.NET 7 is coming soon alongside C# 11. It’s possible to take a look at some of the new features now, including the bang bang (!!) operator and List patterns, which I think are really cool. Here is a video on the topic:

I recently came across an interesting issue where after starting a new ASP.NET Core 5.0 .NET 5 project using the “ASP.NET Core Web App (Model-View-Controller)” template did not include the ability to update .cshtml Razor files without recompiling and restarting the whole app. There is a checkbox to “Enable Razor Runtime Compilation” during project setup but it’s easy to miss and tricky to add afterwards if you don’t know what you are looking for.

I’ve recently ended up needing to ask if the user really wants to navigate away from a page in my Xamarin app, Net Writer. Essentially whilst a post is being edited I don’t want the user to accidentally lose their progress, necessitating the need to inject a “Are you sure?” or “Confirm exit” prompt when the user presses either the Android hardware or OS level back button or the back button on the navigation bar provided by the Xamarin Forms Shell.

I’m working on porting Net Writer from UWP to Android using Xamarin Forms. The Google authentication is a little bit tricky as it is constantly changing. Working off this amazing blog post by Timothé Larivière got me 90% of the way there but there are some updates to the process in 2020. Pre-requisites to register an app with Google At this point in time you’ll need to do the following before you can register a Public app:

Assume we want to automatically show the version number of your app in your UI, for example, the settings page or elsewhere. Your version number will normally be updated by your CI/CD system (updating Package.appxmanifest for UWP and AndroidManifest.xml for an Android Xamarin app). Create a property to bind to ViewModels and how they bind to your UI are out of scope for this post (as you’ll have already got this far).

I’ve published version 1.0.0 of a new open source package and a corresponding nuget package – CoreAdmin.CoreAdmin adds a nice set of CRUD screens to your .NET Core web app in one line of code! Adding CoreAdmin to your app Given a typical Startup.cs file, you will have a ConfigureServices method. You need to add the line services.AddCoreAdmin() somewhere near the bottom (at least after you register your Entity Framework DbContexts).

I came across an interesting issue updating my UWP app to Visual Studio 2019 and a new Azure DevOps pipeline. “Associate with Store” no longer adds password-less PFX files named *TemporaryKey.pfx and *StoreKey.pfx to your project to sign your store submissions – instead in VS2019 it now adds the certificates to your local user store only. Which means when it comes to build, you get errors like C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v15.

Update December 2016: Apple has released a new version of the MacBook Pro featuring the new Touch Bar feature. I do not recommend buying this model. Worse battery life Worse keyboard Touch Bar feature is pretty useless for Bootcamp or virtualization – you will miss the usual function keys USB-C only. Expect to spend 100s on adapters. The original Bootcamp drivers actually physically blew the speakers when running Windows Luckily Apple still sell the 2015 model without Touch Bar.

I’ve picked up a Microsoft Surface RT from the “temporary” New York Times Square Microsoft Store. While the purchasing experience was a bit of a mess (untrained sales staff – I ended up having to type my own details into their POS terminal as I’m not quite sure the guy knew how to type), I managed to make off with a properly boxed (I skipped getting the staff to unbox it and walk me through the “Out of Box Experience”) 32GB Surface, Type Cover and VGA adapter.

I’ve got the Microsoft Money style cashflow chart going with the flot library and some massaging of ASP.NET MVC 3 to output JSON. The chart correctly predicts future cashflow based on your set bills and future transactions. Next up is multiple accounts and currencies at once.

I am finally fed up of having to install Microsoft Money and set up syncing of the data file, so I’ve decided to try and build a web based version. Mint.com does not support non-US markets and apparently does not even support adding your own transactions that have not been downloaded from a bank. “Private Money” is the codename and it looks a bit like this at the moment: The stack:

Microsoft have now released an update to ASP.NET MVC3 imaginatively called “ASP.NET MVC3 Update”. This update upgrades NuGet, bundles Entity Framework 4.1 with all new templates, adds HTML5 template support and splits the jQuery libraries off into NuGet packages so they can be upgraded individually. The bundling with new MVC projects is a sign that Microsoft has selected Entity Framework as the “chosen” ORM layer from now on. Linq2SQL is not flexible enough when dealing with pre-existing database schemas and third party solutions such NHibernate are difficult to get pointy-haired boss approval.

I use Windows at work so for some variety I have moved to a Mac at home. The 2010 Mac Mini is a decent little machine with the RAM upgraded to 4GB. For Windows development you need Visual Studio, which means running Windows on your Mac. Bootcamp is one way of doing this, but then you lose all the benefits of OSX as your host OS. The secret is of course Parallels Desktop which allows you to run Windows virtualized on your Mac.

Just to hammer the point home about how important it is to upgrade to .NET 4.0 if you are using WPF, here are some comparison screenshots of the text rendering in WPF 3.5 and 4.0: Pay attention to the difference between the text rendering on lines 2 and 3. Line 2 shows the new Display formatting mode available in WPF 4.0. This renders the text the same way as the rest of Windows – the shape of the font is distorted so that lines fall on pixel boundaries.

Much noise has been made about Evernote’s new Windows client. For version 4, they dropped WPF/.NET and released a C++ native application. They were pretty damning with their reasoning: Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.

Update 19th August 2015: Apple have released Bootcamp 6, which fixes all of the below when using Windows 10. If you already have Bootcamp 5 installed, run the Apple Software Update utility to get the latest set of drivers. The only oddity I’ve had with Bootcamp 6 is that is resets your DPI scaling to 200%. Windows 10 on Bootcamp (Macbook Pro 13 inch, Bootcamp 5.1) has some teething issues as of build 10162.

Update December 2016: Apple has released a new version of the MacBook Pro featuring the new Touch Bar feature. I do not recommend buying this model. Worse battery life Worse keyboard Touch Bar feature is pretty useless for Bootcamp or virtualization – you will miss the usual function keys USB-C only. Expect to spend 100s on adapters. The original Bootcamp drivers actually physically blew the speakers when running Windows Luckily Apple still sell the 2015 model without Touch Bar.

