So we had some forms in our .NET application that were slow. I took the opportunity to try out some .NET Profiling tools. CLRProfiler Red-Gates ANTS Profiler JetBrains dotTrace Speed Trace Pro CLRProfiler Not too useful for my application. I couldn't figure out how to easily track down slow code with it. ANTS Profiler The source code view of this profiler ......

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I don't remember where I heard about it, but there's a hard disk monitoring utility that I've tried on on two of my computers. It's very useful--it monitors drive temperature and SMART status. The temperature was something I was worried about with a new external SATA drive I had purchased a while back. I was using the 500GB drive to store and access ......

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A while back I was messing around with Yahoo Widgets. I thought it might be helpful to have a schema so that my XML editor would help with auto-complete and validation. As far as I could tell, there wasn't an XSD for the widget format. So, I wrote my own. This one isn't complete, but it's a good start for someone who is looking for a starting point. ......

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I know, it's been a long time since I blogged. Life happens.

Anyway, I'm trying out Live Writer for posting to this blog. Maybe I'll post more now.

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Dave Green has a great post on the three different styles of workflows in Windows Workflow Foundation. Read it to find about out Sequential, State Machine and Data-Driven. Plus he gives good examples on how to decide which style to use. If you haven't heard about Windows Workflow Foundation, check out the official site and the MSDN site. Finally, Sam's ......

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Ok, I want to play with this some more and blog about it...but to help me to remember I'll post this blurb: Using DSL Tools, you can create a custom graphical designer that uses your domain-specific diagram notation. You can then create custom text templates that use models created in your designer to generate source code and other files. In this release ......

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We've been investigating alternatives to MSDE for a recent project. Firebird was one of the alternatives we investigated. Today I saw in a blog post another possibility that we will consider: VistaDB for .NET VistaDB 2.1 database for .NET has been released This 2.1 update includes over 60 improvements, including new support for .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio ......

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JezB asked a question on microsoft.public.dotnet.fra... about how to draw a nice soft shadow behind a rectangular object. I suggested that one way would be to use image slicing and scaling, as per the “old HTML image table” trick.: Make a blurred rectangle in your favorite graphics program. I used Photoshop: Now slice the ......

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So I stumbled across a post by Michael Kaplan that mentioned something about text rendering in WinFX: “the old Graphics.MeasureString versus the new TextRenderer.MeasureText... “the old Graphics.DrawString versus the new TextRenderer.DrawText“ And two thoughts struck me: “Yay, they fixed Graphics.MeasureString” and ......

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At the PDC today, more details on Acrylic have been released. It's now called Expression, and consists of three products: Graphic Designer - Derived from the Acrylic we saw in the CTP release, still targets Avalon Interactive Designer - Also called "Sparkle", for creating interactive content Web Designer - "Quartz", a standards-based rich designer for ......

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While at TechEd, I made a prediction about Avalon, XAML, and a surprise from Microsoft: So, based on my read of just a couple msft guys, and seeing things in the community for a while, here's my read on the situation: They want to deliver Avalon (WinFX) with VS 2005 in November--they're holding it back as their 'big splash.' They've been so open about ......

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At some point the IDE would lock up whenver I pinned the toolbox open. I “fixed” it by deleting the file toolbox.tbd found in %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio... But a cow-orker of mine had the same problem, and deleting that file didn't work. So--best of luck if you are having this problem. If you know ......

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Help science! Participate in MIT's blog survey:

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Update: I've put a project and binaries up for the projectile demo. You can download at http://projectdistributor.net/Releases/Release.aspx?releaseId=209

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I ran across a posting on the main geekswithblogs page. Aaron R had written about some projectile physics calcs. It reminded me of some graphics programs I wrote on my HP-48GX. So just for fun I used his sample calc to write a simple ballistics simulator: Just some simple math, but it was fun. Once I get a group created on Project Distributor, I'll ......

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