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Posts from Doug Holland (Intel) 
 |
A "blue-badge" software engineer at Intel Corporation since March 2007, Doug Holland is part of the Intel Mobility group and is presently working within an advanced tools and development team with an emphasis on graphics performance. Doug Holland holds a Master's Degree in Software Engineering from Oxford University. Outside of work, Doug enjoys spending time with his wife and four children; and is also an officer in the Civil Air Patrol / U.S. Air Force Auxiliary. |
Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on July 18, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Comments (0)
I recently found an excellent five part series of articles on MSDN examining data structures and algorithm analysis using C# 2.0 and you can read the five part series here. Mark Allen Weiss has written several excellent books on data structures and algorithm analysis including Data Structures and Problem Solving Using Java and Data Structures and [...]
Category: Software Engineering, University Curriculum
C# 4.0: Meet the Design Team
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on July 11, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Comments (0)
Charlie Calvert today blogged about a video available from MSDN channel 9 where Anders Hejlsberg introduces the members of the C# 4.0 design team and provides us with a glimpse into some of the changes to the programming language in version 4.0. When the C# programming language made its debut in 2002 it was already a very [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Flying Full Circle - U.S. Navy Blue Angels
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on July 8, 2008 at 10:24 pm
Comments (0)
Some time ago I blogged about the aviation DVD One Six Right produced by Brian J. Terwilliger. Tonight I discovered that Brian has also made a 10 minute short movie detailing his experience taking an orientation flight with the U.S. Navy Blue Angels in an F-18 Hornet. If you have seen One Six Right then [...]
Category: Uncategorized
Sony Launches BD-Live Ready BDP-S350 Blu-Ray Player
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on July 8, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Comments (0)
If like me you've been waiting for a new BD-Live enabled blu-ray disc player then Sony has the answer with the new BDP-S350. The BDP-S350 supports true 1080p output and is compatible with Dolby TrueHD. Unlike the majority of the previous generation of blu-ray players, the BDP-S350 features an Ethernet connection to enable BD-Live features as [...]
Category: Uncategorized
Thoughts After Installing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V RTM
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on July 3, 2008 at 8:16 am
Comments (0)
Once Microsoft released to manufacturing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V on June 26, 2008 it wasn't long before I upgraded the beta installation that I have been using for a month or two. Setup of Hyper-V is as simple as adding an additional role to Windows Server 2008 and the following screen shots describe the process in [...]
Category: Software Engineering, Virtualization
Windows Server 2008 Desktop Experience - DVD and Blu-Ray Playback?
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on July 1, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Comments (2)
As some of you might have noticed from some of the previous blog posts I have written on the release of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the configuration of Windows Server 2008 as an aero-enabled workstation, or dual booting Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008, I have now been using Windows Server 2008 as the primary OS on [...]
Category: Software Engineering, Virtualization
Virtualization for the Software Engineer - One Year Later
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on July 1, 2008 at 10:23 am
Comments (2)
A year ago I blogged about how virtualization was becoming an increasingly pervasive technology within the software engineering community. At that time I had began using a workstation based upon the Intel D975XBX2 motherboard and the Intel® Core™2 Extreme Edition QX6700 processor. With the 64-bit version of Window Server 2008 and the newly released Hyper-V [...]
Category: Software Engineering, Virtualization
Determining if an assembly was built using Release or Debug mode?
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 28, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Comments (0)
Sometimes you find yourself wondering if an assembly was compiled with or without the /debug compiler option, in the case of the C# compiler. In essence this can be determined through the IsJITTrackingEnabled property of the DebuggableAttribute class as the following code demonstrates: private static bool DebugBuild(Assembly assembly) { foreach (object attribute in assembly.GetCustomAttributes(false)) { if (attribute [...]
Category: Software Engineering
ADO.NET Entity Framework - Disturbance in the Force?
