Vista is a cool operating system but the fact that I can’t run IE6 on it plus the fact that I can’t get any of my bluetooth headsets to work with it make it so that I have to roll back to xp for the time being.

I can live without IE6 but not without skype

If somebody knows how to get a logitech or a motorola headset going on vista please let me know. That would mean I can stay on vista

A friend of mine just passed me on this link

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/view.html?collection=sanmarco/index1.sxs

Welcome to Photosynth, a new technology from Microsoft Live Labs that takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.

I was using Team foundation workgroup edition  for the past year to manage collaborating with a couple of people. And the other stuff you use team foundation for.

I like Team foundation a lot but unfortunately am not rich enough to buy licenses for everybody that needs to log bugs etc.  To avoid all those licensing issues we have switched over to a combination of open source packets.The total cost of the operation is about 450NZD for unlimited licenses.

So what is the setup :

• Subversion as source control server
• Apache2 with openSSL for people to connect to the subversion repository.

Install Guide

• TortoiseSVN and/or AnkhSVN (VS2k5 integration) as source control client
• Gemini as project management tool
• Gemini Time tracker to manage the time spent on issues/work items
• The plugin originally written by Chris Auld and improved by Frans Bouma for hooking into subversion

The whole experience took about 6 hours to configure ant that is because I didn’t know apache at all and getting it to work with SSL did take me some time until I found the install guide that had a link to compiled binaries. I’m not that good in compiling ansi-C on a windows 2k3 64-bit machine without the windows sdk installed. Not to mention all these little tools you have to download all over the place. Most of them i had never heard of before, so yes I was happy to find that guide.

We are now completely switched over, except for the work items that are currently in team foundation server. It was a good moment to do this because the most of the previous projects have come to an end and the new wave is rolling in. I got really tired of retyping the emails etc I got into the issue tracker, simply becasue I couldn’t afford it.

In my case I guess it did.

First of all there were the presentations on Presentation Foundation which were really cool and made me want to start playing with it right away.

Unfortunately for my playing time, currently I am in a really busy period professionally so I’ll just have to stick with what I know already.

However I will start using communication foundation whenever possible as well as workflow foundation these two pieces are too useful for me not to use them.
Also it made me rethink the way I’ve been using atlas and how I’ve been evolving with the development of websites in atlas.

In the beginning I was doing atlas I used update panels like everybody else. But soon I came across a lot of limitations of the update panel. Where they weren’t flexible enough etc. That’s when I started talking to webservices directly and did to everything client-side. This had as drawback that once you started to put a reasonable amount of functionality in the page the initialisation process takes a really long time. In meantime atlas has evolved for the better I must say. Also the control toolkit has grown a lot.

Now the control toolkit holds the control I’ve anticipated the most : the animation control. Also for about every bit of functionality you have a blueprint in the control toolkit that let you extend every server control on your page to do pretty much anything you want.

Where I was in doubt last week if atlas was really the best choice to go the ajax route. Now these doubts have been erased.

At tech ed I got a chance to have a chat with Scott Guthrie, who for a really smart guy knows how to communicate really well and certainly better than me , and he couldn’t say what was on the horizon atlaswise but just that it was going to be really cool. Even cooler than Nikhil Kothari’s script sharp, I for one can’t wait to set what they have in store for us.

In short teched was excellent in my case and would love to do it again

I feel so stupid sometimes and today was such a day.. I’d been putting of reinstalling my pc for a  while now.
I had installed vista on it but my machine just isn’t fast enough.

The thing I’ve re-learned today is when installing a pc install the virus scanner last or disable it  during the install period. It shaved about 1 hour of my visual studio installation.

All in all I think that feature saves me about 6 hours over the whole install.

I am now listed on technorati

Technorati Profile

A while ago I decided that I wouldn’t reblog somebody else’s posts. But I have to make an exception today because of what’s going on in the world.

People that have the chance to meet me in person can ask me for my view on that whole situation but I don’t want to write a whole book here.

As my friend Miel blogs :

Faces4Lebanon.org

seeks to demonstrate the solidarity of people with Lebanon and the Lebanese people. Millions of people around the world are calling for an immediate halt of all acts of aggression against Lebanon, and the humanitarian catastrophe that is worsening everyday.


Faces4Lebanon.org

aims to spread the words of millions who want to send a message to the world that they are against all acts of violence and aggression. By publishing your photo on

Faces4Lebanon.org

, you will contribute to the buzz we want to create globally and attract as much media attention as possible in a highly civilized and unique manner. Furthermore, your contribution will document the world’s solidarity with Lebanon and the widespread infuriation from this aggression on Lebanon.

Stop the madness! War isn’t the answer! It never is!

I decided to put some of the questions I get from time to time on my blog, if they involve code samples at least.

Today :

Sent: Wednesday, 26 July 2006 10:18 a.m.

To: Ivan Porto Carrero

Subject: Page Caching

I use the following markup to disable caching for specific pages in my app.

<%@ OutputCache Location="None" VaryByParam="None" %>

Do you know how to do this gloablly, for whole application?

Answer:

void Application_PreSendRequestHeaders(object sender, EventArgs e)

    {

        Response.ContentEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;

        Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);

    }

Add that to the global.asax that will disable all caching

More info on the HttpCacheability object :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/frlrfsystemwebhttpcachepolicyclasssetcacheabilitytopic.asp