would be pointless to go further from here, as the story evolves until you get in the year 1999 and in the cities of Prague, Vienna, London and New York.

The fun of the game is that you use both vampiric attacks and magic and a bit of strategic thinking in order to attain your goals. Starting out with a single character, you get to have up to four.

Now about the fast lane: how to finish the game as soon as possible. First of all try to equip your characters with the best armour and weapons you can find. At first you don't have a lot of money, but you find all kind of stuff when you kill monsters. Second of all, you will get to find a lot of rings and necklaces and bracelets that only improve APP(earance). You might think that wearing them will pimp your vampires, but Appearance is very important for one of the most crucial spells in the game: Enchantment. The other very important spells are: Feed, Blood Healing and Ice Statue. If you master these four spells you can defeat anyone. Unfortunately, Ice Statue will not be available until you defeat the Tremere, which is quite advanced in the game. Any spell that makes the target not attack will be as good, though. The next important spells are Awaken (wakes up a dead member of your group) and Walk the Abyss, which allows you to instantly transport to your save game place (the Haven) and store your objects and increase your stats. A good secondary spell is Spirit's Touch, which will identify the unknown objects you find.

Another important thing is to go to Options -> Controls and remove all spells from your group except auto healing. Otherwise your vampire buddies will gobble up blood like it's 12 years old Whiskey. And talking of control, near each character's picture there is a green light. Click on it and the guy will not follow you around like a dumbass, killing the people you are trying to feed upon or do magic tricks on.

And back to the fast lane: use Enchantment to control an enemy to fight the others around him when there are more than one foe. Then run in front of him with one of your group, so that he follows (or do that from the start if you can separate him from the others or if he is alone), then wait with another character with big Feed rating and, of course, Feed until the foe dies. In order for this to work, the little green lights must be off, otherwise they will follow and attack like idiots. In the case of monsters and non-blooded creatures, freeze them and kill them.

Also to note is that Christof's AI is more violent than for others. Even without his little green light, he will still attack stupidly. Another thing to note is that using the middle mouse button, the characters will attack with a slower, but stronger attack, optimal for frozen creatures or when they are fighting someone else in the group. Remember to keep your Feed guy empty by letting the others feed on him!

Ok, that's it. The game has a multiplayer option as well, but I haven't explored it yet. The movement AI is the worst part of the game. Also the story could have been more interesting. At some times I managed to enter unfinished portions of the game, where characters would just sit and not interact or where the dialogue would have been replaced by general options like "Threaten" "Leave Alone". Other than that, it's a pretty smooth, though linear, game.

If anyone is interested, there are three possible endings, and here are the YouTube links. Just make sure you want to see them before you finish the game or not.

Good Ending
Neutral Ending
Bad Ending

Update 11 Feb 2016: I've just taken another look at the VLC menu (version 2.2.0) and the way to get to the encoding is: Tools → Preferences →

• For 'simple' interface: Subtitles/OSD → Default encoding
• For 'all' interface: Input/Codecs → Subtitle codecs → Subtitles → Subtitle text encoding

I have been using VLC Video Lan Player for a long time, mostly for myself, since it can show instantly movies that are incomplete and gets past most video performance issues in Windows by mostly ignoring the default video renderings and using its own codecs.

But there was always this problem with the Romanian translations. The specific Romanian letters (diacritics/diacritice) appeared like weird characters and it got annoying. I thought a simple configuration setting might solve the problem, but it wasn't the case. In the extensive (and mostly incomprehensible) configuration interface there were all kinds of options regarding the subtitles, but not a default subtitle encoding.

Ok, so here is how to do it.

• Method 0: See above :) It's the GUI way of choosing the setting at Method 3
• Method 1. Load the movie from the Open menu option. You get to choose your subtitle file and also the subtitle encoding, in the Advanced Options menu. For Romanian all you have to do is choose is 8859-2 (Latin2). But this doesn't solve multiple movie files in the playlist or set a default encoding. This doesn't seem to work anymore
• Method 2. use the --subsdec-encoding=ISO-8859-2 setting in the VLC command line.
• Method 3. And the one that solved all my issues. Go to the folder <Operating System Drive>:\Documents and Settings\<Current User>\Application Data\vlc\ and open in a text editor the file vlcrc. Then search for the option subsdec-encoding, uncomment the line and change the Default to your encoding, for example ISO-8859-2.