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 26, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Comments (0)
Do I detect a disturbance in the force? After reading a blog post by Murray Gordon, an ISV architecture evangelist for Microsoft, it appears that several people are expressing concerns with the ADO.NET Entity Framework. According to the blog post by Murray there are currently 156 people who have signed the vote of no confidence and [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Windows Communication Foundation Diagnostics
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 26, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Comments (0)
On occasion even the best developers must diagnose issues within their code and with distributed applications this can be a challenging prospect. The Windows Communication Foundation provides extensive tracing that can be enabled within the application domain configuration file (e.g. the App.config or Web.config of your application). WCF builds upon the tracing capabilities found within the [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft Hyper-V Released to Manufacturing
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 26, 2008 at 11:20 am
Comments (3)
Microsoft today released to manufacturing the Hyper-V virtualization solution for Windows Server 2008. You can read more about the release on the virtualization blog. Updates will be available through Windows Update beginning on July 8th. Links to the download sites can be found on John Howard's blog. Incidentally, Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet websites have been virtualized [...]
Category: Software Engineering, Virtualization
Secondary Drowning & Infant Swimming Resource
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 18, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Comments (2)
It still amazes me that prior to heaing about the following incident of secondary drowning, I personally had never heard of the phenomenon. If you are a parent of a child who swims in a pool at home, or maybe swims at a friend's house, I would encourage you to be aware of the phenomenon [...]
Category: Uncategorized
SQL Server: To convert to Numeric, or not to convert to Numeric, that is the question...
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 10, 2008 at 8:32 am
Comments (2)
Yesterday myself and two other members of my team thought that we had found a bug in the SQL Server engine which is not something you typically do on any given day. What had happened was that the varchar value of '.' was tested using the IsNumeric function which indicated that the varchar value of [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Introducing SQL Server 2008 (Free eBook)
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 10, 2008 at 6:42 am
Comments (3)
Microsoft Press is offering a free eBook of the forthcoming Introducing SQL Server 2008 by Peter DeBetta and the first chapter today on Policy-based Management.
Category: Software Engineering
SQL Server 2008 Reaches RC0 Milestone
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 5, 2008 at 10:30 pm
Comments (0)
During this week's Microsoft TechEd 2008 Developers conference in Orlando, FL the Microsoft SQL Server team quietly reached the release candidate zero milestone with an initial upload of the binaries to MVP's and TAP program participants on Microsoft Connect on June 4th. Once the build had been declared as release candidate zero then the binaries [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft "Velocity" Distributed Cache
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 5, 2008 at 5:43 am
Comments (4)
Microsoft has announced the availability of a CTP of a forthcoming distributed cache technology that is currently known as Velocity. Using Velocity clients can be different machines or processes and access the cache as though it were a local cache when in fact the cache is distributed across one or more cache hosts. The Velocity [...]
Category: Software Engineering
DVP201 Best Practices for Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 4, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Comments (0)
If you are here at the Microsoft TechEd 2008 Developers Conference I would highly recommend attending tomorrow's session by Joel Semeniuk. The session is entitled DVP201 Best Practices for Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and the session will be happening in S320E from 4:30 PM - 5:45 PM. I personally attended this session [...]
Category: Software Engineering
TLA203 Microsoft Visual Studio Team System: Today and Tomorrow
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 4, 2008 at 10:15 am
Comments (0)
Brian Harry, Technical Fellow Developer Division, followed up his keynote presentation with a discussion on Team System as it stands today and what we can expect tomorrow. In the team that I work with at Intel we write applications that exercise the graphics chipset and the associated driver. Building the driver isn't a trivial task and [...]
Category: Software Engineering
DVP203 Applying Feature-Driven Development Techniques to Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 3, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Comments (0)
Joel Semeniuk did it again, knocking the ball out of the park with an excellent discussion on feature-driven development using the Visual Studio Team System. Joel began by mentioning some good resources on feature-driven development and he highly recommended A Practical Guide to Feature-Driven Development by Stephen R. Palmer and John M. Felsing. Joel described a [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft TechEd 2008 Developers Conference - Doug Holland meets Robo-Steve
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 3, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Comments (0)
After this morning's keynote speeches where Bill Gates was presented with a life time subscription of XBox Live by Robo-Steve (see previous blog post), I decided to ask Robo-Steve how I myself might one day achieve such an accolade. Unfortunately Robo-Steve indicated that no XBox live lifetime subscription would be coming my way just yet, guess [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft TechEd 2008 Developers Conference Keynote
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 3, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Comments (4)
During the keynote speech this morning of the TechEd 2008 Developers conference, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates reflected on the company's 33 years as the world's premier software developer, with over 5000 software developers in attendance to learn about how they can best leverage today's technologies while gaining insight into future technologies. During the speech Bill [...]
