MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

Looks like TicketMaster.com is now following the credit card company's lead of charging for the convenience.  I wonder if for $327.50 if they personally hand deliver each ticket!

Today Microsoft delivered their first down payment on the vision to connect our world of devices. The idea is that all your devices should work together and sharing and collaboration should just be easy. In his keynote at Mix08, Ray Ozzie Microsoft’s new Chief Architect hinted about Live Mesh as he talked about a “device mesh”.  Read announcement here. CNEt's FAQ here. - Signup for access to the preview here. (Limited # during the first preview so hurry up!)   Watch video's to understand it here.

So before you starting thinking oh it's just Sync stuff or another SkyDrive....Look deeper and you will find a developer story too - MOE - Mesh Operating Environment which opens up a ton of developer opportunities.  See the developer demo here. 

If you gave up reading the announcement before you got to the "Platform is the core" - it highlights the guiding principles  which really highlights the software-plus-service strategy and how Live Mesh is aimed to bridge the gap that currently exists.

Think Data sync, Meets Connect anywhere + Feeds  + anywhere access

It will be interesting to kick the tires and see how it really works!  I need to turn back on UAC to install the desktop client so once I figure out which machine to try it on I will report back on first impressions.

As I said, I think this is just a down payment, as part of the bigger rollout of the S+S story - Another piece was also announced today with the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online- read the announcement here on the CRM team blog. 

On Friday Microsoft took the covers off a new data center in Boulder, Colorado.  There's a few things that are cool other than it's in Colorado.  For starters, it's Wind Powered using wind-generated power.  This new center houses processing servers for Virtual Earth's photorealistic 3-D.  Read the full article in the Boulder Daily Camera here.  There's also a  good picture of the lab on the VE Gov Blog here.  The new center houses servers totaling more than 5000 cores and more than 10 petabytes of data!

There's another article on the Wind Powered Container data centers here.  I wonder if one day you will just be able to order one of these to use for a few weeks of processing and a truck would just drop it off and pick it up when your done!'

In addition to wind, there's lots of action happening in the solar area as well - here's a link to an article about 13 biggest solar projects.

Denver is one of the 4 cities that now have "Enhanced 3D City Models"  (Details here)  The enhanced models are to improve accuracy, resolution and details.  The models are now denser by 10x or 1000%!  Apparently the Denver Model has 300k trees now.  I didn't go count trees but did zoom around the city for a while and it is looking really good.

If you read the article on the upgrade it has a couple of before and after pictures that show how the new camera technology from the UltraCamX helped.  I did a talk a couple years ago on the VE technology with one of the Vexcel guys and we talked about their digital aerial camera technology - The 14,430 x 9,420 pixels makes my Nikon D200 look like a throw away camera!

If you go check out the sites, don't blame me if you find your self zooming around the city - remember all this technology stuff is suppose to make you more productive!

One of the logical questions that come up when you start thinking about WPF application deployment is around the possibility of deploying both as a Standalone and a XBAP style deploy.  Big thanks to Rob Relyea for providing some details and pointing me to Karen Corby's posts on the topic and the VS Project template.

Karen Corby posted a VS Project template that can easily switch between the two deployment techniques with the same project: VS Template: Flexible Application (this related blog also has some details about which setting in the project file are different.)

In order for code to run in an XBAP, it must be able to execute in the partial trust sandbox.  So if any of the code you want to run in either circumstance needs more permissions, you’ll likely want to use ifdef.  This other Karen Corby post lists details of what works in partial trust.

If your doing anything with WPF/ Silverlight and XAML I would also add Rob's blog to your feed list!

I'm doing a training class this week and thought I would blog about a few of the questions that came up and some answers or pointers to more info.

Any support for LINQ to NHibernate?  - While there's not direct support to NHibernate - There's some community work to show how you can use LINQ and Nhibernate - you can read more here.

Is there much going on to help with Unit Testing and LINQ to SQL ? -  There is some info out there on Unit Testing and LINQ - Ian Cooper's post is here. Ben Hall's How to Unit Test Linq To SQL here.

What's going on with WCF and MTOM? - You can find details on MSDN here regarding Message Encoding

LINQ XML vs XPath - MSDN has a good comparison between LINQ XML and XPath here.

In the past few days I have helped a couple people with an error similar to the following..

'ASP.yourpage_aspx' does not implement interface member 'System.Web.IHttpHandler.IsReusable'    c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\mainsite\15512096\b47379d2\App_Web_0_d_2qxo.6.cs

Both times was related to adding name spaces to the code behind and not changing the Inherits on the <Page definition on page markup.  So if you are getting this error - go check your name spaces.

Today Microsoft released an update to Hyper-v which is the next generation of their virtualization software for Windows Server 2008 - Read the details on the Tech-Net blog here.

I've been doing some stuff with the current beta and have been surprised how stable it's been - I'm definitely looking forward to giving the RC a try.

I've only scratched the surface of the new features but snapshots are among my favorite feature.