I use Windows at work so for some variety I have moved to a Mac at home. The 2010 Mac Mini is a decent little machine with the RAM upgraded to 4GB. For Windows development you need Visual Studio, which means running Windows on your Mac. Bootcamp is one way of doing this, but then you lose all the benefits of OSX as your host OS. The secret is of course Parallels Desktop which allows you to run Windows virtualized on your Mac.

There is a massive hullabaloo about Softbank’s exclusive deal with Apple for the 3G iPads here. Currently, you cannot get a 3G iPad without going through Softbank and signing up for a data plan (either 2 years or some terrible 4,000 yen per 1GB “offer”). This is in stark contrast to the fantastic deal Americans get in the US with AT&T. Softbank appears to be announcing to the press that there will be a “SIM Lock” (SIMロック).

O2 in the UK have finally properly unlocked my iPhone – no more software unlock needed to run it on Softbank. Hurrah! ****

The latest of ridiculous bugs I have found after my switchover to Mac is that Korean takes precedence over Japanese when “Automatic” is selected as the encoding on Mail.app. It literally sees Japanese text as Korean and encodes emails as ISO-2022-KR (Korean) if both Japanese and Korean are selected under Languages. Try it yourself: make sure both Korean and Japanese are in the Languages list (so they show both show up in Mail.

O2 in the UK butcher images while using GPRS/3G/EDGE – seriously effecting the iPhone. Images are recompressed to horrendous levels – look at the App Store here: As you can see, the Facebook and Super Monkey Ball banners have been recompressed. This effects webpages aswell – meaning downloading new wallpapers or browsing Flickr is a waste of time. However, if you change the username for the O2 access point under Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network to “bypass” from the default “vertigo” like so:

El Reg is reporting that O2 has been told by Apple not to release sales figures until Apple say so. UK carrier O2 has confirmed that Apple has placed it under a gagging order to prevent it from publicly revealing how many iPhone handsets it’s sold to date. The company’s head of media relations, Simon Lloyd, told Register Hardware that it’s a stipulation within the company’s sales agreement with Apple that O2 can’t release any such details until the Mac maker says so.

I recently came across an interesting issue where after starting a new ASP.NET Core 5.0 .NET 5 project using the “ASP.NET Core Web App (Model-View-Controller)” template did not include the ability to update .cshtml Razor files without recompiling and restarting the whole app. There is a checkbox to “Enable Razor Runtime Compilation” during project setup but it’s easy to miss and tricky to add afterwards if you don’t know what you are looking for.

In Part 1, I walked through creating a simple form with a backing ViewModel and Validation. In Part 2, I’ll walk through creating a backing Model and Edit functionality. To start off from here, load up the code from part1: https://github.com/edandersen/mvcformtutorial/tree/part1 The final code for Part 2 will be uploaded here: https://github.com/edandersen/mvcformtutorial/tree/part2 Model Mapping flow When editing a ViewModel, we need to prepopulate the view with real data from a domain model.

I’m going to walk through the basics of Form submission with ASP.NET MVC, showing some best practices. This set of tutorials will be useful for developers moving away from ASP.NET WebForms into ASP.NET MVC or even Rails developers curious about how we do things in .NET. You can download the code for Part 1 at: https://github.com/edandersen/mvcformtutorial/tree/part1 Form submission flow If you have come from WebForms, you’ll be used to being able to pull form values out in the code behind by simply referencing variables in your code behind.

Robots.txt is required to allow search engines to properly index your site, and more importantly not index it. If you have a public-facing staging or preliminary site that you don’t want to show up in Google results, you need to make sure that it returns the correct robots.txt with the Disallow: / line to prevent indexing. However, manually adding robots.txt files to staging and production environments as a manual process can be improved with the process below – the same code can serve up a locked down robots.

Finally in playtest on Xbox Indie Games, Avatar Kart now has: 8 CPU racers Avatars sit down and actually steer their cars Race restarting Cool loading animation Drift handling improvements Done some optimisation to get the framerate to a steady 60FPS, definitely still much more I could do. The floating point performance on the 360’s .NET Compact Framework is pretty dire..

My Avatar Kart game now has: A skybox An original track a floor for the world Debug and chase cameras A starting countdown I also finally got Avatars in the code (Xbox 360 only so no videos yet). Microsoft has not decided to release the bones for the avatars, so I cannot do custom animations or poses yet. Therefore they are standing in the karts at the moment…

.NET 7 is coming soon alongside C# 11. It’s possible to take a look at some of the new features now, including the bang bang (!!) operator and List patterns, which I think are really cool. Here is a video on the topic:

I’ve recently ended up needing to ask if the user really wants to navigate away from a page in my Xamarin app, Net Writer. Essentially whilst a post is being edited I don’t want the user to accidentally lose their progress, necessitating the need to inject a “Are you sure?” or “Confirm exit” prompt when the user presses either the Android hardware or OS level back button or the back button on the navigation bar provided by the Xamarin Forms Shell.

I’ve published version 1.0.0 of a new open source package and a corresponding nuget package – CoreAdmin.CoreAdmin adds a nice set of CRUD screens to your .NET Core web app in one line of code! Adding CoreAdmin to your app Given a typical Startup.cs file, you will have a ConfigureServices method. You need to add the line services.AddCoreAdmin() somewhere near the bottom (at least after you register your Entity Framework DbContexts).

Update December 2016: Apple has released a new version of the MacBook Pro featuring the new Touch Bar feature. I do not recommend buying this model. Worse battery life Worse keyboard Touch Bar feature is pretty useless for Bootcamp or virtualization – you will miss the usual function keys USB-C only. Expect to spend 100s on adapters. The original Bootcamp drivers actually physically blew the speakers when running Windows Luckily Apple still sell the 2015 model without Touch Bar.

I’ve put together the first version of a simple program for displaying flashcards in fullscreen, mainly as an exercise in WPF but also because its damn useful for all sorts of teaching environments. Flash cards are simple text files that anyone can edit – just load them up and hit spacebar to cycle through them. “Big Flash Cards” is now at version 0.1 🙂 It supports Unicode so is perfect for Japanese lessons, for which I designed it.