Category: Software Engineering
sp_change_users_login
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 30, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Comments (0)
Often it is necessary to backup SQL Server databases and restore them on another server, before the release of SQL Server 2005 this could be complicated by the fact that the SID's for the associated user accounts were not synchronized through the backup and restore process. I Today using SQL Server 2005 after you backup a [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Windows 7 Multi-Touch
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 30, 2008 at 11:38 am
Comments (0)
Windows 7 appears to have support for new user interface capabilities found in today's Apple iPhone. Check out a video of an early Windows 7 build demonstrating these capabilities on the Windows Vista blog or directly here: Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7
Category: Software Engineering
PDC2008 Professional Developers Conference
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 29, 2008 at 7:41 am
Comments (1)
Microsoft has recently announced that the Professional Developers Conference (PDC2008) will be held in Los Angeles, CA from October 27 through October 30 2008. Registration for the conference is now live and you can save $200 with the early bird discount. Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, will be delivering one of the keynote speeches at [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft TechEd 2008
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 28, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Comments (2)
Okay its not the count down to the launch of the space shuttle although at last years Microsoft TechEd we rushed from the conference on Friday afternoon to see Atlantis launch into space and what an experiance that was. Even if we don't get to experiance a NASA launch day this year, Microsoft TechEd promises [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Managing Software Projects - Sacramento .NET Users Group
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 28, 2008 at 10:14 am
Comments (1)
We had a great turn out last night at the Sacramento .NET Users Group where I dicussed Visual Studio 2008 and the Windows Communication Foundation. After I presented the main discussion we also spent some time discussing several issues facing developers industry wide and an interesting debate ensued about managing distributed software projects. While attending the Microsoft [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Sacramento .NET Users Group
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 27, 2008 at 9:44 am
Comments (0)
I'll be presenting tonight at the Sacramento .NET Users Group and it would be great to see you there if you're able to come along. We'll be discussing the release of Visual Studio 2008 along with the main discussion which will introduce the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to those .NET developers who are not presently familiar [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft Source Analysis for C#
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 23, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Comments (3)
Microsoft today released the Microsoft Source Analysis for C# plugin for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. Originally known internally within Microsoft by the name StyleCop, Source Analysis for C# is designed to enforce more than 200 style best practices for the C# developer. Once installed the source analysis capabilities are available from either the [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Undergraduate / Graduate Debugging Courses
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 22, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Comments (2)
I'm presently reading Debugging Microsoft .NET 2.0 Applications by John Robbins and it occurred to me that almost all of us who write software for a living have never had any college courses on the art of debugging. As John Robbins discusses in the opening sections of the book, this might be in part because [...]
Category: Software Engineering, University Curriculum
Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 - ADO.NET Entity Framework
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 21, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Comments (1)
Microsoft this month released the SP1 beta for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 although after installing this beta some days ago I have to agree with others in the blogosphere that this service pack in many ways represents a new version of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework. While attending the [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft Hyper-V RC1 Available
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 21, 2008 at 9:47 am
Comments (0)
Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 operating system shipped with the RC0 build of the forthcoming virtualization hypervisor known as Hyper-V. Today, Microsoft has made available the RC1 milestone which can be downloaded from the Virtualization Team Blog. It seems its time to put those quad-core processors to work!!! I'll blog again with my experiance upgrading the Windows [...]
Category: Manageability, Multicore, Software Engineering, Virtualization
Microsoft World Wide Telescope
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 20, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Comments (2)
Once in a while the Internet yields software that demonstrates the true potential of the interconnected world within which we live, work, and play. Microsoft Research recently released the World Wide Telescope which has the potential to enable "citizen scientists to participate in research" according to Doug Roberts, director of the Adler Space Visualization Laboratory. With [...]
