It’s the new year so it’s about time I dusted off the Silverlight gloves so I’ve turned my attention back to user authentication with Silverlight. In my ‘bookmarks to look at’ I’d kept Accessing the ASP.NET Authentication, Profile and Role Service in Silverlight which provides a very simple example about how to hook the ASP.NET goodness to Silverlight. One interesting point is that Silverlight uses the same mechanisms as the ASP.NET page so if you login (or logout) with Silverlight then you’ll be logged on (or out) on the ASP site too. It will be interesting to carry on playing with this, I hope to investigate merging this with my Silverlight offline work and roling my own membership provider. Quick point, like me, you’ve not installed SQL Express and are using Vista then change the SQL Local Provider in your Web.Config and not the Machine.Config…trust me you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration.
Headphone pads
The sponge ear pads on my trusty Sony headphones simply disolved the other day and I was left with a very scratchy surface. I hunted for ages to try and get a replacement part (even though the headphones aren’t that expensive) and finally I tracked some down at Maplin, they’re called ‘Earpads’…which was 90% of the battle. They do make my headphones look as if it has two aphro’s but hey they work.
Macbook – and Apple Quality
First off, I do like my MacBook. It’s just the right size for working on my lap, it’s Intel dual core is powerful enough and yes it’s cute. However, the cuteness has faded somewhat as it’s now held together with two bits of sticky-tape! I kept thinking that the palm wrest was sticking to my hand and I thought it was coming unstuck. However, it’s actually started to crack and break apart. There is a ~3mm border that goes all the way around the flat surface, it’s that this is breaking away and my is it ugly. So the next time you hear someone harping on about the build quality of Apple, just hand them some sticky tape…they’ll need it.
iPhone, OSX upgrade or iBore?
I’ve been considering getting back into developing for mobile devices and decided to see what was happening with the iPhone and iPhone SDK. So I went off to the download site where I’d previously downloaded the beta SDK only to discover that it now wants OSX 10.5 where I’ve only got 10.4. Hmm, so you need 10.5 when the beta was fine with 10.4…hmm…really? Oh well I’m not paying for an upgrade that, IMO, gives me nothing but risk. So back to Win Mobile. In the meantime I was taking a look at the general experience of the Blog world in using the iPhone and found this, why buying an iPhone makes you a bore. So I’ll just stick with considering the iPod touch then 😉
Dialog bug with OSX?
My little Mac Book does a pretty good job of running my "at home" applications and doing so without getting too hot and noisy. However, every now and again it ends up sounding like a Spitfire about to take off. What I’ve noticed that is that in the majority of these cases there is nothing running that should be stressing the system out, however, the one common item is that OSX is waiting for me to acknowledge a dialog, e.g. there is a update for xyz do you want to download it? Simply dismissing the dialog turns the Merlin engine off and taxes back to the hanger. So is there some bug on OSX that gets the UI into some kind of tight loop waiting for a response? If so this could be pretty serious for any sort of server application that could be starved of the processor, or at least sucking power.
Completed Unreal Tournament 3 (2007)
I spent some (un)productive holiday time completing UT3 campaign mode and it was good fun. It’s more story based than previous versions and does give you an opportunity to choose different paths through the campaign although I’ve not spotted how I can replay it ensuring I don’t retake the same path. It’s certainly more hectic than 2004 and judging by the levels of my hair pulling it was certainly harder to beat some levels, especially one particular warfare game where my team was outnumbered. I guess I was supposed to use the ‘play card’ feature and there also seemed to be some hints about a team roster but I didn’t use either. One negative critism I’d level was that the AI was pretty dumb. Without wishing to spoil it there is a very important 1 vs 1 duel in which the CPU player is highly skilled, however the computer cannot resist going for the power ups. In this map the "double-damage" is situated in a difficult to reach spot that involves ducking to reach, which in turn means you’re moving really slowly. I.e. you go in there and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Having realised that, I would wait for the power up to apear but make no attempt to get it. I’d simply wait for the computer to attempt to get it when I could then easily mark up another kill. Now I would have expected a human opponent to realise that this strategy was costing them dearly and to give it up but the computer AI was just dumb. In the same duel in 2004 it took me a good few goes to see off the computer but I did this first attempt. Bit of an anti-climax really. But overall UT3 is great fun and getting in a ‘dark walker’ and unleashing War of the Worlds style death rays is good fun. Unlike many other games I’ll still be playing this for some time to come.
Html empty cells and table cell spacing
I finally became frustrated with having to ensure that table cells have some content to make them wok properly and from being hit by the requirement to set the horrible cellspacing attribute so I had a look around the web…
and to stop lines breaking in a table;
overflow:hidden;
white-space:nowrap;
What is the top position of an html element?
I was playing with AJAX Contol Toolkit today and wanted to position a control (ie DIV) at the same position as the control (ie element) however I was suprised to discover that there is no such property, you have to total all the offsets of the elements parents to get the actual position. Fortunatley I stumbled across this…
Find Position which worked a treat.
Visual Round Trip Analyzer/NetMon not working?
I spent 30 mins today trying to understand why the Visual Round Trip Analyzer (VRTA) or NetMon wouldn’t capture any data. After a lot of fiddling with network settings, Virus checkers and the like it turned out to be something very simple. NetMon has settings about how much disk space you should have free before it automatically stops capturing…yes I’ve got less than the default 2% free. After changing the setting it started working. Would have been nice if it has said, "automatically stopped, not enough free disk space" or something!
Missing SQL 2005 performance counters
My .net code kept complaining about uninitialized counters whenever it tried to access SQL Server, ‘The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly’. I opened Performance Monitor and sure enough the SQL counters had vanished. Now I’m not sure why that is, I did have some trouble with a recent service pack to Analysis Services so I’m guessing that’s what struck. With a bit of fishing around I managed to discover how to recover the counters;
Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn>lodctr perf-SQL2005sqlctr.ini
IT Bytes 