To me social network sites seem a bit like eBay in that the world only really needs one of them. And yet we have a few springing up… It reminds me of the early days of online auctions, where Yahoo and others tried to compete with eBay but consumers realized that there really wasn’t any reason to list with [...]
Using MSMQ in a .NET app is incredibly easy – the framework does most of the grunt work for you. Something that seems fairly natural is to use MSMQ in a Service. Services are controlled by the Service Control Manager. When you say “net start myservice”, assuming MyService is installed with the SCM, your service [...]
You’d think there would be a lot of good POP3 code floating around for .NET since it’s a ubiquitous protocol that’s been around more than 10 years but the libraries I could find were either commercial, didn’t support MIME attachments, or just didn’t seem like they were trustworthy code… As I was about to give up [...]
This is good news – Microsoft has picked up Vanguard, a new MMORPG being developed by Sigil Games. The reason it’s good news is that when it comes to developing an MMORPG (a massively multiplayer online role playing game, if you were wondering) one thing that stands out is that it takes a lot of [...]
If you’ve never looked into MSMQ, you should take a few minutes and have a look. Not necessarily because it’s something you’ll use today, but because it’s cool technology that you probably will have a use for sometime, and if you don’t know about it, you’ll probably reinvent this particular wheel.. MSMQ is a message queueing technology. [...]
You know, “.NET” is a stupid name for a framework. I mean, it just sucks that this great technology has this stupid name. You can’t search the ‘net for it (“.NET” is far too common). That’s a huge disadvantage, although I guess C has the same problem. Is it descriptive? Not really – it’s actually [...]
One problem with the magical machine generated XML (*.resx) files that Visual Studio generates is that sometimes, it generates huge diffs for very small changes. Case in point. I have to commit this, without being able to tell CVS what my edits are for, because I have no idea..
I’ve been taking some traditional sorts of programs lately and making them asynchronous, using thread pools. I had to do this because the default ThreadPool limit is 20 threads per processor, and once you have 20 blocking threads, your whole app stops. This basically means taking code like this: void doIt(){ Socket s = new Socket(…) [...]
I just realized the SPOT watches service coverage includes Ottawa. Hmm.
Wow.. according to Don Box, the Microsoft SPOT watches (officially called MSN Direct) host a CLR. Cool.