Category: Graphics, Software Engineering
Windows XP SP3 Available
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 14, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Comments (0)
Microsoft has recently made available Windows XP Service Pack 3 for download. The latest service pack can also be installed through Windows Update as well as through an available .iso image which can then be burned to CD or DVD. An overview of the service pack can be downloaded from here.
Category: Uncategorized
C# 2.0 Data Structures
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 11, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Comments (1)
Anyone who has taken a formal college education in computer science or software engineering will have most likely taken a class entitled "Data Structures". When I took this class in 1994 these concepts were presented using the Modula-2 programming language and then we moved on to using the C programming language. Soon after that I took an advanced [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2008
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 7, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Comments (0)
I just found a website for the Microsoft Architect Insight Conference 2008 that just concluded in the UK on April 29th and the slides for the architecture conference are now available here. I guess Microsoft didn't evangelize this conference much outside of the UK. It would be interesting for Microsoft to hold such a conference here [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Download .NET Framework Source Code
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 5, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Comments (0)
On January 16th 2008 Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2008 can be configured to download the source code for the .NET Framework to enable an improved debugging experiance. Shawn Burk has a great post about configuring Visual Studio 2008 to download .NET source code here. Unfortunately, the only way to get the source code for the [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Windows Vista Component Services
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on April 30, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Comments (0)
Today, while debugging C# code that uses System.Transactions for scope management, I recieved the following exception message. Network access for Distributed Transaction Manager (MSDTC) has been disabled. Please enable DTC for network access in the security configuration for MSDTC using the Component Services Administrative tool. So, as the message indicated, I went looking for the Component Services [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Debugging .NET Framework Source Code
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on April 29, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Comments (1)
I'm currently debugging some issues with an application written against the .NET Framework version 3.0 and today I found an interesting blog post by Shawn Burke where he describes how to configure Visual Studio 2008 to allow the debugger to step into the source for the .NET Framework itself!!! If, like me, you find yourself debugging [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Electronic Paperbacks and Newspapers?
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on April 28, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Comments (12)
I'm wondering how many of you would be willing to put aside the paperback book that you are reading in the evening and instead pickup an electronic book such as the Amazon Kindle? In some respects we've had electronic books for a while now and these new dedicated electronic reading devices are merely taking us to the next level. In the past few [...]
Category: Uncategorized
Windows Account Management using the .NET Framework 3.5
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on April 28, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Comments (2)
While looking into some security coding that I knew I'd be working on in the coming few days I found an interesting new assembly which shipped with the .NET Framework 3.5: System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement Within this assembly are some types that simplify many tasks that have taken considerably more code to achieve in previous versions of the .NET Framework, [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Intel® Desktop Board D5400XS @ Amazon.Com
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on April 21, 2008 at 10:24 am
Comments (4)
In my previous blog post, where I introduced you to the amazing new Intel D5400XS desktop board which features a dual-socket capability allowing you to use two quad core processors within your system, several of you commented about the boards intial availability. Well I'm happy to now tell you that this morning when looked for the board [...]
Category: Gaming, Multicore, Software Engineering, Virtualization
One Six Right - Wanna go fly?
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on April 16, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Comments (0)
Okay now that I've got your attention with those words "wanna go fly?", this blog post is a little different than any of the other posts I've written here, in that it is the first of many where I'll introduce you to a passion of mine, flying. Today I'll be taking a Cessna 172 from Sacramento Executive airport, [...]
Category: Uncategorized
Microsoft TechEd 2008
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on April 15, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Comments (0)
I just completed my registration for Microsoft's TechEd 2008 developers conference which will be held again in Orlando, FL. One major difference this year is that the conference has now been extended from one week to two weeks with the first week dedicated to developers and the second week to IT professionals. Apparently, Microsoft TechEd [...]