Wow. Microsoft has just launched “DreamSpark” – a programme that lets higher education students download pro Microsoft development tools – not the cut-down Express versions of Visual Studio, but the full Professional editions. UK Microsoft student champ Ed Dunhill sums it up the best on his blog here. You get access to: Visual Studio 2008 Pro The whole Expression suite SQL Server 2005 Developer edition Windows Server 2003 Standard (and hopefully soon 2008) The best bit is a whole years XNA Creators Club subscription FREE!

For Japanese language practice for my course I use PocketStackz by some chaps called “Minddate software”. Its an all-purpose language flashcard program with an emphasis on Asian languages (such as that an Asian Unicode font needs to be installed on your PocketPC). What sets it apart is that you can immediately see what words you need to study at any point since the program sorts the words into “stacks” from “unknown” on the left to “known” on the right.

Back in 2011, I created a pretty popular post (that now redirects here) that contained the WEP key for Softbank’s “mobilepoint” wifi hotspot on the Shinkansen. For some reason, both docomo and Softbank encrypt their public wifi connections with publicly accessible keys which doesn’t prevent eavesdropping on connections at all. Docomo even sells “visitor” access passes via their mobile portal, only accessible if you know the wifi password in the first place!

Much noise has been made about Evernote’s new Windows client. For version 4, they dropped WPF/.NET and released a C++ native application. They were pretty damning with their reasoning: Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.

I have used Microsoft Money to manage my finances for coming up 6 years now and still find it the best personal finance app around. The last version in the UK was 2005 after Microsoft cancelled the product and let Quicken take the market. Microsoft then discontinued the international versions in the wake of Mint.com and other Yodlee-based web applications. Mint.com appears to be the most successful of the bunch and was bought by Quicken to replace their terrible Quicken Online.

Just noticed on The Register that Lexmark have added Twitter to a new range of All In One printers. See They have actually written a client for the tiny little touchscreen display on the scanner. Are people really that addicted that they need to use Twitter while waiting for something to copy or scan? Why not use their phone? Because this way it looks like you are “fiddling with the settings”?

The first preview version of the Windows Phone 7 SDK is out and it doesn’t support Japanese (or non-Latin) text in the English ROM. This is a huge disappointment. One of the major advantages the iPhone has over almost every other smartphone platform (and the major reason I bought mine in the first place – I needed Japanese language support) is the built in support for non-Latin languages and their input methods.

O2 in the UK butcher images while using GPRS/3G/EDGE – seriously effecting the iPhone. Images are recompressed to horrendous levels – look at the App Store here: As you can see, the Facebook and Super Monkey Ball banners have been recompressed. This effects webpages aswell – meaning downloading new wallpapers or browsing Flickr is a waste of time. However, if you change the username for the O2 access point under Settings > General > Network > Cellular Data Network to “bypass” from the default “vertigo” like so:

At work I am currently tasked with redeveloping an intranet application used to track customers, products owned, support contracts, support records and all sorts of other CRM-esqué functions. The version used at the moment is a very fast Perl/MySQL/Mod\_perl/Apache setup built over a few years. Its got to the point where the company needs more functionality and hacking extra functions into the current code is getting more and more difficult. Why Symfony?

Wow. Microsoft has just launched “DreamSpark” – a programme that lets higher education students download pro Microsoft development tools – not the cut-down Express versions of Visual Studio, but the full Professional editions. UK Microsoft student champ Ed Dunhill sums it up the best on his blog here. You get access to: Visual Studio 2008 Pro The whole Expression suite SQL Server 2005 Developer edition Windows Server 2003 Standard (and hopefully soon 2008) The best bit is a whole years XNA Creators Club subscription FREE!

UPDATE: No need to do this now, its fixed! For edngames.com I use Facebook, Yahoo! and Windows Live as sign on solutions. However, Windows Live is the only system with a restriction on the domain names you can register. For instance, because of the word “games” in my domain, I get the error message “The Return URL field contains a forbidden word or domain. Please use a different Return URL and enter the HIP solution again.

There is a massive hullabaloo about Softbank’s exclusive deal with Apple for the 3G iPads here. Currently, you cannot get a 3G iPad without going through Softbank and signing up for a data plan (either 2 years or some terrible 4,000 yen per 1GB “offer”). This is in stark contrast to the fantastic deal Americans get in the US with AT&T. Softbank appears to be announcing to the press that there will be a “SIM Lock” (SIMロック).

I’ve put together the first version of a simple program for displaying flashcards in fullscreen, mainly as an exercise in WPF but also because its damn useful for all sorts of teaching environments. Flash cards are simple text files that anyone can edit – just load them up and hit spacebar to cycle through them. “Big Flash Cards” is now at version 0.1 🙂 It supports Unicode so is perfect for Japanese lessons, for which I designed it.

The latest of ridiculous bugs I have found after my switchover to Mac is that Korean takes precedence over Japanese when “Automatic” is selected as the encoding on Mail.app. It literally sees Japanese text as Korean and encodes emails as ISO-2022-KR (Korean) if both Japanese and Korean are selected under Languages. Try it yourself: make sure both Korean and Japanese are in the Languages list (so they show both show up in Mail.

For Japanese language practice for my course I use PocketStackz by some chaps called “Minddate software”. Its an all-purpose language flashcard program with an emphasis on Asian languages (such as that an Asian Unicode font needs to be installed on your PocketPC). What sets it apart is that you can immediately see what words you need to study at any point since the program sorts the words into “stacks” from “unknown” on the left to “known” on the right.

Update April 2012: Five years later after several server moves, this is no longer online – I’m still hunting for the files. Most likely it wouldn’t work on new keitai’s anyway. Edo no Tango (Ed’s Tango, エドの単語) is a Flash Lite based Japanese language vocabulary and kanji flashcard utility. Developed to help my study, it currently contains lessons 10 through 17 from the Genki series of Japanese language textbooks. It uses Flash Lite 1.

