Philip Beadle's Blog

Today Lorraine and I went for a nice long walk around our cool, city Melbourne.  I took a bunch of pictures while we were walking so you can get an idea of where we went and why it is such a nice walk.

Well I'm sad to say that the 95.61_vista driver is not as stable as I would like.  Getting a few driver failures today :(  Oh well the CTP build is out next month.

I was just reading a post by Shawn Mehaffie on a little known security feature in DotNetNuke.  It looks into how to make your database access from the web site more secure.  You can read it here.  

Over the last few weeks I have been trying to find a video driver for my Toshiba Satellite Pro P100 on Vista 5472 with little success.  I tried the ones from nVidia and some from a friend at Microsoft but they kept doing the old BSOD on me and freezing up.  Plus they wouldnt let me play video etc.  A colleague at Readify, Francois pointed me this site http://www.laptopvideo2go.com where I have been trying to find a driver that works well.  These guys modify the inf files so they install properly on lots of different graphics cards.  I finally ended up with 95.61_vista.  So far it seems to be stable even though it blue screened on first start up.  It enables Aero to run and has Glass as well.  Also some videos play. 

So Ill see how this one goes and hopefully the Vista build next month will have everything I need built in :)

Ok you have to check this out.  www.local.live.com is now covering Australia.  The maps are great and the driving instructions appear to give a good answer.  They returned the route I would drive for the ones I tested.  The aerial photos only go to a high level but at least its a start for now.  Google Earth is still much better for aerial shots.

The really cool thing about local.live is that there is an Outlook addin that will give you maps and driving instructions added to your appointments !  You can get it here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7A0BCE98-EAB4-40A3-B7EC-43C09D6AE8CB&displaylang=en&Hash=HW8DBG.  You will need Outloom 2003, doesnt work on the Beta version of Office yet.

Last night I got up at 1:55am to attend a live web cast from Redmond.  Quoted from the events site.

"This session explores designing and developing UI workflow applications. The next release of ASP.NET will provide a key integration point with Windows Workflow Foundation, enabling developers to build PageFlow scenarios making it easier to create representative UI for the business process layer. Come and learn the keys to UI workflow ranging across interactive activities, the hosting layer and the PageFlow design. Topics covered include the provider model for workflow persistence, communication mechanisms between the UI and the workflow runtime, parallelism and delays in an interactive workflow, and activity mappings available to the UI workflow developer.

Presenter: Kashif Alam is a Program Manager on the ASP.NET team.

About the Live From Redmond series. This series of Live Meeting presentations are designed specifically for the community by members of the Microsoft product teams. The presentations are all done by actual team members working on the specific technology, and are a great way to hear from and ask your questions directly to the product team ."

There were a few technical difficulties but the bit I did see and hear was quite interesting.  They were showing a new addition to the Work Flow Designer and runtime that allows you to easily control the flow of a set of ASP.Net pages.  They had a control called a UIActivity and a new item called a NavigationWorkflow.  I didnt get to see the actual demo as the Live Meeting window froze but the technology does look promising.

I love the visual designer for Workflow in VS2005, it really is an excellent addition to the suite.  I personally believe that Workflow (WF) will become a major part of a lot of applications.  Not just because of the end result application but also during the development process developers will be able to more easily show what the application is doing to the client.  We all know clients love pretty colours and graphs :)

Mitch Denny has come up with a novel way of getting a real GRID computer system to work.  I have joined in and put the IFrame on my site to help out with the experiment.  You can read all about it at www.gridenvy.com .

Its not a typo its a new book / encylopedia that i bought recently. I am having a blast reading it and trying out the "nuggets" of wisdom inside. The best thing about it is its all stuff you already know or have heard about and you know is right.

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TDo this survery and see which Super hero you are. Always good for a laugh.

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When I was trying to create a byte array[] of a report in SQL Reporting Services I kept getting a permissions error saying that the user didnt have enough permissions to perform the function.  The error is misleading as it is not a file system permission error its actually a reporting services permissions issue.  All you need to do is login to localhost/Reports click on the report and then go to Properties/Security and add the user as a Browser.