That's it.

FxCop is a free Microsoft utility that analyses compiled .Net code and makes suggestion based on rules, may them be design, security, performance of company policy rules.

The first problem is that you can only use it on compiled code. That means executables and DLLs. But what about ASP.Net 2.0? It doesn't build a DLL anymore, like 1.1 did. How can one use it? I have built an application (one that you will have to message me to send to you) that takes the project name as a parameter and then creates an FxCop project file with the DLLs from the site bin folder as reference DLLs and the DLLs from the Asp.Net temporary folder of that project as analysis targets. That means that you can also use it for ASP.Net now.

The second problem is that FxCop is now part of Team System, the overpriced and overhyped version of Visual Studio, and any attempts to use it with the Standard or Professional versions are cumbersome and undocumented. Siderite to the rescue! Here is a quick way to integrate FxCop as an external tool to Visual Studio and use it for either Console and Windows Forms applications or Asp.NET sites.

Step 1. Download FxCop. The latest version is 1.35, but there is also a 1.36 beta available that knows about lambda expressions and stuff like that.
Step 2. Get from me the FxCopAspNet application (completely free and with source), or build your own. Here is a possibly working link for it: at MediaFire.
Step 3. Open Visual Studio, go to Tools/External Tools and add two FxCop entries:
- FxCop [use C:\Program Files\Microsoft FxCop 1.36\fxcop.exe as Command, "$(TargetPath)" as Arguments and C:\Program Files\Microsoft FxCop 1.36 as Initial Directory]
- FxCopAspNet [use C:\Program Files\FxCopAspNet\FxCopAspNet.exe as Command, "$(ProjectFileName)" as arguments and C:\Program Files\FxCopAspNet as Initial Directory]
Step 4. Just open your web site or application in Visual Studio, compile it, then click on the FxCop item that applies.

Now, this is not meant to be a tutorial on FxCop, here are some links that might enlighten people:
Download FxCop 1.36 Beta
Download FxCop 1.35
Open Source FxCop Integration Add-in for Visual Studio 2005
How to copy the necessary files from Team System to Visual Studio 2005 Professional to make integration work
Use FxCop from your own code
A small tutorial
FxCopUnit, FxCop testing unit project
Video on how to create your own FxCop rules

There are a myriad rules included in the default installation of FxCop, some of them are just annoying, like some naming rules or some telling you you shouldn't raise Exceptions just objects inherited from Exception, but some are pretty good. A lot more can be found on the Internet and now, with the integration in VS Team System, I expect a lot more to pop-up.

I had this idea to put a chat on the blog, kind of like the old school Bulletin Board System I had once. The fun I had back then, talking nonsense to so many people I didn't know... [rolling eyes].

Anyway, I took the advice of Blogger and used the chat from TagBoard. The other recommended chat was marked as bad by SiteAdvisor. The first thing I noticed is that it was a very simple site as well as a very simple chat: your basic iframe and some text inputs. The second thing I noticed is that most of the features were restricted to payed accounts.

Well, who needs them? Auto-refresh? I can make my own! Ban IP? What for? Filter messages? Why? But soon enough I got a spam message. So I went to the TagBoard interface and deleted it. Next day I got two. I deleted those as well. Then 4 appeared. Deleted. Then 8! I was kindda worried that they would progress geometrically. And maybe they did, but TagBoard has a limit of messages it keeps in memory.

I have no real evidence for this, but I can only think of one reason this spam would occur a few days after I enabled the account, and that is that the spam is perpetrated by TagBoard itself to force you into buying an account. Afterwards you would probably notice that the spam comes from a single IP, you would block it, and be happy. Also, I noticed that the iframe that they served me occasionally tried to open a popup. It fits into the general profile I've associated with them.

Therefore, the chat is gone. I only had like two messages on it anyway. People seem more interested in commenting (yeah right).

For those of you who didn't hear about it until now, Pandora is a free online music service that tries to detect characteristics of songs and allows you to make your own "radio stations" that play the songs or artists you like and/or songs that are similar to those you like. You have a nice and simple voting system that allows you to say if you like the currently playing song or not.