I am a great fan of Remote Desktop and have been using it for over a decade. It’s built in and just works. One gripe of mine has always been the poor framerate which makes animations and transitions super janky by default. In RDP 10 it turns out this can be massively improved by enabling a screen encoding based on AVC/H.264 video. By enabling the group policy “Prioritize H.264/AVC 444 graphics mode for Remote Desktop Connections” under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Remote Session Environment, I was able to get a glorious 60fps, almost double what I was getting before.

I came across an interesting issue updating my UWP app to Visual Studio 2019 and a new Azure DevOps pipeline. “Associate with Store” no longer adds password-less PFX files named *TemporaryKey.pfx and *StoreKey.pfx to your project to sign your store submissions – instead in VS2019 it now adds the certificates to your local user store only. Which means when it comes to build, you get errors like C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v15.

It is increasingly looking like the Surface 3 is going to be discontinued. Microsoft is running out of stock on the 128GB / 4GB RAM model. Third party vendors are heavily discounting it, suggesting a clearance. The biggest sign of its demise is that Intel are simply going to stop making the quad-core Cherry Trail Atom processors that power the Surface 3 and other tablets like it. This is a crying shame.

Update 19th August 2015: Apple have released Bootcamp 6, which fixes all of the below when using Windows 10. If you already have Bootcamp 5 installed, run the Apple Software Update utility to get the latest set of drivers. The only oddity I’ve had with Bootcamp 6 is that is resets your DPI scaling to 200%. Windows 10 on Bootcamp (Macbook Pro 13 inch, Bootcamp 5.1) has some teething issues as of build 10162.

Update 13th June 2015: It looks like Microsoft has reversed course and reinstated the Windows 7 Backup and Restore feature in Windows 10! Success! Update 16th Sept 2013: What follows is a rant written after upgrading to 8.1 and seeing my automated backups just stop working and the backup restoration function also removed. An afternoon was wasted faffing about with the new File History feature which still refuses to backup files not on my system drive and deliberately ignores files in the SkyDrive folder, preventing you from having a local backup.

I’ve picked up a Microsoft Surface RT from the “temporary” New York Times Square Microsoft Store. While the purchasing experience was a bit of a mess (untrained sales staff – I ended up having to type my own details into their POS terminal as I’m not quite sure the guy knew how to type), I managed to make off with a properly boxed (I skipped getting the staff to unbox it and walk me through the “Out of Box Experience”) 32GB Surface, Type Cover and VGA adapter.

I am finally fed up of having to install Microsoft Money and set up syncing of the data file, so I’ve decided to try and build a web based version. Mint.com does not support non-US markets and apparently does not even support adding your own transactions that have not been downloaded from a bank. “Private Money” is the codename and it looks a bit like this at the moment: The stack:

Microsoft have now released an update to ASP.NET MVC3 imaginatively called “ASP.NET MVC3 Update”. This update upgrades NuGet, bundles Entity Framework 4.1 with all new templates, adds HTML5 template support and splits the jQuery libraries off into NuGet packages so they can be upgraded individually. The bundling with new MVC projects is a sign that Microsoft has selected Entity Framework as the “chosen” ORM layer from now on. Linq2SQL is not flexible enough when dealing with pre-existing database schemas and third party solutions such NHibernate are difficult to get pointy-haired boss approval.

Just to hammer the point home about how important it is to upgrade to .NET 4.0 if you are using WPF, here are some comparison screenshots of the text rendering in WPF 3.5 and 4.0: Pay attention to the difference between the text rendering on lines 2 and 3. Line 2 shows the new Display formatting mode available in WPF 4.0. This renders the text the same way as the rest of Windows – the shape of the font is distorted so that lines fall on pixel boundaries.

Much noise has been made about Evernote’s new Windows client. For version 4, they dropped WPF/.NET and released a C++ native application. They were pretty damning with their reasoning: Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.

I have used Microsoft Money to manage my finances for coming up 6 years now and still find it the best personal finance app around. The last version in the UK was 2005 after Microsoft cancelled the product and let Quicken take the market. Microsoft then discontinued the international versions in the wake of Mint.com and other Yodlee-based web applications. Mint.com appears to be the most successful of the bunch and was bought by Quicken to replace their terrible Quicken Online.

The first preview version of the Windows Phone 7 SDK is out and it doesn’t support Japanese (or non-Latin) text in the English ROM. This is a huge disappointment. One of the major advantages the iPhone has over almost every other smartphone platform (and the major reason I bought mine in the first place – I needed Japanese language support) is the built in support for non-Latin languages and their input methods.

After a lot of trial and error using Process Monitor and Virtual PC, I have finally sussed out exactly what XNA2.0 games on Windows need to run. The requirements are slightly different to XNA 1 games. Direct X runtimes There are four files that need to be installed in the system32 folder for XNA to initialise properly. They are: xinput1_3.dll x3daudio1_3.dll d3dx9_31.dll, and xactengine2_9.dll The first three can be placed alongside the application exe and then load fine, but xactengine2_9.

Wow. Microsoft has just launched “DreamSpark” – a programme that lets higher education students download pro Microsoft development tools – not the cut-down Express versions of Visual Studio, but the full Professional editions. UK Microsoft student champ Ed Dunhill sums it up the best on his blog here. You get access to: Visual Studio 2008 Pro The whole Expression suite SQL Server 2005 Developer edition Windows Server 2003 Standard (and hopefully soon 2008) The best bit is a whole years XNA Creators Club subscription FREE!

I frequently use Remote Desktop (RDP/Terminal Services) to access my machines running Vista SP1 RTM. 90% of the time, after connecting, I get this annoying problem with the Start bar: Only the Start button itself is visible. This happens on all my Vista machines, both SP0 and SP1 This happens no matter what version of Remote Desktop I am using, the XP version or the “new” Vista one It only appears to happen when the computer was originally using the Aero DWM composition engine and originally in a different resolution to what I am asking the Remote Desktop session to render It happens wether or not the taskbar is at the top or bottom of the screen So far the only way to get the taskbar back I have found is to click the lonely Start button, click Windows Security, choose Start Task Manager, kill the explorer.

