He’s a member of the 2old2play website but he’s certainly NOT too old to play the latest games. Meet Waterborn 2o2p in our Xbox.com Gamer Spotlight!

Bonjour,

Je vous partage un paramétrage qui peut être très utile sur un serveur de production (ou sur votre pc) afin d’investiguer après coup sur l’origine de crashes applicatifs. Vous allez me dire : mais on sait déjà faire en branchant un débogueur comme Adplus ou avec DebugDiag! Oui, effectivement. La subtiité est que je vous propose de faire cette prise de dumps sans avoir de composant ou service actif à mettre en place qui “surveillerait” les processus. En effet, nous utilisons la fonctionnalité WER (Windows Error Reporting) fournit par Windows. 

Le paramétrage est tout simple : une ruche avec trois valeurs dans le registre :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps

• DumpFolder : Chemin vers le répertoire dans lequel enregistrer les dumps
• DumpCount : Nombre maximum de dumps pouvant être créés
• DumpType : Type de dump à créer (1 pour mini dump et 2 pour full dump)

 Voici un exemple que vous pouvez utiliser avec comme répertoire de sortie C:\Dumps :

 

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\LocalDumps]
“DumpFolder”=hex(2):43,00,3a,00,5c,00,44,00,75,00,6d,00,70,00,73,00,00,00
“DumpCount”=dword:00000010
“DumpType”=dword:00000002

 

A noter qu’il vous est possible d’effectuer ce paramétrage seulement pour un processu donnée (et non pour tous les procesus). Dans ce cas, il suffit de créer une sous-ruche portant le même nom que l’éxécutable et ayant la même structure :

 

–

 

La référence MSDN est la suivante : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb787181(VS.85).aspx 

A bientot,

Sebastien.

Those who have followed this blog will have noticed that it’s been a long time since we posted anything new about Axum, and the time has come to state publicly that which may have been clear to some but not others, that we’re not currently pursuing productization.

We have seriously examined the possibility of releasing the source code under an OSS license, but that, too, will require time that we don’t have that much of. At this time, no one is assigned paid hours to work on Axum, but we are still entertaining fantasies about an open-source release sometime in the future by doing some extra work during down times.

That said, the incubation effort was very successful in our opinion: several of the concepts embodied in Axum live on in the next versions of C# and .NET: C# and VB will support their own form of asynchronous methods, while .NET is adding support for data-flow constructs following the patterns we set up in Axum and the C++ concurrency runtime.

On the other hand, the concepts around safe parallelism and agent-based programming were seen by many as too far outside the mainstream to be adopted now in languages like C# and VB. The idea of Axum was to not force these concepts on general-purpose languages, so those of us who have work on Axum are not surprised.

It’s disappointing to have to post this kind of entry, but it’s better to acknowledge the situation than to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that everything’s OK.

 

Niklas, Artur & Josh
Axumites

It’s time to profile our third Tech Student of the Month, featuring a student whom we feel is using the Microsoft platform and development toolset to do something exceptional. For the month of February we have chosen Robert Klenka, a junior at the University of Texas – Arlington who is studying Computer Science and Engineering. Robert is already selling his apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace and has written code that is being used on fighter jets!

Robert’s interest for computers started at an early age when he was inspired by his father’s work as an engineer at General Electric. Robert became fascinated by computer programming because it allowed him the freedom to create anything he desired. His interest in Web Design lead him to create his first website by the time he was in Middle School. He taught himself how to create websites from scratch by searching for articles and tutorials online as well as toying with the NetScape Composer. Robert continued to develop his web designing skills and was later given an opportunity to create a website for a local gun club. His experiences here allowed him to improve upon his skill set and learn how to work with a real client for the first time. Consequently, he has been managing the same site for 10 years now.

Robert was unable to take programming classes until his Junior Year in high school, so he decided to work and study on his own. Once Robert became a junior, he was excelling in his programming classes having already received a CompTIA A+ and Cisco Certification. It was then that he realized he wanted to pursue a degree in Computer Science after graduating. Klenka enrolled in a local community college to build up his knowledge base about programming and then went to the University of Texas – Arlington. Here, he began to learn new languages like C# and ASP.NET using Microsoft tools like Visual Studio provided by his school’s MSDNAA license and the DreamSpark program.

