Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Is Live Mesh constantly crashing? Try removing Silverlight

  On two of the four machines I’m running Live Mesh on, I found the Mesh Operating Environment (moe.exe) repeatedly crashing. It was completely stable on the other two machines, but on these two machines it would just crash, restart, and crash again a few minutes later. The crash details were fairly sparse (only the Windows Error Reporting logs, not direct entries from Mesh), but I noticed they referenced mscorlib (the .NET runtime object library). I also noticed that both of these machines had Silverlight installed, while the two machines that were working fine didn’t. Silverlight does include a .NET CLR implementation, so I figured it was possible there was some conflict. Sure enough, the crashes stopped on both machines once I uninstalled Silverlight. In fairness, I’ve installed a number of alpha versions of Silverlight on my machine, so it’s possible this was not a general incompatibility with Silverlight and Mesh and just remnants of those previous versions. In any case, hope this saves... Posted Jul 30 2008, 02:51 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Microsoft, .NET, Knowledge Base

• Is IIS7 on Vista not serving static content?

  If you add IIS7 and ASP.NET on Vista, many of the common HTTP modules are not installed by default – including the one for static content. The problem is that it doesn’t return a 404 or other error, but rather zero-byte files. If you’re seeing empty files returned for CSS, images and JScript files, this is likely the culprit. (You’ll all see the Static Files handler for * being mapped to the DefaultDocumentModule). The answer is to go into the Windows Features dialog and make sure that the Common Http Features are checked off. Hope this helps. Posted Jul 02 2008, 02:10 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Software Development, Vista, Microsoft, .NET, Programming, Knowledge Base

• We are looking to hire good developers

  Notches is hiring developers . We’re looking to bring on developers to be part of the core engineering team. We want people that can contribute to the product in a myriad of ways beyond coding. We want people who can ask the tough questions and challenge us. We want people who are not afraid to take ownership over an area and really drive it forward. Our core platform is written in C# / .NET, so familiarity there will help – but ultimately we’re looking for smart, ambitious people with a good background in computer science, algorithms, and so on. Our offices are currently in downtown New York City (SoHo). We’re certainly flexible in terms of hours but we do want to spend as much time as possible collaborating in person – in other words, we’re not looking for offshore firms or out-of-town developers right now. You can find a more detailed job description here . If you’re interested or know anyone who might be, please contact us. Posted Jun 12 2008, 01:47 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Software Development, Personal, Web 2.0, C#, .NET, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Programming, Notches

• The Enterprise, The iPhone, and the Role of Silverlight

  With its recent announcement to support ActiveSync on the iPhone , Apple is clearly going after the enterprise user. The problem, as Colin puts it, is that the decisions that consumers make decisions on a radically different set of criteria than organizations . Lack of Exchange support was surely holding back enterprise adoption, so that move was both obvious and inevitable. The fact that they are also supporting remote wipe is a bigger deal than most might realize too - security is a major concern for large enterprises, and for a long time Blackberry was the de facto device in large part because of this. (Windows Mobiles devices weren't allowed at my last job until the Remote Wipe feature was enabled). Fundamentally, I think we're moving to a model where enterprises are going to demand a certain baseline for devices to play in their garden. Features like over-the-air Exchange connectivity, remote wipe, and support for .NET, Java, and Flash are quickly becoming non-negotiable. It... Posted Mar 27 2008, 09:00 AM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Rants, Gadgets, Microsoft, .NET, Enterprise, Apple, Programming

• Congrats to Faisal on his new role on the ADO.NET team

  My good buddy Faisal has moved from MSBuild to ADO.NET . Specifically, he's the Program Manager for LINQ to SQL and the Object Service for Entity Framework. He says you'll hear a lot more from him on these things, but of course if past history is any indication his blogging will be short lived :) Either way, I'm still waiting for him to convince me why I should LINQ instead of SubSonic . The only issue we're really having now with SubSonic is with the JOIN story, and they're supposedly prototyping stuff to address this in the next build. Posted Dec 05 2007, 03:45 PM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Personal, Microsoft, .NET, Programming