I picked up my Surface RT on launch day last year as I happened to be in New York for work. The strong yen made it a bargain and I’ve been living with it since. Because it won’t run most desktop apps, it has seen limited use. It was an excellent video player during flights, but nothing an iPad could not have handled. Word made a passing replacement for Windows Live Writer with it’s built in blogging system, but it wasn’t perfect.

On the Surface’s Windows RT, you cannot install alternative browsers. This means no AdBlock. There is a workaround to this, using IE10’s “Tracking Protection”. First, fire up desktop IE10, click the little gear in the top right and select Safety -> Tracking Protection. Click on “Get a Tracking Protection List online…”. You should see a list of tracking protection lists on Microsoft’s site. You will want to click Add next to the Easylist lists.

I’ve picked up a Microsoft Surface RT from the “temporary” New York Times Square Microsoft Store. While the purchasing experience was a bit of a mess (untrained sales staff – I ended up having to type my own details into their POS terminal as I’m not quite sure the guy knew how to type), I managed to make off with a properly boxed (I skipped getting the staff to unbox it and walk me through the “Out of Box Experience”) 32GB Surface, Type Cover and VGA adapter.

The only official Windows Phone in Japan is au’s Toshiba IS12T. Not wanting to change plan, I picked up a SIM unlocked Nokia Lumia 800 and put the Softbank micro SIM card from my iPhone 4 inside. If you want a more general guide to setting up Windows Phone for previous iPhone users and what apps should be installed, read Scott Hanselman’s post. Remember to disable iMessage if you are moving from an iPhone.

That was quick: iPhone update: now supports multitasking, no additional charges for calling over 3G Skype has dropped their plans to charge for 3G calls and have released an update to their iPhone client that finally supports multitasking. At Skype, we believe that better call quality and better availability (which is achieved with an app capable of multitasking and/or making calls over 3G) lead to increased call frequency and longer calls.

I got an interesting invitation to fill in a survey about Skype Mobile. Skype on iPhone is an application that is deliberately ignored by Skype while they try and figure out how to make money from it. Their recent spat with Fring, who have implemented 3G Skype, background multitasking and video chat on iPhone 4 already, highlights their position on this. There is now no way to use Skype on Android after Fring had to remove the service since Skype refuse to release a client.

There is a massive hullabaloo about Softbank’s exclusive deal with Apple for the 3G iPads here. Currently, you cannot get a 3G iPad without going through Softbank and signing up for a data plan (either 2 years or some terrible 4,000 yen per 1GB “offer”). This is in stark contrast to the fantastic deal Americans get in the US with AT&T. Softbank appears to be announcing to the press that there will be a “SIM Lock” (SIMロック).

The first preview version of the Windows Phone 7 SDK is out and it doesn’t support Japanese (or non-Latin) text in the English ROM. This is a huge disappointment. One of the major advantages the iPhone has over almost every other smartphone platform (and the major reason I bought mine in the first place – I needed Japanese language support) is the built in support for non-Latin languages and their input methods.

O2 in the UK have finally properly unlocked my iPhone – no more software unlock needed to run it on Softbank. Hurrah! ****

I’ve just pieced together a renderer for QR codes that outputs a texture instead of System.Drawing.Image objects (the Xbox .Net Framework version does not have access to the Drawing namespace). I’ll be using this as a way of uploading times on Avatar Kart to my server instead of copying a code which you had to do in Lines, my previous game. I will release the code once I’ve tidied it up a bit.

The latest of ridiculous bugs I have found after my switchover to Mac is that Korean takes precedence over Japanese when “Automatic” is selected as the encoding on Mail.app. It literally sees Japanese text as Korean and encodes emails as ISO-2022-KR (Korean) if both Japanese and Korean are selected under Languages. Try it yourself: make sure both Korean and Japanese are in the Languages list (so they show both show up in Mail.

El Reg is reporting that O2 has been told by Apple not to release sales figures until Apple say so. UK carrier O2 has confirmed that Apple has placed it under a gagging order to prevent it from publicly revealing how many iPhone handsets it’s sold to date. The company’s head of media relations, Simon Lloyd, told Register Hardware that it’s a stipulation within the company’s sales agreement with Apple that O2 can’t release any such details until the Mac maker says so.

For Japanese language practice for my course I use PocketStackz by some chaps called “Minddate software”. Its an all-purpose language flashcard program with an emphasis on Asian languages (such as that an Asian Unicode font needs to be installed on your PocketPC). What sets it apart is that you can immediately see what words you need to study at any point since the program sorts the words into “stacks” from “unknown” on the left to “known” on the right.

Update April 2012: Five years later after several server moves, this is no longer online – I’m still hunting for the files. Most likely it wouldn’t work on new keitai’s anyway. Edo no Tango (Ed’s Tango, エドの単語) is a Flash Lite based Japanese language vocabulary and kanji flashcard utility. Developed to help my study, it currently contains lessons 10 through 17 from the Genki series of Japanese language textbooks. It uses Flash Lite 1.

I’ve now had the pleasure of developing two line of business applications using two very contrasting versions of the Symfony framework in PHP/MySQL. Whereas symfony 1.0 allowed you to generate custom CRUD (create, read, update and delete) interfaces by editing simple human-readable config files and overriding simple functions, new symfony 1.2 systems require you to understand badly documented APIs (more on that later), PHP’s OO programming quirks, the exact method call order of the new forms framework and write completely new classes to provide custom filter functionality.

At work I am currently tasked with redeveloping an intranet application used to track customers, products owned, support contracts, support records and all sorts of other CRM-esqué functions. The version used at the moment is a very fast Perl/MySQL/Mod\_perl/Apache setup built over a few years. Its got to the point where the company needs more functionality and hacking extra functions into the current code is getting more and more difficult. Why Symfony?

One of the perks of working in R&D at Medidata is “Innovation Time”. Twice a year, engineers get to spend two weeks building whatever they want. Ideally some of the things we build will go back into direct product development but if not, we are encouraged to open source the work. Fresh from attending Microsoft’s Build 2013 conference in San Francisco, I wanted an excuse to use all the latest Microsoft web stack tools.

