Eric Rudder in Sofia

I just came from 2 meetings held today in the local Microsoft office. The purpose of the meetings was Eric Rudder(Microsoft Senior Vice President for the Developer Platform Evangelism Division) to meet with the local ISVs( in the first meeting)and with the local .NET User Group members(in the later one).
The atmosphere was informal and it was more like Q&A session. The second session (with the .NET User Group members) was more technical and it was really cool. I really enjoyed it! We had a little after party with a lot of technical P2P discussions.
The Q&As was mostly about the WCF. There was also a Bulgarian guy(George Kremenliev) from the WCF testing team, who gave us some additional interesting bits. I hope he will be able to make a session in front of the .NET User Group, soon.
Eric talked about the future of the MS technologies and answered tons of technical questions about the various TREE LETTER ACRONYMS and I think most of the guys there were excited to meet him.

Shortcuts – My Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget

I read a tutorial about building Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget and decided to try it myself. So this will be my first (and hopefully not the last) Windows Vista Sidebar Gadget – a gadget to display some usefull shortcuts.

The first problem I faced is the need to have a better knowledge on javascript. Fortunately, lately I ‘m working on a projects based on Atlas , so I ‘ve learned some basic javascript stuff. It would be even better if the Sidebar API was based on the Atlas client-side API – this is where I’ve invested a couple months digging into…Anyway, the second problem for me is the visual appearance of my gadget – I can’t do the design stuff, but anyway I’ve made some quick images with Paint.So here are the features in short:

• display a list of clickable shortcuts
  
• clicking over a shortcut, triggers execution of some shell command
  
• support for adding new shortcuts.
  
• support for deleting shortcuts
  

In general writing a gadget is similar to writing a web site with client-side scripting only – it contains HTML , CSS, JS, media, etc. So that’s how it looks like in the gadgets gallery:

After installing the gadget , it displays some default shortcuts

Only the last shortcut may be deleted – that is not quite user friendly , but it was easier for me :-)

Clicking on settings of the gadget provides dialog to add a new shortcut. The user may clear all shortcuts as well.

The gadget code may be downloaded from here. It is not completed in anyway and has some bugs as well. The zip file contains installation instructions.

There is a lot of room for improvements… but no time at all

The real value of the SecureString

I found recently an interesting blog dedicated mostly to security issues authored by a Security Development MVP named Valery.

Among the other intriguing posts, I found this post discussing the real value of the SecureString class

SQL Server 2005 Everywhere CTP is available

The Sql Server 2005 Everywhere Edition CTP is available for download
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Everywhere Edition offers essential relational database functionality in a compact footprint ideal for embedding in mobile and desktop applications including a new generation of occasionally connected dynamic applications.
Read more here
Download link

Unable to install Visual Stidio 2005 on Windows Vista Beta 2

I just tried to install VS2005 on my Vista Beta 2 box and received an error message saying that the setup process was terminated.

Few minutes googling and the solution was there: I just had to install msxml6 before proceeding with the VS2005 installation. And that may be done by launching the msxml6 installer from:

[DVD]\wcu\MSXML\msxml6.msi

Then I launched VS2005 installer again and everything was just fine.