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Hey folks. After a good amount of time away, I have decided to come back to game development land. This time, I will continue work on my game Spaceballs (a Geometry Wars clone), only using XNA this time around. I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but to give myself time to do this, I have even canceled my World of Warcraft account (again). I just have way too much stuff on my plate, and if I want to get back into game development, something has to go (thanks go to Chris and George for encouraging ......
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the “Feature Of The Week” newsletter. In this week’s newsletter, we will continue on the “Transactions Bandwagon” by discussing the Transactional Registry. This newsletter will be short and sweet as, truth be told, this feature still needs to have a bit more documentation than it has today. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the Longhorn Server Feature Of The Week! What is the Transactional Registry? The Transactional Registry (TxR) is an enhancement to the Registry ......
Yay, I can finally talk about this. For those of you that haven't heard yet, the incomparable Rory Blyth, the smartest man, is joining the C9 team. Rory is going to make a GREAT addition to the C9 team and I expect to see some great stuff coming from him in the future. Of course, I'm also psyched because it means that he will most likely be working just one or two hallways away from me :). Congrats Rory ......
Hello everyone, and welcome to the second installment of the “Feature Of The Week” newsletter. This week, we will take a short little peek at a feature coming in Vista and Longhorn Server called Remote Differential Compression. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the Longhorn Server Feature Of The Week! What is Remote Differential Compression? Remote Differential Compression (RDC) allows applications to synchronize data between two computers in an efficient manner. The synchronization efficiency is made ......
Hello everyone, and welcome to the “Feature Of The Week” newsletter. In the Feature Of The Week Newsletter, we visit a new feature coming in Longhorn Server every week. The goal is that these are nice, short, and efficient to minimize the amount of effort required by you, the reader. With every Feature Of The Week, we will provide links to more resources in case you want to spend more time diving into the feature covered. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the Longhorn Server Feature Of The Week! What ......
I am starting a new category/feature on this blog. It is something that I've started to do internally and I hope to share with all of you :). The feature is called the Longhorn Server Feature of the Week. Every Friday, I will talk about a new/enhanced feature coming with Vista or Longhorn Server. They will be nice, short, and sweet. The goal is to make them short so that it doesn't take hardly time at all to read it, and will provide links to follow up on if you want to do some more investigation ......
For those of you that semi-regularly follow this blog, you may or may not have noticed that I've really been getting into OS Development lately. Of course, the first step is brushing up on x86 assembly language. Outside of that, it's a lot of Research, Research, Research, and more Research. Heck, even if it's not research, I just finished the book "Just For Fun", about Linus Torvalds (very enjoyable read, IMO). One of the specific topics that has really excited me is the Virtual Machine Monitor architecture ......
Howdy all y'all. I'm hoping to get some feedback from all of you. Basically, I'm hoping to get a "reader's braindump" on what development features you are looking forward to most in Vista/Longhorn Server. So, what development features are you looking forward to most in Vista/Longhorn Server? Feel free to just leave a comment (nice and easy-like) :).
For anyone that has had to boot Windows into debug mode to do some digging around (like remote Kernel Debugging), things have changed. In the past, you could open up boot.ini in the root of the system volume, and add a "/debug" flag to the Windows OS record of choice. One of the things you might notice with Vista is that boot.ini is now gone, solid gone. So, with boot.ini gone, how do you boot into debug mode? It is done with a new tool called "bcdedit". In the root of the system volume, you'll notice ......
Before I joined the ranks at Microsoft, a hobby I started to take up was Operating System development. Technically, I didn't get very far yet (I had just started). My "kernel" (if you can even call it that) basically just printed "Hello World" to the screen. But heck, it was booting up from a floppy, loading the kernel into memory, and executing to do that (in a VM of course, I wouldn't even dare run my hobby OS on an actual machine :P). ... (Read More) ......
It's moments like these that make me proud to be a Microsoft employee. Here's an excerpt: Students have scheduled appointments with teachers, typed into their online calendars, instead of being limited to structured times for classes. Their laptops carry software that assesses how quickly they're learning the lesson. If they get it, they'll dive deeper into the subject. If not, they get remedial help. Lessons will have more incorporation of current events to teach subjects. For instance, a question ......
I'll be updating this post over time to reflect new resources that are made available regarding the transactions platform in Windows. Websites: [Transactions] Transactions Programming Forum - MSDN [Transactions] Transaction Management in Windows - Microsoft.com [TxF] TxF Documentation - MSDN Blogs: ... (Read More) ......
After my post the other day linking out to a post about authoring file systems on Linux with Mono, I decided that I wanted to try it out myself. So, I went and grabbed the latest Ubuntu, and sojourned out to install it under Virtual PC 2004. I remember trying to do this 6-12 months ago and having it fail _miserably_ for me (or most of the Linux distros for that matter) when trying to install under Virtual PC 2004. Eventually, I just gave up. Now that I have a little more knowledge on Linux and virtual ......
While I'm on the topic of Transaction resources out there, I might as well give a more detailed list. Just off the top of my head, here's the resources you should definitely be checking out if you want to get into transactions on the Windows platform (or even if you are already using transactions on the Windows platform): Microsoft Sites: Transactions Programming Forum on MSDN Transaction Management in Windows Blogs: Jim Johnson Florin Lazar Well, and I hope, me :). If I have left out any obvious ......
I came across this article today by Sahil Malik. If you are wanting to get up to speed with System.Transactions in general, as well as how it integrates with ADO.NET, make sure to check it out. He also covers some general concepts regarding transactions as well. So, if you are wanting to understand and be able to explain concepts like Transaction Managers, Resource Managers, Durable Enlistments, etc., also make sure to read it :). Enjoy ......
Jim Johnson has a new post about how to use TxF with the new model in Vista RC1. You will obviously need the RC1 bits to mess around with it. I'm hoping to expand on this topic in the future to show some code samples of using it not only by itself, but also using it with SQL and the like. I'll also have some "context" posts around that describing the architecture and relationships around TxF so you can better understand the articles. Unil then, go check out Jim's post :) ......
I know, this post isn't exactly Windows-related, but I thought it was cool nonetheless... Miguel de Icaza recently posted on his blog on the topic of authoring file systems with Mono on Linux. Since I've been digging into File System "stuff" at work lately dealing with TxF and the like, I find this very intriguing. With FUSE, you can essentially write user-level file systems that can be mounted in Linux. Not only that, Jon Pryor released a bridge for Mono that can be used to write file systems in ......