In the summer of his freshman year at UTA, Robert got the opportunity to combine his passions for programming and aeronautics as an intern at Lockheed Martin. During this first internship at Lockheed Martin, Robert was involved in an independent research and development group where he was able to assist with the design of an airplane chip benchmarking process. He worked on the creation of a mining program that combined three different types of airplane chip data into one using C++. In addition, Robert was given a unique opportunity to put together a first generation Microsoft Surface and write some apps for it.

Robert spent another two summers interning for Lockheed Martin. In his second term, he worked with a fellow intern on updating all of the planes’ Java code from version 1.3 to 1.5. This code enabled Lockheed Martin to determine different airplane electronic capabilities and is now being used on the aircraft-manufacturing floor. By his third summer at Lockheed, Robert was given the opportunity to work on the embedded software of the F-35 Lighting Joint Strike Fighter Jet using C++. Unfortunately, Robert could not expand more, deeming it ‘classified.’ Nonetheless, his code is being used on real fighter jets. Cool!

Now that he has finished his internship at Lockheed Martin, Robert is planning to take more advanced CS classes in his senior year. He is taking advantage of this free time to work on several personal projects such as a Windows Mobile application called OBDMobile. The idea for the app started when Robert asked himself, “How can I talk to my car?” He explored how to answer this question by experimenting with his beloved Dodge truck to create an on board diagnostics kit that could check information from his car. Robert sought advice from local shops but nobody wanted to help him because it would compete with expensive products that the shops were already selling. This gave him even more motivation to build the solution himself. He used his laptop to read the data from his car and built a user interface using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft Expression Studio 3 (both of which are available to students for free on the DreamSpark website). Now Robert was truly “talking to his car” by getting all sorts of information such as RPM, MPH, cooling temperatures, lights, etc. Robert took his achievement further when he ported the app to run on his phone using Windows Mobile 6.5. OBDmobile is being sold on the Windows Phone Marketplace today for .99. Thanks to DreamSpark Robert was able to register his application to the App Hub for free and has had over 100 downloads from people using his app all over the world. Not a bad way to pay for books!

Since the release in November, Robert has gone on to create a few apps for Windows Phone 7. He finds the new operating system so easy to develop for that he can create a new app in almost no time. Robert has made a lite version of OBDmobile to run on Windows Phone 7 along with new apps called FlickPick and P90X Manager. FlickPick allows you to make quick decisions by loading in a list of options and then shaking the device to pick one of them. P90X Manager helps you track your workouts and nutrition to stay in shape on the go!

We wish Robert the best of luck and hope that he enjoys learning advanced programming skills in his senior year!

Join our Microsoft Tech Student community on Facebook and tell us your story!

Visit Robert Klenka’s website

Read last month’s Tech Student Profile on Den Delimarsky

 

 

This past Saturday, I was involved in a presentation to over 180 developers at the Silicon Valley Web Camp event, a free training event for developers run by Microsoft. I presented a session on data access and co-presented some follow-up sessions with Michael Palermo (@mpalermo) who knocked it out of the park!

We covered all kinds of great stuff: ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor, Entity Framework in the morning. Dr. Doris Chen (@doristchen), the local Developer Evangelist for Silicon Valley, presented the rest of the afternoon on jQuery, AJAX and other client technologies.

Of course, the demo goblins ate me up and it snowballed but I think that overall I did a great job of making my point. I blame lack of sleep over the last couple of weeks

Here’s a pic (Palermo’s presenting and I’m monkey boy on the PC for this one).

Here’s another one of me helping some folks – this is where the REAL value is, getting one-on-one help from the experts!

 

Palermo and I presented some custom content not available in the WebCamp training kit. If you’d like to use it, you can download it here.