I’ve got the Microsoft Money style cashflow chart going with the flot library and some massaging of ASP.NET MVC 3 to output JSON. The chart correctly predicts future cashflow based on your set bills and future transactions. Next up is multiple accounts and currencies at once.

I am finally fed up of having to install Microsoft Money and set up syncing of the data file, so I’ve decided to try and build a web based version. Mint.com does not support non-US markets and apparently does not even support adding your own transactions that have not been downloaded from a bank. “Private Money” is the codename and it looks a bit like this at the moment: The stack:

My Avatar Kart game now has: A skybox An original track a floor for the world Debug and chase cameras A starting countdown I also finally got Avatars in the code (Xbox 360 only so no videos yet). Microsoft has not decided to release the bones for the avatars, so I cannot do custom animations or poses yet. Therefore they are standing in the karts at the moment…

During my down time I’ve been cracking on with XNA and am developing “Avatar Kart” – essentially Super Mario Kart on the SNES with Xbox avatars (we have to wait until XNA Game Studio 3.1 this summer for avatar support). In a couple of days I’ve managed to finish: CPU Car AI Physics and wall collisions Terrain effects Lap counts and car rankings Split screen The track is still from SMK and the cars are empty but it does the job.

I’ve put together the first version of a simple program for displaying flashcards in fullscreen, mainly as an exercise in WPF but also because its damn useful for all sorts of teaching environments. Flash cards are simple text files that anyone can edit – just load them up and hit spacebar to cycle through them. “Big Flash Cards” is now at version 0.1 🙂 It supports Unicode so is perfect for Japanese lessons, for which I designed it.

My dissertation project saw me making an XNA game (Lines) and website to go with it (edngames.com) which used web services to make essentially a cut down Xbox Live on the PC with rich presence support, automatic high score uploading etc. I feel it was very successful (and the markers agreed) but I didn’t get the time to spend on the game portion that I wanted to, instead concentrating mainly on the distribution scenarios and the user experience.

At work I am currently tasked with redeveloping an intranet application used to track customers, products owned, support contracts, support records and all sorts of other CRM-esqué functions. The version used at the moment is a very fast Perl/MySQL/Mod\_perl/Apache setup built over a few years. Its got to the point where the company needs more functionality and hacking extra functions into the current code is getting more and more difficult. Why Symfony?

Update April 2012: Five years later after several server moves, this is no longer online – I’m still hunting for the files. Most likely it wouldn’t work on new keitai’s anyway. Edo no Tango (Ed’s Tango, エドの単語) is a Flash Lite based Japanese language vocabulary and kanji flashcard utility. Developed to help my study, it currently contains lessons 10 through 17 from the Genki series of Japanese language textbooks. It uses Flash Lite 1.

Inspired by one of my current professors Garr Reynolds, I’ve finally started a namesake blog. I plan to post once a week about something interesting, while building up a portfolio to show to anyone interested (have loads of projects I need to write about). The site is a bit rough around the edges at the moment, but that should hopefully change soon; I just really needed to knock it up quickly.

It is increasingly looking like the Surface 3 is going to be discontinued. Microsoft is running out of stock on the 128GB / 4GB RAM model. Third party vendors are heavily discounting it, suggesting a clearance. The biggest sign of its demise is that Intel are simply going to stop making the quad-core Cherry Trail Atom processors that power the Surface 3 and other tablets like it. This is a crying shame.

I picked up my Surface RT on launch day last year as I happened to be in New York for work. The strong yen made it a bargain and I’ve been living with it since. Because it won’t run most desktop apps, it has seen limited use. It was an excellent video player during flights, but nothing an iPad could not have handled. Word made a passing replacement for Windows Live Writer with it’s built in blogging system, but it wasn’t perfect.

Assume we want to automatically show the version number of your app in your UI, for example, the settings page or elsewhere. Your version number will normally be updated by your CI/CD system (updating Package.appxmanifest for UWP and AndroidManifest.xml for an Android Xamarin app). Create a property to bind to ViewModels and how they bind to your UI are out of scope for this post (as you’ll have already got this far).

I recently hit the classic case of trying to add Indexes to a large table. Whilst Entity Framework Core supports creating Indexes online during migrations, not all versions of SQL Server support this. In the case that your migration contains the code: migrationBuilder.CreateIndex( name: "IX_TableName_ColumnName" table: "TableName", column: "ColumnName").Annotation("SqlServer:Online", true); This will fail hard on SQL Server Express, which you are likely using for development locally, with the error message “Online index operations can only be performed in Enterprise edition of SQL Server.

One fantastic new feature in the latest version of Windows 10 is an add on you can install that allows you to use an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution natively in Windows. This opens up a whole new world for developers on Windows, including access to the same class of Git and SSH tools that are available on OS X (goodbye PuTTY!). To enable it, start by heading to Settings, Update & security, For developers and turn Developer mode on.

It is increasingly looking like the Surface 3 is going to be discontinued. Microsoft is running out of stock on the 128GB / 4GB RAM model. Third party vendors are heavily discounting it, suggesting a clearance. The biggest sign of its demise is that Intel are simply going to stop making the quad-core Cherry Trail Atom processors that power the Surface 3 and other tablets like it. This is a crying shame.

This is a follow up to my initial thoughts on the rental properties by Get Living London at East Village E20, approximately 18 months after moving back to the UK and settling down here. Get Living London are simply the best landlords in London. Period. If you have to rent and live in London, ideally it should be from them. They are now Private Landlord of the Year for two years in a row and it not hard to see why.

A few months ago I started to write a replacement for Windows Live Writer for Windows 10 using the new Universal Windows Platform, calling it Net Writer and putting it on the Windows Store in Preview. A few weeks later Scott Hanselman announces that Windows Live Writer has finally been open sourced as Open Live Writer licensed under MIT. It was time to throw away my code and use that!

Great news! In Windows 10 build 10130, Microsoft appears to have seen sense and brought back the perfectly functional Backup and Restore function that was removed in Windows 8.1. You can find it in the classic Control Panel under “Backup and Restore (Windows 7)”. No longer do you have to use the File History feature. The Windows 7 version of Backup and Restore supports a schedule you control, all files on your hard disk, includes a System Image at the same time and will include your OneDrive files!

