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November 2006 - Posts

• WPF Here, There and Everywhere (or An Introduction to WPF/E)

  There's been some noise recently about WPF Everywhere (or WPF/E), a technology which was announced at PDC05 and Joe Stegman from Microsoft demonstrated at MIX06 . Here I'm going to collect together a few web resources about this technology. So Read More... Posted 28 November 2006 11:00 by john.rayner | 3 Comments Filed under: WPFE, WPF/E, Silverlight

• An architect is like ... Polyfilla

  A colleague insisted that everyone knows what an architect does. More by nature of a comparison than from wanting to assume the label of "architect", I said "Well, what I do when I join a team is to try and fill whatever holes there are Read More... Posted 27 November 2006 16:57 by john.rayner | 0 Comments Filed under: Technical Architect Role

• WSS2: Stsadm.exe removes existing web.config files

  I'm writing an installer to install a SharePoint site onto a server and have found some strange behaviour in stsadm.exe. The relevant portion of my installation goes like this: Create a new directory Create an IIS web site on this directory Deploy Read More... Posted 20 November 2006 16:23 by john.rayner | 0 Comments Filed under: Installers, MSI, Deployment, SharePoint 2003, WSS2

• WiX: Integrating into the continuous build

  I've been working on a WiX installer recently and I was asked to integrate it into the project's continuous build process. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. Early on in the development, I decided to use WiX version 3. It is nicely integrated Read More... Posted 17 November 2006 14:17 by john.rayner | 3 Comments Filed under: Continuous integration, Continuous build, CC.Net, Engineering practices, CruiseControl.Net, Installers, MSI, WIX

• WiX: A not-quite-so-gentle introduction

  In my last post, I gave a very high-level overview of MSIs and WiX. Here I discuss more of the detail and provide the basic technology context which lots of tutorials seem to omit. Read More... Posted 15 November 2006 20:46 by john.rayner | 0 Comments Filed under: Engineering practices, Installers, MSI, WIX

• WiX: A gentle introduction

  An introduction Windows Installer XML (WiX) - what is, why you might want to use it, and some useful WiX-related links Read More... Posted 10 November 2006 12:39 by john.rayner | 1 Comments Filed under: Engineering practices, Installers, MSI, Deployment, WIX

• Using WCF in the MessengerService

  I reworked the MessengerService to use WCF instead of hosting its own web services. The resulting code is a lot simpler and more powerful, thanks to the WCF library. Read More... Posted 07 November 2006 11:04 by john.rayner | 1 Comments Filed under: C# 2.0, WCF, .Net 3.0, Messenger, MSN Messenger Attachment(s): MessengerService2.1.zip

• Reflection on Generic Types (part 2)

  A while ago I posted a question about generic interfaces that ramined unanswered until Anthony supplied a neat solution. This got me thinking a bit further about reflection on generic types. Read More... Posted 02 November 2006 09:59 by john.rayner | 1 Comments Filed under: C# 2.0, CLR 2.0, Generics, Reflection

• A Windows Service to accept messages via a web service and send them over MSN Messenger

  Here I present a Windows Service which signs in to an MSN Messenger account at startup and exposes some web services in order to send messages. A custom MSBuild task is also included which consumes these web services. Read More... Posted 01 November 2006 12:01 by john.rayner | 4 Comments Filed under: Development practices, Continuous integration, Continuous build, CC.Net, Engineering practices, CruiseControl.Net, Messenger, MSN Messenger Attachment(s): MessengerService.zip