The Moth

The baby of our team (sorry Mark :-)), just dropped me a line to point to an official version of Camtasia that works on Vista.

This is great news, I can now resume to producing some screencasts, which is something I haven't done for a while. If you are new to this blog, check out my previous screencasts on channel9 and on the MSDN nuggets page and stay tuned for some Orcas recordings.

I haven't played with this yet but it looks promising for anyone with SideShow interest.

See announcement in SideShow forums and also the download site.

In the "Orcas" framework, another green assembly is the System.Net.dll that contains all the new PeerToPeer classes (spread over 3 namespaces: System.Net, System.Net.PeerToPeer and System.Net.PeerToPeer.Collaboration). I saw a nice demo of this by the dev on the team back at TechReady3. In terms of explaining the library, once again the product team are "getting in there" first, so no point duplicating what they have already written. Check out the first post and stay tuned on the p2p blog for more... I've captured a class diagram of 3 key classes here for my future reference...

Whinge and you shall receive. 18 months ago I moaned about the lack of FileAs in Windows Mobile 5.0 and showed how to achieve that programmatically . WM6 offers it out of the box in the UI as you can see below :)

Some blogs have reported that there are performance improvements in the Garbage Collector that ships with Orcas. That is slightly inaccurate. What is new is the ability to have finer control over the GC, including the ability to suggest to it that it should not run during the execution of a time critical phase (e.g. code block) of your choice (I know some guys that would love that in the .NET Compact Framework but this is a full framework feature only).

I was going to do a proper write up on the additions (1 method, 1 property and 1 enumeration) but Chris beat me to it and, given that he officially tests the feature, he certainly knows a lot more about it than me so go read about the new GC collection modes here and the new GC latency modes here.

Planning for Tech Ed 2007 has started. As one of the largest dev conferences, in each timeslot there is a lot of choice and attendees sometimes make the wrong choice (and then score the session badly of course because it wasn't what they wanted). This is a genuine problem with technical events and is not specific to Tech Ed.

Dave is looking for ideas on how to improve the session descriptions and has some radical propositions for changes. Go give him your feedback.

In my opinion, no amount of shortcuts is going to tell me what the session is going to be like other than the abstract. I really don't understand why people don't read the abstracts carefully before going into a session. If everybody read the 7 line paragraph and made their decision based on that, then we could work on speakers writing accurate abstracts. As an example consider my session description here. After the session, one of the delegates came up to me and said, "I enjoyed your session but was a little disappointed as I was expecting you to cover what was coming in Orcas for Vista development". At first I was baffled why he would think that, but then I guessed what happened: the guy read the title and nothing else. Again, please read my abstract and see if it was not clear what the session was about. There is an argument here for better titles, but how can you capture a 75' session in 7 words?

If you are one of the delegates that do not read abstracts and just turns up at sessions based on the title alone, let us know why and maybe tell us what is it we can do to incentivise you to read those abstracts.

If you are not familiar with the new Event Tracing for Windows in Vista then read this article. You'll then no doubt be asking yourself "what about access from managed code?". For the answer, go read this blog post.

While I have previously described Restart Manager, I never thought to use it in this cool way even though the question definitely is something I have asked myself in the past! Keep reading...

Question: When my application attempts to access a file, I get access-denied errors because the file is in use by another application. In the past, I've used tools from Sysinternals (microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals) to figure out what that other application is, but I'd like to be able to discover this programmatically from within my application. Is there a way to programmatically determine what processes are currently using a specific file?

Answer: Stephen to the rescue!

I was going to point to the new crypto algorithms on Shawn's blog, but actually if security floats your boat, just read his entire Orcas category.

If you prefer exploring these things directly in Visual Studio look at the classes in the System.Security.Cryptography namespace in Core.

Office 2007 introduces a new file format, which you will have at least heard of e.g. PowerPoint files are now pptx, Word files are docx and Excel files are xlsx. Not everybody has made the switch to the new Office suite and I know that because I keep getting requests to provide my slides in the old format. Please open the files in the new format with the legacy version that you are using - just download the Office Compatibility Pack.