• Friday Fun: LOLCODE! on the DLR

  The LOLCAT is mildly amusing, but what I find really amazing is that someone actually took the time to write an implementation LOLCODE for the DLR . Imagine that, instead of writing boring old C# code, you wrote something like this: HAI CAN HAS STDIO? I HAS A FISH ITZ "Yummy" VISIBLE FISH VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!" I HAS A FIB I HAS A A ITZ 1 I HAS A B ITZ 0 GIMMEH FIB IM IN YR LOOP VISIBLE B IZ FIB SMALR 1? YARLY GTFO NOWAI VISIBLE "NOWAI" KTHX I HAS A TEMP ITZ A UP B LOL A R B LOL B R TEMP NERFZ FIB!! KTHX KTHXBYE Incredible. As John said, though, if nothing else it's a great example of how to implement a simple language on the DLR. Posted Nov 23 2007, 03:07 PM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Things that amuse me, .NET, Friday Fun

• Microsoft Silverlight

  A lot of people are very excited about Silverlight , the technology that was formerly known as WPF/E. Jesse says it will give Flash a real run for its money because of a better video story (emphasis in original). Unlike Flash, Silverlight (the new name) will support DRM, it supports the industry standard VC-1 codec used in HD-DVD and Blueray, and it can take advantage of the built-in media streaming capabilities of IIS. As for DRM support, I don't think that's of any real consequence. Jesse claims "companies that want to stream TV and movies over the web, will not consider any method that doesn't allow for DRM protection", but we're already seeing a trend away from DRM. That said, there are certainly things to get excited about, particularly the prospect of cross-platform CLR support and the ability to develop Flash-like applications with the power of the Visual Studio environment (and not having to learn a new scripting language at that). One thing worth noting is the fact that Flash is... Posted May 25 2007, 02:30 PM by Tim with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Innovation, Microsoft, C#, .NET, Video, Programming, DRM

• OpenID gaining momentum

  On the heels of Microsoft's announcement that it will support OpenID in CardSpace , AOL has become the latest major player to support OpenID . "Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI". This is big news. We made the decision to use OpenID as the sole authentication mechanism on a product we're building, and I'm increasingly happy with that decision. At best, we'll have no local accounts. At worst, we'll be an OpenID provider. It would be relatively trivial to expose ASP.NET membership as an OpenID provider (especially with the JanRain Server component). In fact, I'm somewhat surprised no one has done this already. If you're not familiar with OpenID, check out the brief introduction to OpenID . Posted Feb 17 2007, 07:05 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Technology, Security, .NET, Blogging, Programming, OpenID

• An Introduction to OpenID

  OpenID, which describes itself as "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity", has been gaining momentum and getting press in the Identity 2.0 space. The fundamental idea of OpenID is that a URI is necessarily unique and thus a good way to identify users. If you say you own a URI and can properly authenticate with the URI, then you must be who you say you are. Admittedly, this can be tricky to understand at first. Perhaps the best analogy is an open version of Passport, where you can download and run your own Passport server. When you go to Microsoft.com or MSDN, you don't log in to a "local" account - you are instead redirected to a Passport (now Windows Live ID) screen to enter your username and password. From a user perspective, OpenID is not that different as Simon Willison showed in this his screencast (embedded below). Scott Hanselman also discussed OpenID on a recent Hanselminutes and has a number of good resources (including the screencast) linked... Posted Feb 15 2007, 09:06 AM by Tim with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Security, .NET, Video

• SQL Server installation problems on Vista? (Failed to compile the Managed Object Format)

  I've been having issues installing SQL Server 2005 tools (i.e., Management Studio) on Vista. I know it works because I was able to get it installed on my tablet also running Vista - I just couldn't get it on my desktop. I thought it might be related to SQLEXPRESS installed as part of the VS.NET 2005 install, but that didn't seem to fix anything. As it turns out, this is related to a corrupt WMI repository - and the fix is quite easy. C:\Windows\system32>winmgmt /verifyrepository WMI repository is INCONSISTENT C:\Windows\system32>winmgmt /salvagerepository WMI repository salvage failed Error code: 0x8007041B Facility: Win32 Description: A stop control has been sent to a service that other running services are dependent on. C:\Windows\system32>winmgmt /salvagerepository WMI repository has been salvaged As you can see, I had to run it more than once - but it eventually fixed the problem. I clicked Retry and the install went through fine. Hope this saves time for anyone else running... Posted Jan 22 2007, 05:48 PM by Tim with | with 28 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Software Development, Microsoft, .NET, Enterprise, Programming