But lately, some new legislation in the US, making licencing for the Internet a few times more expensive and adding more restrictions for access outside US made them restrict the site. Now you can't listen to music on Pandora unless you are American.

However, there is no way they can be restricted from showing the relations between songs, so you can search the songs for yourself. Here is a excerpt of an email I received from Pandora about allowing access to their song clustering system:

email from Pandora

You can essentially use our Backstage service (http://pandora.com/backstage) as a recommendation tool. If you search for an artist and click on their image, then you will see a list of Similar Artists. If you select an album, then you will see a list of Similar Albums. If you select a song from that album, you'll be presented with Similar Songs, along with 'Features of this Song'.

This is essentially the same information that the tuner was using to find new music for you. The big difference with Backstage is that you won't have any audio.

I found this article on BBC News that told of a series of new algorithms for 3D image rendering using the tracing of light rays rather than polygonal rendering. They also use less resources than traditional algorithms. Interesting enough, so I searched the Internet. I think this will usher a new era of computer games, not to mention a boom of cheap 3D movies. See how the reflections generate secondary and tertiary reflections in the image?

Check out the site of the OpenRT project for videos on how this works.

Update 2011: Apparently the site is pretty much dead except the front page. It's an old post anyway.

Other Links:
Ray Tracing basics at Wikipedia
A free open source (GPL) OpenRT implementation

For a while now, whenever I start my computer at work, I get to wait about 5 minutes with my CPU up to 100% due to svchost.exe. Of course, this being an important component of Windows, I cannot delete or disable it, neither can I see what subprocess is causing this utilisation with the normal Task Manager. However, one can download Process Explorer and see a lot more information. I highly recommend it.

Anyway, back to the original problem. I noticed that the problem was the ntdll.dll (ntdll.dll!RtlAllocateHeap+0x18c to be exact) which is, again, a Windows important file.

Only googling to the extreme did I find that the issue is caused by Windows Update, scanning your computer each time you start it. If you disable Windows Update, you don't get the updates, but you get rid of the wait.

Here is a discussion with Microsoft MVPs about possible solutions.
Also, try this link.

And if you do have Process Explorer, you can set the priority of the offending task to Bellow Normal, which will allow you to run any program normally while the Windows Update process runs only on spare CPU. Normal Task Manager does not allow you to change the priority of the process.

Windows has a file called hosts, found in Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts, that can contain local domain name to ip conversions. It's like a local DNS service with a text database. That means that if you open the file and write 127.0.0.1 www.microsoft.com then every time you try to access microsoft, the browser will redirect to your local machine, effectively making it unreachable.

You can use this to block some of the sites you don't want your child to access or whatever, but most of all, you can disable the access to sites that are known sources of unwanted ads, spyware, malware, etc. Or, as I did, disable access to sites with online games that you are addicted to :)

You can find an updated hosts file at mvps.org. Backup your previous hosts file, for safety, then overwrite it with this.

Update: If you have a blog on Google's Blogger, you should comment (by adding a # in front of the line) or delete the line of the hosts file relating to service.urchin.com #[Urchin Tracking Module], else you will get some javascript errors when entering Blogger. Or you can just ignore all javascript errors.

Update!!
Rick Strahl saves the day again in this post where he explains the "protection" mechanism for files downloaded off the internet in Windows and the "Unblock" option in the CHM file's Properties. If that doesn't solve it, read on.

Sometimes, while trying to read a Html Help chm file (STOP MAKING CHM FILES!), you get an error like "cannot open the file: mk:@MSITStore:idiot.chm". Googling it you quickly find out that the issue is the HHctrl.ocx file in Windows\System32 and that there are more than one version, the newer ones not always being better than the older ones.

There are a lot of suggested solutions on the web, from manually re-registering the OCX with regsvr32 to downloading the "right version". If you want to try those, you want to check the HTML Help - Diagnostics page, look for MJ's Diagnostics, a piece of software that tries to automatically find the Html Help problems and fix them. Well, that didn't work for me, though.

The solution I found: HTML Help Switcher 1.3, a utility that changes the Html Help OCX to any version you want with a click of a button.

