Managed World

Hello everyone, and welcome back to  the “Feature Of The Week” newsletter. This week, we will revisit a prior Fear Of The Week technology that we discussed in order to show off a cool capability of that technology. If you are a developer wanting to mess around with TxF (Transactional NTFS), you should especially read on :).

Did You Know? Did you know that on Vista, Transactional NTFS will work with an NTFS-formatted USB Flash Drive? It’s true! If you want to play around with Transactional NTFS and how it can interact with SQL, for instance, but you only have one hard drive, you don’t have to worry about Secondary Resource Managers and all that hubbub, gizmos,  doodads, and what-cha-ma-call-its. Just pop in that NTFS-formatted USB Flash Drive, and play around until your heart’s content.

Since the USB Flash Drive is not the system drive (well, we hope it’s not the system drive in this case :P), you can circumvent the need for secondary Resource Managers when wanting to test out interoperability scenarios with Transactional NTFS (like TxF + WCF, TxF + SQL, TxF + MSMQ, etc.).

Happy Coding :).

Generic Transactional NTFS Links...

Documentation

• Windows SDK

Videos/Webcasts

• [Video] Vista Transactional File System
• [Webcast] The Revolutionary Vista TxF Infrastructure
• [Webcast] Developing Apps For Vista With TxF

Blogs

• Jim Johnson
• Jason Olson

Hello everyone, and welcome back to  the “Feature Of The Week” newsletter. This week’s newsletter will be short and sweet. We will go over the new Application Recovery and Restart API. The API itself is very small and very simple to use (which, in my opinion, is “A Good Thing” TM).

What is Application Recovery and Restart?  Application Recovery is a set of technologies that give applications the opportunity to control what actions are taken on their behalf by the system when they (the application) fail.

If the application registers a callback with the RegisterApplicationRecoveryCallback function, the system will execute the recovery callback on application failure. The application can that take action to do things like attempting to recover documents. If the application has not registered for recovery, the system attempts to diagnose and report the problem.

If the application registered a callback with the RegisterApplicationRestart function, the system will automatically restart the application after the recovery or diagnosis is completed. If the application has not registered for restart, the system will simply close the application.

Documentation

• Windows SDK
• RegisterApplicationRecoveryCallback
• RegisterApplicationRestart

Screencasts

• Windows Vista Restart & Recovery APIs from Managed Code

I had a fresh reminder of the exact reason why I love XNA so much. I figured that I wanted to brush up on my "1337 5k!llz" and that it was about time to get back into C++ stuff. Well, I love game development, so why not brush up by developing a game, right? Well, that was my thinking behind this whole story.

I've been a DirectX kind of guy ever since I started in game development. So, what the heck, I figured I would stir up the pot and try some OpenGL development in C++. Not a problem, there's a metric crap-ton of OpenGL tutorials over on NeHe that I can follow. Here I come "Creating a Window", YEE HAW! Visual C++ Express installed? CHECK. Windows SDK installed? CHECK. Visual C++ Settings pointing to new Windows SDK directories? CHECK. I'm ready to roll, all y'all. Let's get on with it homeboys.

So, open up the first tutorial, type in all the code for creating a window and clearing the screen....

....

DAMN, that was a LOT of typing. Holy moley, I could have developed a bad case of arthritis from the tutorial alone. Geez, how many lines of code is this? 400?!?!?!?!?!? 400 lines of code to get a BLANK WINDOW on the screen? WTF?!?!? Okay, forget getting my "1337 5k!llz" back in shape, I'm just going to spend that time continuing to work with XNA.

Perhaps to make it more "1337," I'll play around with the Lex/Yacc-type stuff in the Visual Studio SDK to write my own language that I can use as a custom scripting language in a game. Yummy.

TIMMMMMEH!!! TIMMMMMEH!!!

I don't know why, but apparently it has taken me until now to finally "get" podcasting. The interesting part though is that the .NET-type podcasts aren't the ones that have really caught my attention. No, it has been the game development and other video game-related podcasts that have caught my eye.

The one that got me started was GDC Radio. It has a bunch of game development-related podcasts that are excellent. I've loaded up on a bunch of them to get ready for my 10 hour flight to Amsterdam on Saturday. One particular one that sounds interesting is an interview they did with Bioware on 'Creating a Monster RPG.'

I dug through the iTunes podcast directory (the more I use iTunes, the more I love it (that, and my iPod)). That led me to a bunch of podcasts on video games and video game reviews. Just what a video game geek like me likes :).

Now, when I'm packed into the sardine can stuffed with high oxygen levels for exorbitant amounts of time this weekend, I can zone out and listen to these podcasts while getting all doped up on apocalyptic amounts of caffeine and pretending that I'm on some far-off safari voyage across the picturesque lands of the Serengeti (although I don't know why I would exactly do that as I'm not much of an outdoor person (I suppose it just sounds better than "playing Final Fantasy 3 on my Nintendo DS Lite")).

Yesterday we saw our first snowfall of the year (at least, sticking-to-the-ground-wise) in the Redmond/Kirkland, WA area. While the Microsoft campus was technically "open" today, all major services (read: shuttles, reception, cafeterias, etc.) were all closed. So, in that sense, I consider the campus "closed" in practice. Since the roads are an absolute mess, I decided staying home today was the best option.

I went out for some food last night and learned my lesson. While I did get home safely, it took about 1.5 hours to get 16 city blocks. Not fun, in the least.

This was also Jasmine's (our doggy) first measurable snow fall as well (at least enough to play in). And now, the jury is in: Jasmine Loves Snow. I decided I wasn't going to let this moment slip past me, so I whipped out the camera (which reminded me, I really need to get a _good_ digital camera).

Here's the view from our back porch this morning (it was a couple inches deep in places):


Jasmine playing in the snow:


And, the aftermath of Jasmine playing in the snow (what a cute puppy!!!!):


This time of year is definitely a beautiful one :).

When setting up a virtual machine for some internal development today, I came to a sore realization:

The only thing in this universe that takes longer than installing Visual Studio 2005, is uninstalling Visual Studio 2005.

Sigh...