Category: Events, Software Engineering
Microsoft Visual C# Keybindings Poster
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on April 3, 2008 at 9:39 am
Comments (0)
While attending the last few Microsoft TechEd and Microsoft PDC conferences, Karen Liu has presented an excellent session on the Visual C# environment and the many keybindings that can accelerate common tasks within the IDE. If you're attending TechEd this year then keep an eye out for Karen's session as I'm sure she'll be doing [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft MIX 2008, IE 8.0 and Silverlight 2.0
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on March 5, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Comments (2)
Today at MIX 2008, Microsoft's Web designer and developer conference, Microsoft announced several new technologies that promise to bring about richer, more interactive content on the Web. Announced at the conference were Internet Explorer 8.0 which is available today in its first public beta release, Silverlight 2.0, Expression Studio 2.0. Microsoft also a preview of SQL [...]
Category: Graphics, Software Engineering
Got DirectX 10.1?
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on February 28, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Comments (8)
With most Windows Vista users still using the original RTM version of the operating system there is much speculation within the blogosphere regarding Windows Vista SP1, not to mention the revision to the DirectX API's in version 10.1. DirectX 10.0 shipped with Windows Vista and required DirectX 10 compatible graphics cards along with DirectX 10.0 drivers [...]
Category: Graphics, Software Engineering
Dual Boot Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on February 26, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Comments (7)
After researching how to enable Aero on the Windows Server 2008 desktop (see previous blog post) I proceeded to install Windows Server 2008 onto the third hard drive within a desktop computer that currently has Windows Vista running on the first two disks within a RAID configuration. Windows Server 2008 installed without an issue however upon [...]
Category: Manageability, Software Engineering, Virtualization
Intel® Desktop Board D5400XS
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on February 21, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Comments (12)
Working at Intel it takes a little more before I say "WOW" about a technology, however today we announced that Intel codename SkullTrail is now simply known as the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform. Central to this platform is the Intel® Desktop Board D5400XS which supports two processors providing upto eight processing cores along [...]
Category: Gaming, Graphics, Software Engineering, Virtualization
Toshiba May Pull Plug On HD DVD Video Format
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on February 18, 2008 at 11:59 am
Comments (3)
FoxNews.com is reporting the Toshiba may pull the plug on their HD-DVD video format which has been competing against the Sony Blu-Ray format for some time now. According to the FoxNews.com article, "On Friday, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the largest U.S. retailer, said it will sell only Blu-ray DVDs and hardware and no longer carry HD DVD [...]
Category: Gaming, Graphics, Software Engineering
Microsoft's 'D' Textual Modeling Language
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on February 15, 2008 at 10:10 am
Comments (1)
It appears that our friends in Redmond are cooking up a new programming language that is currently codenamed 'D'. It has been referred to as a textual modeling language and Becky Nagel and Mary Jo Foley have details on the project.
Category: Software Engineering
Windows Server 2008 "Aero Enabled" Workstation Edition
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on February 12, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Comments (29)
Last week Dell shipped me a new Vostro 1700 notebook which I promptly upgraded from Windows Vista Business edition to Windows Server 2008. In this blog post I'll show you how to setup Windows Server 2008 in a Workstation configuration. Windows Server 2008 installed without an issue although I could not find out how to install [...]
Category: Intel® Software Network 2.0, Software Engineering
Microsoft Ships Windows Server 2008 / Vista SP1
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on February 4, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Comments (0)
Today Microsoft released to manufacturing both the Windows Server 2008 operating system and the SP1 update to the Windows Vista client. Microsoft will however delay the release of the service pack to mid-March to allow some third-parties and Microsoft time to resolve driver issues that beta testers have reported since installing pre-release builds of the [...]
Category: Manageability, Software Engineering, Virtualization
Windows Server 2008 will RTM Next Week...
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on February 1, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Comments (0)
According to a Microsoft insider, Windows Server 2008 will RTM next week on February 6th, 2008. Margie Semilof, Senior News Director of www.SearchWinIT.com, reports that all Windows Server 2008 SKU's will RTM next week aside from those that include Microsoft's new Hyper-V hypervisor virtualization technology. Although it will likely be sometime before Windows Server 2008 becomes [...]
Category: Manageability, Software Engineering, Virtualization
CodePlex.Diagnostics
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on January 30, 2008 at 9:53 am
Comments (0)
Someone once asked the question, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Well, that got me thinking a couple of years ago about exceptions within software that we design, develop, or even merely rely upon ourselves. The leason learned though has little to [...]
