Greg Blogging On .NET

January / Feb .NET Stuff

The Dayton Cincinnati Code Camp turned out really awesome- I was glad to have travelled down. Got to present on Media Center 2005 along side with Jason Follas. Got to hang out with some great folks and discuss a few community ideas as well (more detail coming later- stay tuned).

Jim Holmes did a really great job organizing the event, as did his team of helpers. The amount of work that Jim had to put forth to pull this off was just mind boggling. I think everyone would agree that the code camp was a success- check out his blog for a quick summary of the evals.   The presentation on Media Center was a little frustrating at first- the machine locked up initially when we were trying to show a simple demo.  I'm not 100% sure what the issue was but I am leaning toward hardware.  I got the machine home and had a "Could not boot OS" message when I turned it on. After tightening a few cables here and there everything seemed fine.  So... I'll chalk it up to the demo gods for the time being. 

In case you want to get the full Media Center experience, and learn a little more about MCE and how to build one- come check us out at the Great Lakes Area .NET User Group on February 15th. 

Also, we have a really special presentation coming up at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group meeting on Jan 31! Bill Wagner (presenter, author of Effective C# and other books and articles, all around good guy) will be presenting on a great topic- generic in C#!  Meeting detail here.

Oh, I still owe a link to the code and presentation. I will post this as soon as Jim sends me a link to the location.

Dayton / Cincinnati Code Camp

I'm here at the Dayton / Cincinnati code camp today. So far it rocks!  A lot of familiar faces, and plenty of new ones.  I belive there around around 130 people here- quit a showing especially for a Saturday. 

Gearing up for a presentation on Windows Media Center Edition 2005.  It's been a lot of fun preparing for this.  Thursday of this past week my lovely weather web service decided to break- and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me.  I found mention on other sites about issues with .NET and the NOAA web service, but nothing to tangible.

I decided to grab a program called Ethereal- it allows you to sniff packets on the network going to and from your machine. I kept getting the Protocol Violation error. After examining the packets I noticed that everything appeared to be posting correctly so I knew the data was coming.  However, ASMx with .NET 2.0 is very picky and wants everything "by the book" for security purposes among other things.  Eventually I did the following:

1. Forced the protocol version of the HTTPwebrequest to 1.0

2. Allowed for unsafe headers in the web.config

3. Disabled keepalives

I will be posting the code for the demo and the presentation very soon- stay tuned!

Xbox 360 MCE Tips

When registering an application for use with an MCE Extender and using the %windir%\ehome\RegisterMCEApp.exe, make sure you use the /allusers switch. If you do not use this switch, it will only work for highly priveleged accounts.  The MCE Extender runs in the context of a less secure account, and thus will not see the add-in if you do not register with /allusers.  For more information about what you can and cannot do with an MCE Extender, see the following MSDN article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/MedctrSDK/htm/handlingthelimitedaccessrightsofamediacenterextend.asp

Also, thanks goes out to Michael Creasy (MSFT) for his help.

A quick summary: the MCE rights are limited by default read/write:

- Only to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE
- Only locations on disk that explicitly have read/write permissions defined for Media Extender Users local group. By default, this is the Shared Documents folder.

Beyond that, I haven't really found limitations with the applications that can run on an extender.  I was able to successfuly get the xbox 360 to display my custom HTML application that uses ASP.NET web services, and type in to them with the Media Center remote (did not try the Xbox 360 remote yet).  I am going to be playing with AJAX / ATLAS and will also give that a whirl (not sure if this will make it into the code camp demo or not).

MVP Status...

Xbox 360, ASP.NET, and Media Center Edition at Code Camp

If you are anywhere near Dayton / Cincinnati Ohio, please consider coming out to the Code Camp on Saturday, January 21. There will be plenty of great topics presented. The main categories are as follows:

SQL/Mobile/CF,  Development, Non .NET Methodologies, Whiteboard Talks / Misc. topics

As you probably guessed, the emphasis will be on coding.  There are 6 sessions, and 4 categories running concurrently at each session.  There is no charge to attend and breakfast/lunch will be provided thanks to Microsoft. Jason Follas, a fellow user group leader at the Northwest Ohio .NET User Group will be presenting along with me on the topic of developing for Media Center in a whiteboard session at the end of the day.  We will also showing how the Xbox 360 connects to Media Center as well as a cool proof of concept application. We will show some demos, give you some takeways for developing apps, setting up a media center, etc. and an interactive session.

Here is the camp schedule:

http://daytondevgroup.net/CampSchedule.aspx

I know many of the other presenters and I'm sure this will be a great event. Please drop me a comment if you plan on attending.

Register here:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032284859&Culture=en-US