.NET web applications tend to get treated very poorly in the real world – some people still think that copying and pasting the contents of their /bin/Release/ directory (lovingly referred to as “DLLs”) over Remote Desktop to a webserver and manually setting up IIS is acceptable – but this is now 2015 and the world has moved on. Here are my thoughts on some of the various ways you can deploy .

Update: I’ve posted an updated review after being here for 18 months. The following is a review of my thoughts so far about living at East Village, the former Athlete’s Village at the 2012 Olympic Games. My landlord is Get Living London and this will be from the perspective of myself as someone I imagine typical of a renter here – a young professional working at a firm in Canary Wharf in the technology field.

The community around .NET in Tokyo is pretty hard to find, so I’ve decided to do something about it. The Tokyo .NET and Mono Users Group has it’s first meetup on July 15th at the Hobgoblin in Shibuya. RSVP on Meetup.com here. We’ll be starting talks and presentations from the following meetup. Join us if you want to get to know some like minded .NET developers.

On December 5th, I delivered a live coding demo at Medidata’s UK office, going over some of the newer stuff for .NET Web Developers. It’s 48 minutes long and covers MVC5, VS2013, EF6, SignalR 2 and some other bits while I build a rudimentary Twitter clone called “MediTwit”. Nuget blew up about half way through but we recovered. Full video below (visit the full post page to view):

Update November 2014: Softbank has changed their WEP keys. This will no longer work. Sorry folks. I finally figured out how to get wifi access using a laptop on the Shinkansen (Nozomi N700 only I think) or any Softbank “mobilepoint” access point. iPhone and iPad users will already have free “Softbank Wifi” access – this is normally locked to only an iPhone or iPad. Softbank only check your user agent.

Windows 7 has been out for a few days for MSDN members and the public beta is due soon. One of the best new features is native DivX, AVCHD and mp4 video support. With the codec framework completely changed (as explained by Long Zheng here), usual MKV splitters for Windows Media Player no longer work and viewing HD MKV files now definitely requires VLC for now. On my travels I found an application called TSMuxer on the doom9 forums – this has the ability to very quickly convert HD video files between formats with no quality loss whatsoever.

Thanks to the ever-excellent Zman at The Z Buffer, I’ve been sent some screenshots of what Lines actually looks like on the New Xbox Experience. Awesome!

So my grand plan to rewrite my game for the Community Games launch didn’t quite go according to plan, so I decided to polish up the original version as a bit of practice. It has now been approved and is on Xbox Live Community Games – NXE users can download the trial and buy it now, while everyone on the old dashboard will have to wait until November 19th. The internet ranking site is up at http://www.

I am a great fan of Remote Desktop and have been using it for over a decade. It’s built in and just works. One gripe of mine has always been the poor framerate which makes animations and transitions super janky by default. In RDP 10 it turns out this can be massively improved by enabling a screen encoding based on AVC/H.264 video. By enabling the group policy “Prioritize H.264/AVC 444 graphics mode for Remote Desktop Connections” under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Remote Session Environment, I was able to get a glorious 60fps, almost double what I was getting before.

Running Windows 10 Anniversary Edition? Click this link and say yes to the prompts (You’ll, er, have to press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to exit and sign in again). Back? You just launched the hidden Take a Test app. Windows 10 Anniversary now includes a chromeless kiosk mode that web pages can launch. Basically any link in the format… ms-edu-secureassessment:<URL>!enforceLockdown<br></br> …will launch the app. Administrators can even create user accounts that are locked down to single web pages where CTRL+ALT+DELETE is the only way out.

It is increasingly looking like the Surface 3 is going to be discontinued. Microsoft is running out of stock on the 128GB / 4GB RAM model. Third party vendors are heavily discounting it, suggesting a clearance. The biggest sign of its demise is that Intel are simply going to stop making the quad-core Cherry Trail Atom processors that power the Surface 3 and other tablets like it. This is a crying shame.

Update 19th August 2015: Apple have released Bootcamp 6, which fixes all of the below when using Windows 10. If you already have Bootcamp 5 installed, run the Apple Software Update utility to get the latest set of drivers. The only oddity I’ve had with Bootcamp 6 is that is resets your DPI scaling to 200%. Windows 10 on Bootcamp (Macbook Pro 13 inch, Bootcamp 5.1) has some teething issues as of build 10162.

Update 13th June 2015: It looks like Microsoft has reversed course and reinstated the Windows 7 Backup and Restore feature in Windows 10! Success! Update 16th Sept 2013: What follows is a rant written after upgrading to 8.1 and seeing my automated backups just stop working and the backup restoration function also removed. An afternoon was wasted faffing about with the new File History feature which still refuses to backup files not on my system drive and deliberately ignores files in the SkyDrive folder, preventing you from having a local backup.

Much noise has been made about Evernote’s new Windows client. For version 4, they dropped WPF/.NET and released a C++ native application. They were pretty damning with their reasoning: Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.

The first preview version of the Windows Phone 7 SDK is out and it doesn’t support Japanese (or non-Latin) text in the English ROM. This is a huge disappointment. One of the major advantages the iPhone has over almost every other smartphone platform (and the major reason I bought mine in the first place – I needed Japanese language support) is the built in support for non-Latin languages and their input methods.

I have been having a problem where I would get “This page cannot be displayed” errors the first time I tried to access a website. The odd thing was that hitting Refresh would solve the problem and I would get through to the site immediately. At first, I thought it was a DNS problem due to the Internet Connection Sharing setup, but turns out it is Vista messing around with the net connection with a process called “Receive Window Auto-Tuning” (this alters the size of the packets on your network based on network conditions).

After a lot of trial and error using Process Monitor and Virtual PC, I have finally sussed out exactly what XNA2.0 games on Windows need to run. The requirements are slightly different to XNA 1 games. Direct X runtimes There are four files that need to be installed in the system32 folder for XNA to initialise properly. They are: xinput1_3.dll x3daudio1_3.dll d3dx9_31.dll, and xactengine2_9.dll The first three can be placed alongside the application exe and then load fine, but xactengine2_9.