Category: Manageability, Open Source, Software Engineering
Microsoft Delays SQL Server 2008 Release
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on January 29, 2008 at 9:50 am
Comments (0)
Microsoft had been planning on formally releasing Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 on February 27 in Los Angeles however it seems now that SQL Server 2008 will not RTM until Q3 2008. The Data Platform Insider has more details.
Category: Software Engineering
CLR via C#
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on January 28, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Comments (0)
If there is one .NET book that I find myself coming back to on a regular basis, even after reading it from cover to cover twice, it is Jeff Richter's CLR via C#. If you want to truly understand what goes on within the Common Language Runtime when, for example, you create a new thread, [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Windows Forms MessageBoxOptions Enumeration
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on January 16, 2008 at 10:59 am
Comments (0)
In a Windows Forms based application I'm developing here at Intel I was observing some strange behavior that at first really perplexed me as to the cause. Within the applicaton the user is often prompted to confirm a WCF service operation before the service operation is performed such as the deletion of some database entries. If [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Free ISO Burning Software for Windows Vista
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on November 20, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Comments (9)
Today I came across a small utility that successfully burns .iso images to CD or DVD on Windows Vista x86 and x64. Given that even commercially available software is still slow to provide x64 versions it was a really pleasant surprise that Alex Feinman has provided downloads of ISO Recorder v3 for both versions of [...]
Category: Uncategorized
Debugging Unexpected Exceptions
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on November 19, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Comments (1)
Occassionally while writing debugging code within Visual Studio we run into unexpected exception such as the System.NullReferenceException shown in the following screen shot. The question then becomes how do we debug the exception within the Visual Studio Immediate window because we did not assign the exception object to a variable within a try catch block. Actually [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Visual Studio 2008 / .NET Framework 3.5 RTM
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on November 19, 2007 at 11:08 am
Comments (0)
It only seems like yesterday that Visual Studio 2005 went RTM along with the .NET Framework 2.0, since then we have also seen the release of the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 which added WCF, WF, and Windows Cardspace. Today however, Microsoft released to manufacturing Visual Studio 2008 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. Soma of course [...]
Category: Uncategorized
Visual Studio 2008 RTM Next Week
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on November 16, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Comments (1)
According to the MSDN Subscriptions WebLog the Visual Studio 2008 RTM build will be available on MSDN subscriber downloads sometime next week, and considering next week is Thanksgiving that must mean that it will RTM sometime before the end of day Wednesday. Microsoft's Corporate Vice President - Developer Division, S. "Soma" Somasegar, announced the availability of [...]
Category: Uncategorized
Microsoft Outlook 2009 - Meeting Defragmentation
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on November 13, 2007 at 9:06 am
Comments (0)
With peer-to-peer networking technologies what I think would be an awesome capability in the next version of Microsoft Outlook, say version 2009 hypothetically, would be the ability to automate what I'll call meeting defragmentation. If Outlook knew what the calendars of my family, friends, and co-workers were then maybe it could defragment our calendars such that meetings [...]
Category: Uncategorized
C# Partial Types and Partial Methods
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on November 12, 2007 at 2:20 pm
Comments (0)
With the release of Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 came the introduction of the partial keyword to the C# programming language. With Visual Studio 2005 it became possible to distribute the declaration of a type across multiple source files. Code generation techniques provided the inspiration behind this technique given the fragility of [...]
Category: Software Engineering
WCF Services - Impersonation
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on November 2, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Comments (0)
Yesterday I was discussing some aspects of .NET security and how it relates to WCF services, someone asked an interesting question regarding the impersonation of the user calling a WCF service. Let's assume that you've created a Windows Service that is installed upon a middle-tier application server, and that Windows Service is running as Local [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Validation of Windows Forms
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on October 12, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Comments (4)
It never ceases to amaze me how many wonderful classes are right there for us to use within the .NET Framework, and I'm still discovering types that have been there since version 1.x let alone types added to the framework with version 2.0 or 3.0. In recent years I've spent considerably more time working on middle-tier [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Greg the Architect
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on July 27, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Comments (0)
I just stumbled upon the Greg the Architect website which if you're at all involved with software development then I'm sure you'll find fairly amusing.
