News and Views of a Technical Nomad

Mar

27

Cebit Roundup

March 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment

A useful summary of recent Cebit news from Germany is available at EliteBastards.com (Love the Domain Name!).

Mar

27

MS Embedded Partner, Southampton-based company BVM, have released a Mini-ITX platform with MS Embedded XP SP2 pre-installed on Compact Flash drives.

The componentised OS can be used on embedded systems that require sub-sets of Windows XP functionality, and/or should be tamper-proof and/or have a small footprint.

Various OS options are offered ranging from an off-the-shelf image on CF disks to a fully customised locked down image.

The standard Windows XP Embedded “Advanced Set Top Box” (ASTB) image includes the device drivers and services required for everyday applications, such as Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, USB devices, and TCP/IP networking with file sharing. Also included are device drivers for display, serial and parallel ports providing a solid starting point for the development of most embedded applications.

The latest release, with Service Pack 2 and Feature Pack 2007, adds extensive control of the write filter, required on Flash based systems to minimise wear of the Flash devices when configured as system discs.

Standard releases of Windows XP Embedded are available on CompactFlash or memory stick for most of the Mini-ITX and mini-boards in the BVM range.

Source: Epiacenter

Mar

22

Microsoft Technet has a new whitepaper on best practises for SQL Server 2005 SP2 which can be found here.

Mar

22

It is well known among Mini-ITX fans that VIA produce even smaller boards than the 17cm x 17cm Mini-ITX, namely the Nano-ITX which is only 12cm x 12cm.

The Nano-ITX range of motherboards from VIA (also known as the Epia N, NL and NX series) were only introduced in 2006 and there is still a lack of suitable cases around which has the obvious effect of hindering take-up of the new board in the market.

Hopefully, this will soon be rectified as German company YANG iT, has released a new enclosure for the Nano-ITX called the Serener GN-L01 which is avaliable from Logic Supply in the USA. YANG iT also produce a range of cases for the Mini-ITX.

Source: Epiacenter

Mar

22

AMD has introduced a new Motherboard size called DTX in an attempt to compete with the increasingly popular Mini-ITX produced by VIA and others.

The new board would be 20cm x 24.4cm which is a bit bigger than the Mini-ITX which is 17cm x 17cm.

AMD is pushing a new motherboard format called DTX, which it says will allow system assemblers to build smaller PCs that are quieter and less wasteful of energy.

The DTX spec is intended to bolster the fast-growing market for small form factor (SFF) PCs, said Jochen Polster, AMD’s sales & marketing VP. He added that around 20 companies have already signed up to make DTX boards and cases, including Asus, Asetek, MSI, Gigabit, Elitegroup and Shuttle.

Polster said that PCs based on ATX motherboards are too big, noisy and energy-hungry. “The best argument for ATX towers is that the components are standard, and therefore cheaper than proprietary SFF boxes,” he added, in a dig at the mini-ITX format championed by VIA.

With their built-in video, sound and other ports, VIA’s mini-ITX boards have been popular with builders of embedded PCs - and with case-modders, who build PCs into all sorts of outlandish casings - but less so in the wider PC market.

Polster claimed that’s because compact designs such as mini-ITX, which is 170mm square, are simply too small for the average technician to work with. By comparison, at 200×244mm, DTX is still big enough to see where the cables go - and to allow for expansion.

“DTX is designed to be easy to assemble and upgrade,” he said. “That’s very important for small system builders, who cannot deal with very small boxes.”

The DTX specification is deliberately limited. It calls for the board to be manufacturable as a four-layer PCB, which Polster claimed would make it cheaper than the likes of mini-ITX, and it defines two expansion slots and an internal power supply for the PC, but nothing else apart from mounting points.

“We do define two PCI or PCI-Express expansion slots,” he said. “Almost no-one uses expansion slots any more except for graphics - there are exceptions, and they will continue to use towers.”

He added, “We’re not interested in defining I/O or graphics on the motherboard. The builder can include PS2 ports if he wants - we think he shouldn’t, but he can. We are trying to be neutral here - we want to repeat the success of ATX.”

Source: PC World

Mar

19

Rockford Lhotka, whose books on object programming in VB6 heavily influenced my programming style back in the late 1990s, has a pretty interesting article on the growth of specialisation in the programming world, which can be found here.

It is a view that I totally share; I have been in the programming industry for 20 years now; when I started in the mid 1980s as a COBOL programmer on VMS; we were expected to know everything about the operating system, the database system and the programming language. This was in the days before Relational Databases came along and revolutionised queries! In those days, one could learn everything there was to know about C or COBOL or FORTRAN in 3-6 months.

Today, in the Siebel world, I would defy anyone to say that they know everything about Siebel. There are too many Business Components, Business Services, Verticals etc etc for anyone to know everything and that is just Siebel. Everyone I know in the Siebel world is a specialist as am I (I specialise in EAI).

Visual Basic has grown from a pretty simple language in 1993 to an incredibly powerful, diverse, flexible language and nowadays, one cannot be expected to know everything about the .NET Framework. I know VB.NET quite well and I have done a fair bit of development in VB.NET and the .NET Framework; but there is no way that I use, or have a need to use, the vast bulk of the Framework.

