Alexander Schmidt Mathematical methods, programming

On January 13, 2009 the Microsoft Developer Conference will be held in Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago, which is a scaled-down version of the Professional Developer Conference which took place a bit earlier. They will show off the Cloud Computing innovations with Azure platform, the next generation of web development tools and the advances in computer languages on Microsoft .Net platform. Sounds very interesting and I could not resist to attend this event in person to be able to put my fingers on the latest bits of upcoming Microsoft Windows 7 and speak in person with leading Microsoft evangelists. Will see you at Hyatt on Tuesday and if you expressed a desire to learn more, check out the web site of the conference at

http://www.msdndevcon.com/Pages/Chicago.aspx

For some scenarios in scientific parallel computations, one may need to configure to run the MPICH on a Windows Vista computer. This includes scenarios when running the cluster on the commodity hardware in the heterogeneous environments.

Say there is configuration according to the following specification:

1. Host - Windows Vista

2. Cluster node - Windows Server 2003

3. Cluster node - Windows Vista

In this configuration, computers 1 and 3 should have additional firewall rules:

1. Go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. On Inbound Rules, right click and select New Rule... In the following dialog, enter parameters of the new rule.

Rule Type - Program

Program - in This program path enter: %SystemRoot%\System32\rclumad.exe

Action - Allow the connection

Profile - Depending on your environment, choose the correct check boxes.

Name - Enter rclumad.

2. Now locate the new rule in the list and open Properties dialog. Make sure the Protocols and Ports has the settings as follows:

3. Now you should be able to execute the tasks remotely passing through Windows Firewall.

If you're doing a developement for WPF/Silverlight, these are the essential tools aiding you in routine tasks such as viewing an object graph or auto-generating a business form from your code:

http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/mole-for-visual-studio/

Mole is a Visual Studio visualizer. Visualizers have been part of Visual Studio since version 2005. During debugging sessions, visualizers allow developers to view objects and data using a customized interface. Visual Studio ships with several simple but useful visualizers. Many developers have posted visualizers for .NET classes.

http://karlshifflett.wordpress.com/xaml-power-toys/

XAML Power Toys is a Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Multi-AppDomain Add-In that empowers WPF & Silverlight developers while working in the XAML editor.  Its Line of Business form generation tools, Grid tools,  DataGrid and ListView generation really shorten the XAML page layout time.

Register for a getVIRTUALnow event in your area and find out how Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Microsoft System Center - including Virtual Machine Manager 2008 - and Microsoft Desktop and Application Virtualization can help you virtualize from the data center to the desktop.

The agenda looks pretty cool, which includes Hyper-V introduction, application assesment and planning toolkit, and you supposed to get home a software package. The only drawback, even though it is a roadshow, you'd have to throw $149 to get into it.

This is a really nice story indeed regarding how some techniques were developed just for utility purposed and later evolved into hot technology now known by the name as AJAX. Read on from the former Exchange guy at http://www.alexhopmann.com/story-of-xmlhttp/

If you're writing an article or any other paper, make sure you format it according to the style, recognized in the area the paper supposed to  appear. For example, the following styles are available in Microsoft Word 2007

1. APA - American Psychological Association
2. Chicago
3. GB7714
4. GOST - Russian style
5. ISO 690 - ISO standard for bibliographic referencing in documents
6. MLA - Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing
7. Harvard 
8. SIST02
9. Turabian

If you're writing a technical paper, you can stick with either Harvard or APA style.

Since Microsoft Word 2007 does not support Harvard reference style by default, here is a project on CodePlex site which provides XML extensions for Microsoft Word 2007 to enable the support for several styles commonly used in colleges and universities. 

If you are getting the message in your asp.net web application with Microsoft Enterprise Library installed:

The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.

this means that the category of the performance counter, that your application is trying to use is not registered. Try to find that assembly, that has the installer and using InstallUnit from .Net framework, execute the installer with the following command:

InstallUtil.exe /i YourAssemblyName.dll

In addition, if something went wrong during the installation of Enterprise Library, execute C:\Program Files\<Microsoft Enterprise Library dir>\InstallServices.bat

Give a try for the CoolCommands for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, which includes all the commands Microsoft should've included to the bundle from the vey beginning:

http://weblogs.asp.net/GMilano/archive/2006/02/27/439208.aspx

Also, if you're struggling from the poor IDE performance when your solutions are relatively big, following those guidelines might be a relieve: Go to first article to apply the tips and see if that is enough. If not, go to the second article...
http://www.thekua.com/atwork/?p=29
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/22/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Optimizing-ASP.NET-2.0-Web-Project-Build-Performance-with-VS-2005.aspx

So, what we expect in the next iteration of the C# called C# 4.0 as a development community? You've probably heard that the core team is working on the next version and they put quite an efforts on the expanding the possibilities of the language. If you didn't, check this video from the Channel 9 where they have core guys talking about what is on horizon: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/C-40-Meet-the-Design-Team/ C# will contain many features tailored for the better integration with the dynamic constructs of the modern design approaches, which already exist in primitive form today.

I'd like to see more features brought to it to support more parallel programming, such as this addition that exists today: Parallel Extensions for .NET framework http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=348F73FD-593D-4B3C-B055-694C50D2B0F3&displaylang=en This is besides an ADO.NET Entity framework http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa697427(VS.80).aspx In addition, we want to see tightly integrated with IDE application services for virtualization: http://blogs.technet.com/softgrid/archive/2008/06/17/microsoft-application-virtualization-4-5-release-candidate-is-now-available.aspx