Corey Roth [MVP]

In case you are interested, the July 2006 CTP of Microsoft Expression Designer is now out. This combined with Visual Studio 2005 is currently your best options for making Windows Presentation Foundation applications.

Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer July 2006 CTP

When you install the June 2006 CTP of Expression, you may find that it at first appears unstable. This is usually noticeable by the fact that it may crash when opening a project or sample. The most likely cause of this is that you had a previous version of the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime components installed.

To resolve this, uninstall the .NET Framework runtime components, and then uninstall Windows Imaging Components. You must then install a new version of the imaging components, and then reinstall the runtime components. I can find you more info on this if you need it should you run into this problem.

Atlas makes it really easy to make client side to web services and what not. Recently I discovered a scenario where I want to call directly to an Atlas web service on page load through JavaScript code. The problem with this is that no call to the Atlas API can be made until Window.OnLoad executes. Therefore if you have any inline javascript in the page calling the Atlas API, you will end up with an object not found error.

Luckily Atlas has a method that you can pass a delegate to for this situation. By calling Sys.Application.load.add, you can have any function of your own access the API when the page loads. The syntax would look something like the code below.

function MyFunction()
{
    // do something like call atlas web service
}

// pass a delegate to atlas's method to add onload
Sys.Application.load.add(MyFunction);

At some point you might try to use a new object and Visual Studio reports a compiler error such as "Cannot implicitly convert type bool? to bool". This only occurs as you are working with new .NET 2.0 objects. The truth is bool? is actually the same thing as Nullable. It is just that VS2005 reports errors about nullable types using a question mark. I talked a long time ago about nullable types here.

Where I encountered this was I was trying to use the OpenFileDialog class in WPF and it uses a return type of Nullable. So in the past, the ShowDialog returned a type of bool, in this case it retunrs a type of Nullable. The key to remember with nullable types is that you have to check the Value property to get the actual value.

For example:

if (myOpenFileDialog.ShowDialog().Value)
{
    // do something
}

If you are worried about null values coming back be sure and check the IsNull property first before trying to access the value.

Since there are 7,000 different versions of Windows Vista, I thought this page and chart was pretty interesting because it tells you which IIS features are avaialble in what version. Again, I remind you from an earlier post that IIS supports multiple instances in Windows Vista.

Some of the biggest changes is that IIS isn't even fully included in the Starter/Home Editions. However, Windows Activation Service is present to support WCF. The Professional editions of Vista are actually designed for web developers and even allow 10 simultaneous connections as opposed to the usual 3. In fact, they support everything LongHorn Server does except for remote administration.

Take a look at the chart at the URL below. It has some good information in it.

IIS7 Features in Windows Vista Versions

So I always wondered why Visual Studio always had everything in a 1033 folder on my hard drive and I saw the number around so much. Maybe some of you knew what it was but I never bothered to look it up or put two and two together until today.

1033 is the LCID language code for English. Therefore, French is 1036, Spanish is 3082, German is 1031, etc. Not a terribly useful peace of information, but somewhat intersting none the less.