Upcoming Redmond, WA Web Camp

I will be presenting at another Web Camp locally here in Seattle, so if you are in the area, please register and stop by on March 25th at the Mixer in Redmond!

El Miércoles 16 de Febrero, en colaboración con Telerik y PreEmptive Soltuions, se lanzó una oferta para los grupos de usuarios y sus desarrolladores. La oferta ella se incluye lo siguiente:

- Los controles de Telerik para Windows Phone 7 que te ayudarán a crear grandes aplicaciones

- Las estadísticas de tus aplicaciones de PreEmptive que te ayudarán a controlar y actualizar tu aplicación.

- Una ayuda para potenciar tu grupo de usuarios proporcionando 100$ por cada aplicación válida.

Si creáis y publicáis una aplicación de Windows Phone 7 que haga uso de los controles de Telerik y la solución de estadísticas de PreEmptive para WP7 tu grupo de usuarios recibirá 100$. Tú, como desarrollador obtendrás algunos de los controles de Telerik y las estadísticas de PreEmptive de forma gratuita hasta finales del año 2011.

La oferta está limitada a los primeros 500 participantes. No esperes y envía tus aplicaciones ya. Puedes encontrar más información sobre la promoción en http://www.telerik.com/products/windows-phone/getting-started/user-groups.aspx

Esperamos que os resulte de utilidad.

Saludos,

El equipo de MSDN España

 

One programming pattern that could be made easier for the
developer is implementing the IAsyncResult
asynchronous programming pattern. Writing code so it doesn’t block threads is
difficult to do.  It is even more
difficult using this pattern because there are multiple different ways for a
programmer call an operation implementing the pattern.

 

Once you do have a basic implementation, though, it is a
tedious and repetitive task to create asynchronous operations on your classes.  This means that with asynchronous operations there
is an opportunity that the right tools could help make development easier.  Before we can create the tools, we will need a
basic pattern and supporting code.

 

You can find documentation on asynchronous programming in
MSDN, however, as time goes by the documentation gets more heavily weighted
toward the event based pattern. It is increasingly hard to find documentation
on how to use or implement the older pattern. 
The MSDN page for APM is here though.
The other interesting thing is that even the event based pattern may be going
away now as well, in favor of built in language support in C# 5.0 for the Tasks
library (Hint: Search for “AsyncCTP”). This
is a great topic for another post. In the meantime, if you need to support
asynchronous operations using a framework 3.5 and earlier, it may be good to
know one of the previous patterns.

 

Asynchronous
Programming Model Use

Because the documentation is getting scarce, I feel
obligated to give a brief overview of how to use the programming model.
Typically, there are two matching methods on a class with signatures similar to
those shown below:

IAsyncResult
BeginConnect(string host, int port, AsyncCallback userCallback, object state);

void
EndConnect(IAsyncResult result);

 

The
application would typically use the above example methods (from the Socket
class) as follows:

 

IAsyncResult
result = m_socket.BeginConnect(

     m_host,

     m_port,

     this.ConnectCompleted,

     null /*state*/);

 

private void
ConnectCompleted(IAsyncResult result)

{

    try

    {

        m_socket.EndConnect(result);

 

        // Additional code here

    }

    catch (SocketException exception)

    {

        // TODO: Handle exception

    }

}

 

Exceptions
and data (if any) are reported in the EndXXX method when the operation
completes. When implementing this pattern, it is necessary to return an object
that implements the IAsyncResult interface from the Begin method and will be
passed to the callback when completed. There are
ways of blocking threads and waiting synchronously on the operation, but if
your goal is to not block threads then these are hopefully not of interest to
you.

 

You may still
able to find more information on the internet if necessary to understand how
this pattern or even the event based pattern is used.

 

Summary

 

Asynchronous
programming is difficult, and implementing asynchronous operations to prevent
threads from blocking is even more difficult. Once you have done it a few
times, it becomes very tedious to do. 
Many people have given their perspective and coding patterns to
accomplish this task already. Like everyone else, I will quickly give my own
spin on it in the next post, so we can get past that and onto how to make
things easier.