I frequently use Remote Desktop (RDP/Terminal Services) to access my machines running Vista SP1 RTM. 90% of the time, after connecting, I get this annoying problem with the Start bar: Only the Start button itself is visible. This happens on all my Vista machines, both SP0 and SP1 This happens no matter what version of Remote Desktop I am using, the XP version or the “new” Vista one It only appears to happen when the computer was originally using the Aero DWM composition engine and originally in a different resolution to what I am asking the Remote Desktop session to render It happens wether or not the taskbar is at the top or bottom of the screen So far the only way to get the taskbar back I have found is to click the lonely Start button, click Windows Security, choose Start Task Manager, kill the explorer.

UPDATE: No need to do this now, its fixed! For edngames.com I use Facebook, Yahoo! and Windows Live as sign on solutions. However, Windows Live is the only system with a restriction on the domain names you can register. For instance, because of the word “games” in my domain, I get the error message “The Return URL field contains a forbidden word or domain. Please use a different Return URL and enter the HIP solution again.

I picked up my Surface RT on launch day last year as I happened to be in New York for work. The strong yen made it a bargain and I’ve been living with it since. Because it won’t run most desktop apps, it has seen limited use. It was an excellent video player during flights, but nothing an iPad could not have handled. Word made a passing replacement for Windows Live Writer with it’s built in blogging system, but it wasn’t perfect.

A promising slide from TechEd 2012 promises VPN support for Cisco VPNs: And from here: The TechEd 2012 session “Windows 8: Windows RT Devices for Business” (http://channel9.msdn.com/ Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/WCL202) stated at the 26 min mark that Microsoft incorporate the Cisco VPN client into Windows RT out of the box. It doesn’t work for most Cisco VPN setups where the IT department has decided to use PSK authentication. Windows never natively supported the IPSec Identifier, or “Group Name” feature in Cisco VPNs, which I argue would be the vast majority of real use cases.

The CapsLock key is rubbish. Remapping it to Control is easy on OS X and the Happy Hacker keyboard I use on my desktops doesn’t even have one. On standard Windows you can run a key remapping program but WinRT is locked down (for now). Here is an easy way to map Caps Lock to Control. First, hit the Windows key and type “Powershell”. Right click on the Powershell icon. You will see some options appear at the bottom of the screen – click “Run as Administrator.

On the Surface’s Windows RT, you cannot install alternative browsers. This means no AdBlock. There is a workaround to this, using IE10’s “Tracking Protection”. First, fire up desktop IE10, click the little gear in the top right and select Safety -> Tracking Protection. Click on “Get a Tracking Protection List online…”. You should see a list of tracking protection lists on Microsoft’s site. You will want to click Add next to the Easylist lists.

I use Windows at work so for some variety I have moved to a Mac at home. The 2010 Mac Mini is a decent little machine with the RAM upgraded to 4GB. For Windows development you need Visual Studio, which means running Windows on your Mac. Bootcamp is one way of doing this, but then you lose all the benefits of OSX as your host OS. The secret is of course Parallels Desktop which allows you to run Windows virtualized on your Mac.

Just to hammer the point home about how important it is to upgrade to .NET 4.0 if you are using WPF, here are some comparison screenshots of the text rendering in WPF 3.5 and 4.0: Pay attention to the difference between the text rendering on lines 2 and 3. Line 2 shows the new Display formatting mode available in WPF 4.0. This renders the text the same way as the rest of Windows – the shape of the font is distorted so that lines fall on pixel boundaries.

Much noise has been made about Evernote’s new Windows client. For version 4, they dropped WPF/.NET and released a C++ native application. They were pretty damning with their reasoning: Evernote 4 is a major departure from Evernote 3.5 in every way. While 3.5 added tons of great new features, there were some problems we simply couldn’t fix: the blurry fonts, slow startup times, large memory footprint, and poor support for certain graphics cards were all issues that the technology behind 3.

Finally in playtest on Xbox Indie Games, Avatar Kart now has: 8 CPU racers Avatars sit down and actually steer their cars Race restarting Cool loading animation Drift handling improvements Done some optimisation to get the framerate to a steady 60FPS, definitely still much more I could do. The floating point performance on the 360’s .NET Compact Framework is pretty dire..

I’ve just pieced together a renderer for QR codes that outputs a texture instead of System.Drawing.Image objects (the Xbox .Net Framework version does not have access to the Drawing namespace). I’ll be using this as a way of uploading times on Avatar Kart to my server instead of copying a code which you had to do in Lines, my previous game. I will release the code once I’ve tidied it up a bit.

My Avatar Kart game now has: A skybox An original track a floor for the world Debug and chase cameras A starting countdown I also finally got Avatars in the code (Xbox 360 only so no videos yet). Microsoft has not decided to release the bones for the avatars, so I cannot do custom animations or poses yet. Therefore they are standing in the karts at the moment…

During my down time I’ve been cracking on with XNA and am developing “Avatar Kart” – essentially Super Mario Kart on the SNES with Xbox avatars (we have to wait until XNA Game Studio 3.1 this summer for avatar support). In a couple of days I’ve managed to finish: CPU Car AI Physics and wall collisions Terrain effects Lap counts and car rankings Split screen The track is still from SMK and the cars are empty but it does the job.

My dissertation project saw me making an XNA game (Lines) and website to go with it (edngames.com) which used web services to make essentially a cut down Xbox Live on the PC with rich presence support, automatic high score uploading etc. I feel it was very successful (and the markers agreed) but I didn’t get the time to spend on the game portion that I wanted to, instead concentrating mainly on the distribution scenarios and the user experience.

After a lot of trial and error using Process Monitor and Virtual PC, I have finally sussed out exactly what XNA2.0 games on Windows need to run. The requirements are slightly different to XNA 1 games. Direct X runtimes There are four files that need to be installed in the system32 folder for XNA to initialise properly. They are: xinput1_3.dll x3daudio1_3.dll d3dx9_31.dll, and xactengine2_9.dll The first three can be placed alongside the application exe and then load fine, but xactengine2_9.