Read the whole article!

Mar

19

Microsoft Blogger Scott Guthrie has a new series of really good posts explaining new features which will be included in Orcas, Microsoft’s up and coming version of Visual Studio which includes new versions of VB.NET, C# and the .NET Framework.

The first post covers new C# and VB features including Object Initializers, Automatic Properties and Collection Initializers and can be found here.

The second post explains the new Extension Methods and can be found here.

You can find an introduction to Orcas here.

Mar

14

Microsoft have now made the latest version (SP2) of the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 available for download here.

The .NET Compact Framework allows developers to write .NET applications for Windows PocketPC and Smartphone devices using Visual Studio 2005.

I once setup the Compact Framework on Visual Studio 2003 on my old laptop and successfully managed to port elements of my .NET VB Windows application including the TreeView control and have my PocketPC query data wirelessly from my central SQL Server database which was pretty cool.

The main problem I had with it was getting SQL Server CE to run on the PDA and replicate with the main database using IIS. What I really wanted it to do was replicate with a local database on my laptop and not a central database via IIS. That was a couple of years ago on SQL Server 2000 however and things have progressed a bit since then.

Anyway, back to the new release…

New Features:
Service Pack 2 of the .Net Compact Framework V2.0 includes some new features in the Remote Performance Monitor aimed at finding memory leaks in the managed heap. These features allow you to take snapshots of the GC heap at any point in time and view the relationships between the live object instances in the heap. You can also compare multiple snapshots over time in order to spot allocation trends in your application as it executes. Fixed Bugs:

  1. NETCFRPM fails on x64
  2. Setup install/uninstall fails silently when the MSI is launched from Control Panel-Programs and Features on Vista
  3. Finalizers fail on RTF objects because COM bindings are already disposed
  4. VS crashes on trying to attach without setting the Attach Enabled Registry Key
  5. Thread.Join() fails with ERROR_INVALID_HANDLE on CE 6.0 platform
  6. Potential memory corruption caused by circular reference
  7. JIT assertion failure when non-existent COM port is addressed
  8. TypeLoadException using generics with NETCF 2.0
  9. IrDA is broken on Windows CE 5.0 devices
  10. NetCFRPM and MDBG cannot target headless devices
  11. SerialPort: Data corruption occurs if DataReceived event is used to receive Unicode characters sent across serial ports
  12. SerialPort: Cannot open a COM port beyond COM9
  13. SerialPort: GetPortNames() does not return serial port names beyond COM9
  14. SerialPort: Data corruption occurs if DataReceived event is used to receive Unicode characters sent across serial ports
  15. NETCF deadlocks on exit if native callback delegate has been called on native thread
  16. VS 2005 RTM attempts to deploy NETCFv2.wce5.ARMV4I.cab/System_SR_ENU.cab instead of NETCFv2.wm.ARMV4I.cab/System_SR_ENU_wm.cab on Windows Mobile 6 platforms
  17. XmlSerializerializationWriter: When GetSpecifiedMember returns false serialization is halted resulting in loss of data
  18. Access violation marshaling a class with a string field
  19. Stepping out from a Breakpoint after Func eval causes breakpoint to remain at same place and then VS 2005 hangs
  20. COM: Access violation in N->M byref marshaling
  21. Native exception in marshalling code when using Interlocked.Exchange
  22. Access violation in StubPolicyAlloc (eestub\policy.cpp
  23. SerialPort.Open thows IOException on CE 6.0 devices
  24. Type.GetDefaultMembers() doesn’t return base type’s default members
  25. Installing multiple locales of same MSI results in multiple instances of NetCF showing up in Add Remove Programs
  26. VS 2005 attempts to deploy System_SR_ENU.cab instead of System_SR_ENU_wm.cab on Windows Mobile 6 platforms
  27. Debugger does not correctly handle new native threads entering through COM
  28. NETCFRPM parses connection string improperly when device uses ipv6
  29. V2 SP2: HttpWebRequest: HTTPS request fails when TLS_RSA_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA cipher is used
  30. Debugger may AV if breakpoints active before F5
  31. WebBrowser’s NavigatingEventArgs does not allow to cancel navigation
  32. XmlSerializer fails to deserialize enum’s with spaces

Source: Mark Prentice at MSDN

Mar

14

Red Five Labs have recently released a new .NET Compact Framework implementation for Nokia S60 cellphones which run Symbian OS.

Basically, it allows applications built on .NET Compact to run unchanged on phones running Symbian which is the operating system that both Nokia and Ericsson use for their phones.

For more information, check out Red Five Labs

Source: Symbian Freak

Mar

14

MSDN magazine have an interesting article on a new version of the venerable utility Spy++ which programmers have traditionally used to help debug Windows processes and messages.

The new version is called ManagedSpy and is designed specifically for .NET work.

keep looking »
blog search directory Directory of Computers/Tech Blogs British Expat Blog Directory.