Category: Intel® Software Network 2.0, Software Engineering
Virtualization for the Software Engineer
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 16, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Comments (8)
Virtualization is well on its way to becoming a pervasive technology and initially I was somewhat skeptical with respect to the effect this would have on software engineers within their development environments. I could certainly see the effect this would have with respect to our production environments. The number of physical server machines placed into the [...]
Category: Intel® Software Network 2.0, Multicore, Software Engineering
Microsoft Silverlight at the British Library
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 12, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Comments (2)
You have probably heard of the Microsoft Silverlight project which aims to provide a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in enabling the next generation of media experiences on the Web. An interesting example of the capabilities of Silverlight is the Turning the Pages 2.0 application at the British Library. I'll hopefully be blogging more about the impact Silverlight will have on Web-based [...]
Category: Software Engineering
TechEd 2007 - LNC09 The Microsoft Certified Architect Program
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 12, 2007 at 11:34 am
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On Wednesday last week, Sondra Webber of Microsoft introduced several existing MCA's in an open discussion on the Microsoft Certified Architect program. According to Sondra, Microsoft was asked by many of the fortune 100 companies to produce a certification process for software architects, such that these companies can truly evaluate the quality of the people [...]
Category: Software Engineering, University Curriculum
TechEd 2007 - DEV309 Team Development Best Practices
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 11, 2007 at 3:08 pm
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When attending conferences such as Microsoft's TechEd 2007, I usually return with a single statement that I heard during the conference ringing in my ears. At Microsoft TechEd 2007 that statement was uttered by Joel Semeniuk who co-authored Managing Projects with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. Just as the statements that echoed in my ears [...]
Category: Software Engineering, University Curriculum
Microsoft TechEd 2007 - Attendee Party
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 7, 2007 at 7:58 pm
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This year's attendee party was held at Universal's Islands of Adventure and wow what a lot of fun that was and I'm really going to have to bring my family back here sometime soon. I know one of my daughter's would have really loved the Spiderman ride which combines a cool ride with lots of [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 - codename "Katmai"
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 7, 2007 at 12:58 pm
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During the Microsoft TechEd conference, Microsoft has been demonstrating some of the features of the SQL Server codename "Katmai". You can download a CTP build of "Katmai" and there is also a whitepaper from Microsoft explaining the many additions to the platform that you can expect within SQL Server 2008 when it releases next year. [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Microsoft TechEd 2007 - Blast from the Past...
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on June 4, 2007 at 7:15 pm
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This morning's keynote for the Microsoft TechEd 2007 conference opened in Orlando FL with Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President of the Microsoft Server and Tools business. Bob was accompanied by Christopher Lloyd, from the Back to the Future fame, along with the obligatory 1980's Delorian fully equipped with the Flux Capacitor. After a brief, but very [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Trustworthy Computing - Microsoft TechEd 2007 Bloggers Breakfast
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 29, 2007 at 7:57 am
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It only seems like yesterday that I was attending the Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference in Boston MA and now I'm just under T minus one week before I fly to Orlando FL for Microsoft's TechEd 2007. At the 2006 conference I was fortunate enough to be invited to the first TechEd Bloggers Breakfast in which Microsoft's CIO [...]
Category: Software Engineering
Say Goodbye to Courier New within Visual Studio 2005
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 25, 2007 at 12:47 pm
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Tired of using the age old Courier New font for coding? Well, Microsoft now provides a new Consolas font which installs itself as the default font within Visual Studio 2005 and will also be the default font within Visual Studio codename "Orcas" which is currently in beta. Sean Lareree within the Visual Studio Editor's blog cautions that [...]
Category: Software Engineering
new BlueBadge("Doug Holland").CreateBlog();
By Doug Holland (Intel) (76 posts) on May 25, 2007 at 11:26 am
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Welcome to my new blog at softwareblogs.intel.com where I'll be posting about all things related to software engineering, with a particular emphasis on the C# programming language and the Microsoft .NET platform in general. You're probably wondering who I am? I'm a "blue-badge" software engineer at Intel Corporation since March 2007, and today I'm part of the Intel [...]