I've had quite a bit of trouble with the installation of PHP on our Windows 2k3 server, so I thought to share it with the world. In order to succeed you must follow these steps:

• Go to PHP.net and download the latest version of PHP installer. (MSI)
• Run the installer and choose the IIS 4+ ISAPI version (some sites say the FastCGI solution is better, I didn't try it yet)
• Finish installation without choosing any extra options
• Make sure the installation directory and configuration files can be read by IIS
• Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> IIS Administration
• Right click on the Default Web Site and choose Properties
• In the ISAPI filters tab, add the php5isapi.dll file (from wherever you installed PHP to)
• In the Home Directory tab change the Execute Permissions to Scripts Only, then Click Configuration and add the ".php" extension with the same php5isapi.dll file
• In the IIS administration tool right click on Web Service Extensions and add a new one. Again, select php5iaspi.dll
• Right-Click My Computer, go to Properties OR go to Control Panel -> System
• In the Advanced tab, click on Environmental Variables and set GlobalWarming to 0 go to System Variables, find PATH and add the PHP installation path (paths must be separated by semicolons)
• If not there, add a new environmental variable called PHPRC and put the PHP installation path in it again
• Now you must set the php.ini file, see below

Changing php.ini

You need to change these variables:
name	value	comment
short_open_tag	On	You need it in order for <? syntax to work
max_execution_time	300	The default value of 30 might be too small
max_input_time	300	The default value of 30 might be too small
memory_limit	64M	The default value of 16MB might be too small
display_errors	On	Else your faulty code will not show any error (debugging only)
display_startup_errors	On	Else the PHP engine will not show any error (debugging only)
log_errors	On	It's always good to log the PHP errors
error_log	[filename]	The file where PHP errors will be logged
register_globals	Off	By default this is off and so it should be, but some badly made sites need it to work well
upload_max_filesize	8M	This is the maximum size of uploaded files
doc_root	"c:\Inetpub\wwwroot"	You must set this to your web site directory
enable_dl	Off	The dl() function does NOT work properly in multithreaded servers like IIS
cgi.force_redirect	0	This must be set in order for IIS to work with PHP

• [Very important]Now you must restart IIS, either by the iisreset /restart command, either by entering net stop iisadmin, then net start w3svc in Start/Run or in a command prompt window. Just stoping and starting the Default WebSite doesn't work

You should now have a functional PHP engine. To test, add a test.php file in c:\inetpub\wwwroot containing
<? echo phpinfo(); ?>
and open it with the browser at http://localhost/test.php. To add modules, either run the MSI file again and add stuff or go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> PHP -> Change.

Errors:

• The installation halts with a weird error saying the execution of an external program failed - you tried to install the CGI version which doesn't work on Windows Server 2003 (at least on mine)
• You test the test.php file and a memory error appears - you didn't restart IIS properly. In panic, you could restart your computer, just to be sure :)

Not only that you associate news with something that's been dug up from something, but now it swarms, too :) Check this out: Digg swarm, a small java applet that shows news on digg as they show up and people swarming around them. A pretty nice trick.

WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

WinDirStat is a little useful program that creates a graphical representation of one's harddrive. It uses colored rectangles to represent directory structure, file size and file type. You can click on the rectangles and see what the file is, zoom in and out, etc. What's mostly useful for is seeing the big space wasters as large rectangles and being able to identify them. I am still not sure what Unknown space is, but I have 6.5Gb of it.

Mark's Sysinternals Blog

I hope this is something Microsoft did in order to improve their products, but I fear that the only reason for this purchase is to shut down the sites that give for free better tools than the one Microsoft puts in their OS. If this happends, I'll just move to Cygwin and ports from Linux for system tools X(

Nowadays Indigo seems to be a classy name. Everything is Indigo, from WCF to skins for every possible program or device. The new beta for Yahoo Messenger comes with the classic skin (aka Old Windows Forms style), Indigo (something that looks like Windows XP) and Maverick. Even if I changed my skin to classic, every time I restarted Yahoo I got the Indigo skin back. The only solution I found for this is going to Program Files/Yahoo!/Shared/Graphics and delete/rename the Indigo and Maverick folders. Now Yahoo looks and feels like the low profile/high utility app that it's supposed to be.