Community developer blogs

Richard Blewett

Recent Posts

• My blog has moved

  Posted: 06 Jun 2007 at 17:57

  My blog has moved over to dasBlog and can be found Here

• Sorry for the loss of service

  Posted: 05 Jun 2007 at 15:39

  My blog has been dead for a while due to someone managing to enter a comment that broke the very old blog engine I use (BlogX). Now I have this fixed I will also look at moving to a more modern blog engine ... watch this space

• The connected systems roadshow goes to Dublin

  Posted: 12 Feb 2007 at 14:34

  We're running another Connected Systems Roadshow in Dublin next week.It is being held at the Berkley Court Hotel on the 21st February starting at 10:00am. We'll be talking about using WCF, BizTalk and SQL Service Broker in distributed systems. If you would like to attend please register here.

• An other successful UK BizTalk User Group meeting

  Posted: 12 Feb 2007 at 14:16

  The second meeting of the UK BizTalk User Group took place in London on February 6th. We had talks on Using BAM for realtime aggregation and RFID. Many thanks to Ben Goeltz and Simon Holloway for those talks. The next meeting date has yet to be announced but should be sometime in May (as long as we

• Connected Systems Roadshow Slides and Demos

  Posted: 01 Dec 2006 at 12:33

  Thanks to everyone that attended the DM Connected Systems Roadshow in TVP over the last two days myself, Niels and Dom had a blast. As I promised, the slides and demos from the track me and Niels did are now available here. Dom's track materials are linked from here. Onwards to the next roadshow - w

• WCF Self hosting snippet

  Posted: 08 Oct 2006 at 15:44

  While teaching Essential WCF last week I got sick of creating the skeleton for a simple self hosted service. Dom (who was co-teaching with me) suggested I write a snippet for it. This is what I came up with: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <CodeSnippets  xmlns="http://schemas.

• Something strange with the NetPeerTcpBinding validator

  Posted: 08 Oct 2006 at 15:25

  I've been head down in WCF for a while now, culminating with teaching the first run of DevelopMentor's Essential WCF course last week. After the Peer to Peer session I was talking to one of the students about the possiblity of using the technology for scenarios other than writing your own version of

• It lives!

  Posted: 08 Oct 2006 at 14:33

  Well its been a long time since I blogged so its time to get back into the groove. Hopefully this time I'll make more regular posts.

• Hmmm ... where have my menu items gone?

  Posted: 30 Mar 2006 at 11:56

  I worked with the carnage that was the complex relationship between VS2005 and SQL 2005 betas and CTPs for pretty much the entire beta cycle and got used to strange thinngs happening in the VS IDE. On release I  installed the  RTM bits and everything looked fine. However, teaching for Deve

• Thread.Abort still considered harmful

  Posted: 07 Mar 2006 at 14:35

  Back in the days of .NET 1.1 there was a nasty issue with Thread.Abort where the ThreadAbortException could be thrown out of a finally block this was one of the reasons you should not have called Thread.Abort in 1.1. For v2.0 this no longer happens, however, this can have its own issues. Consider th

• Re-MVP'd

  Posted: 05 Jan 2006 at 15:27

  Just found out that I've been awarded MVP status again for this year so this is just to say thanks to those involved and you never know - I might even get the logo on to my website this year ;-)

• It Lives!!!

  Posted: 02 Jan 2006 at 10:54

  After more than a month of my blog offline I've finally got it back up and running. The server I share with Ian Griffiths died horribly at the end of November. However, Ian being far more concientious than me got his blog up and running fairly quickly after the server was repaired. i got snowed unde

• H'asta la Vista

  Posted: 04 Oct 2005 at 12:07

  Well I gave it my best shot but unfortunately there were too many bits missing for me to be able to run with it as the platform for running the Guerrilla WinFX class on Nov 7th. I've repaved on to Win2003 now and we'll run on that. The three things that were the crunch for me were: No IIS No MSMQ No

• Activating Vista from non-admin

  Posted: 29 Sep 2005 at 14:51

  As I've said, I'm running with Vista as my main OS. Since I installed I've been having problems activating Vista which was getting worrying that I only had 8 days left. Unfortunately the activation dialog has only been appearing when I have been logged on  as a normal user. . It has requested e

• Httpcfg.exe Found!

  Posted: 25 Sep 2005 at 10:44

  In a previous post I was bemoaning the fact that httpcfg.exe does not ship with Vista or the WinFX SDK. This then sent me on a quest to find a copy. After searching the web a bit I discovered it was on the Windows Server 2003 CD - ah don't have one of those to hand. Back to the drawing board Ahh goo

• Vista, non-admin and httpcfg.exe

  Posted: 24 Sep 2005 at 21:43

  More from the Vista battlefront. OK so I'm looking to develop with least privilege (Dominick would be proud of me). So I am running on Vista under a user account (i.e. non-admin). As the WinFX curriculum lead for DevelopMentor I kind of need to be able to do things like write WCF (Indigo) code.

• The amazing Vista RSS integration mystery

  Posted: 24 Sep 2005 at 19:57

  At the PDC we were shown sample after sample generating RSS, consuming RSS and the new RSS integration in Vista. Due to a rather unfortunate dose of studpity I managed to lose all my newsgator settings as I repaved on to my Vista config. OK I thought - nows a prime opportunity to give this amazing R

• Running with Scissors

  Posted: 24 Sep 2005 at 02:34

  So Microsoft call it dogfooding. I guess I had to take the plunge on a number of fronts. I've installed Vista on my laptop - yes, not in a VPC. Not only that I have now abandonned by .NET 1.1 dev environment (theres a major repave on the way if I get a 1.1 consulting gig ;-) ). I decided, as we are

• PDC Run Down

  Posted: 17 Sep 2005 at 16:28

  Well the PDC has ended and so I guess its time to reflect on stuff that has been going on this week. I guess the big news for me that I can talk about is that I'm co-authoring DevelopMentor's Guerrilla WinFX course with Jon Flanders, Dominick Baier, Pierre Nallet and Brock Allen. The first run will

• I'm going to the PDC

  Posted: 11 Sep 2005 at 14:20

  I've just seen this post from Sam so I thought I'd cheer him up by saying I'm going to PDC too! Come and drop by the DevelopMentor stand and say hello we'll have some neat stuff to talk about during the week.