The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a
soldering iron, a hardware type with a program patch and a user with an idea.

The Wizardry Compiled, Rick Cook

While playing with Indigo I spend several hours on duplex services and clients finally leading to an annoying issue. I tried two different examples, one from the book Programming "Indigo" and another one from the WinFX SDK documentation [1]. In both cases I spend hours writing down all the code, e.g. the examples in the book do not fit with the current release of the WCF anymore. So some minor fixes have been necessary. Having both examples I tried to start the clients, but they did not receive any response from the service. If you are patient enough (which means waiting 5 to 10 minutes) the client will result in a ChannelConnectException.

What is wrong? Bindings? Any mistake in the XML config-files? The solution is as simple as it could be: Just right-click the web site in the solution browser and choose Start Options... 

Uncheck NTLM Authentication which is checked by default and restart your service and client.

After restarting the service and the client, the client is processing, the service is responding and the Quick Console shows the expected output:

[1] winfx.msdn.microsoft.com

Have you realized already this cool feature in Visual Studio 2005?

If you write down some interface or class names which do not exist yet, they appear in black (as long as you still use the default settings for the editor). As soon as you write down the appropriate class or interface the color changes from black to light blue. Why this is cool? It makes it pretty easy to find typos in your code right before compiling. If you see such code not in the appropriate color, either you have a typo in its name or the class or the interface is not implemented yet. It makes a lot of sense when you write down code but the implementation of a class or interface is not yet available because it is written by another person. It's a nice feature in VS 2005.

While writing papers, there are some really usefull hints you must know. If you write down topics, usualy it's a royal pain on your back always to grap the mouse to choose the Heading 1 formatting. Just press [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[1] to [Ctrl]-[Alt]-[3] to mark the lines as a heading. Unfortunately this doesn't work for Heading 4.

Another great thing is the rand macro. Sometimes it is usefull to have some arbitrary text betwwen all the headings which make the structure of you document. Just type in =rand() for some paragraphs of text or =rand(2) if you want exact two paragraphs. Of course you can choose any other number as well.

Word provides you some text to fill your empty space:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Yesterday from 6 pm to 9 pm the second run started. In the whole exhibition area you were able to find all kind of excellent food and drinks. Really a lot of people were interested in the Coding4Fun projects. Actually I lost my void because I had to talk so much. Before the exhibition opened I was able to wander around a little bit. So there is a lot of interesting stuff from Microsoft and  its partners coming. Unfortunately you do not have as much time as staff to have a chat with everybody providing a booth there, even if it would be really interesting. As far as we realized, there is no explicit break for lunch. So people are coming to the lounge from the morning until the afternoon to the lounge on their way to their lunch. It is nice, because there are not so many attendees their at once and you can take a few minutes for each person interested in the stuff.

 
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So, the first run is over. From 11:30 am to 3 pm a lot of attendees were interested in the fichertechnik robots shown at the Coding4Fun Lounge. A lot of people asked for the library we show here: the library will be available with the final version of the Visual Studio. You can find the bits then at the Coding4fun website. It's really nice if people realize that they have played with fischertechnik when they were little. When they see the stuff now, with the interface and all the computing stuff, they say: "I have to get this for my son...". Why do I not believe that it is for their children?

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The Coding4Foun Lounge is located in next in the Big Hall, next to the Partners Scenarios. So, have a break at take a look at the demos over here.

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We had to set up the demos already yesterday, and finally we got the sign you can see on the picture. Opening times of the Exhibiton Hall are

Tuesday, 9/13: 11:30 – 3pm; 6pm – 9pm
Wednesday, 9/14: 10:30am – 3:30pm
Thursday 9/15, 9:30am – 2:30pm

Rolf already got his chance to play with the robots over here yesterday. And he already asked when the stuff will be available for download. We are working on a library, based on the Visual Studio 2005 beta 2. So a finall version will be available of course with the final version of the .NET Framework 2.0.

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While preparing some demos to show cool stuff at PDC 05 I installed the hot new DirectX SDK Update August 2005 [1]. Unfortunately VS 2005 does not like the update. After starting my already testet applications using DirectInput an Exception occured. A LoaderLock was detected... what the heck?

Actually you can find something about this issue in the Visual C++ 2005 Library and Runtime Enhancements transcript [2]. Also Tone Engel has found this isue already and posted the solution in his blog [3].

Just set a new string value mda = "0"  under HKEY_LOCAL_MACINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework. Looks like it does not solve the problem, but at least the error message disapears.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en&categoryid=2
[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/transcripts/vstudio/vstudio_091604.aspx
[3] http://tonesnotes.org/2005/08/23/loaderlock-warning-2005-beta

If you have to use orften contracts in Microsoft Communication Foundatation aka Indigo, sometimes you become really bored by implementing all the interfaces. Visual Studio 2005 helps you saving a lot of time by choosing the interface your class inherits from. Using the Implement Interface menu item you will get all the methodes required by the interface.

IIS is not willing to start anymore. At least in the Microsoft Knowledge Base [1] you can find a hint for this problem. So first, I thought it could be all the beta WinFX and Indigo stuff, I have installed on my machine. Finally I found the reason: Skype grabed port 80. After closing Skype I was able to restart the IIS.

[1] http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;816944