I was happily watching Tipping the Rift when, I started the next episode I received the following message.

"your netflix account has been used to watch movies instantly from 4 different computers"

DRM is never cool.  Netflix tech support says this was caused by AVG(free?)  8 and the way they are setting up a virtual registry for Internet explorer.  One more check on the no more AVG list, I guess.

According to Ruters and the WSJ Microsoft has been putting out gentle feelers out for a Facebook acquisition.  If MS did buy Facebook would the loyal Facebook users stay or go some where else?  MySpace wasn't adversely affected when News Corps acquired them.

So far I have found two examples of a stand alone strategy for Silverlight.

Silverlight: Running standalone full trust applications

How to make Silverlight be AiR?

Both pretty much use the same method by employing MSHTA with an *.hta file.(also achieving full trust for the application)

The trouble is these solutions are not a cross platform answer, and I don't see the benefit this would bring over a WPF click once app or an xbap application.  At least its possible.  Maybe Microsoft will find it beneficial to provide an attractive offline mode for Silverlight apps.

I am not sure how I feel about this. ( are they now adware? )

Sure I use the free version, but not they are going to start bugging me to upgrade after a virus definition update?  Sorry but you won't get my business now.  To bad I considered AVG to be a respectable company until they pulled this stunt. 

I was porting some code to WSE 3 and had to look for a new method of compressing my web service requests and response.  It seems there are many options to handle compressing a response and decompressing it on the client but they all seem to overlook at the web service request.  They can be almost as large as a response and would benefit tremendously from compression.  So this weekend I threw together a HttpModule that could handle compressing the web service response and handle incoming compressed requests.  I also have the custom WebRequest and WebResponse classes for handling the compression on the client side.

Client side usage.

In your web service proxy class overload the GetWebRequest

partial class TestService : System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol 
{
    protected override System.Net.WebRequest GetWebRequest( System.Uri uri )
   {
      return new MicroFischCompress.CompressWebRequest( System.Net.WebRequest.Create( uri ), true);
   }
}
 

 WebServiceCompression.zip (147.02 KB)

You can now set all the Environmental Fonts in VS 08

Go to Tools->Options and select fonts and colors.

This sets the font for menus, tabs, solution explorer...

With ADO.net 3.5 you no longer need to use/install the Jet driver for working with an Access database.

You can use this connection string(reads Access 2007 and below).

Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=C:\myFolder\myAccess2007file.accdb;Persist Security Info=False;

Thanks to ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook, 2nd Edition(if I were smarter I would have used my amazon correspondent link)

And ConnectionStrings.com

Found an rss feed full of LINQ  N-Tier resources check it out here

The Visual C++ Team Blog just announced Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack Released!

I noticed this on Microsoft downloads last night. Any way here is the official download url http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D466226B-8DAB-445F-A7B4-448B326C48E7&displaylang=en

This Feature Pack includes MFC items( Office 2007 ui items, Visual Studio ui items) and TR1(Technical Report 1) additions

In case you had not heard Microsoft added some new badness to MFC

The MFC Feature Pack library supports new features in the following areas:

Menus

Toolbars

Panes

Ribbon Control

Outlook Alert

Controls

Dialog Boxes

Customization

Visualization

Special Features

 

See What's New (MFC Feature Pack)

Walkthroughs (MFC Feature Pack)

Reference (MFC Feature Pack)

Samples (MFC Feature Pack)

Download (MFC Feature Pack)