Here's a use case for you. Google released an English language parser based on their tensorflow machine learning platform. I could download all the code from their git repository, set up a VM with all the right Java bits, and go through a 3 hour compilation process, and maybe get everything built successfully... ...or, I can download their Docker image and run that image in a Docker container on my machine in a fraction of the time and get to playing with the English parser which is what I was really interested in. I'm not a Docker expert, but I've been dabbling in it and I see potential. As others have mentioned, it really depends on your use case (insert quote about everything looking like a nail when you're holding a hammer). In my opinion, it is a slightly different take on virtualization. It seems more lightweight than other virtualization platforms (I have used VMware in the past, tend to use VirtualBox these days), but part of that is because it appears aimed at temporary resources. Hope this info helps! Cheers, Carl

Good thing all he did was kiss her... ;P

I've been using Vista Ultimate on my home desktop for a while, but not for development. Recently, I got a new laptop for work, and decided to make the jump onto Vista there as well. This has been a new experience using Vista as a development platform, and I'm running into difficulties with IIS7. On my laptop, I created a basic .Net 2.0 web application. The application is running in the "ASP.NET V2.0" app pool, which uses the NetworkService identity.

1. If I use "Pass-through authentication" on my site, Authorization to the physical path fails, even though NetworkService has Read permissions to the physical path. How can I get Authorization to succeed?
2. If I use "Specific user", and provide my credentials, Authorization succeeds. However, when I browse the application, it appears the default page is rendered as a static file, not executing any of my codebehind.

• In the "Handler Mappings", I see no mappings for ".aspx". Shouldn't I?
• I ran aspnet_regiis -i, this did not create the script mappings I expected it to.

Frustratingly, on my desktop, I do see script mappings for ".aspx", etc. However, I have the same problem as on the laptop with not being able to run as Network Service. If I do run as a specific user, I am able run my test site. But this doesn't help me as I would like to develop/debug/run as Network Service on my laptop. Any help and/or references are greatly appreciated. (Also, been looking for a good SMTP server to run on this laptop, as I found IIS7 does not include an SMTP server!) Cheers, Carl

My votes go for the following: "About Face" by Alan Cooper My first edition copy of this looks way outdated now, but the core concepts still ring true. "Inside Visual C++: 5th Edition" by James Kruglinski Taught me everything I needed to get started with MFC, and got me off on the right foot. Kruglinski unfortunately died tragically in a hang-glider accident shortly before the book was released. "XSLT: 2nd Edition" by Michael Kay Excellent to get started, and an excellent reference after you've gotten started Have seen Code Complete a number of times, but never bought it. After reading some of the response here though, perhaps it's time to give it a read. Cheers, Carl

My thoughts exactly, when I saw the image appear, I wondered if Wolf Blitzer could actually see her or if it was really just studio magic. Amazing what you can do with a little smoke and mirrors... Cheers, Carl

Background: I'm an experienced .Net developer. Very fluent in C#, so-so on some of the language aspects introduced in C# 2.0, and want to push my experience into ASP.Net 3.0/3.5, LINQ, XAML, WPF, WCF, WF, etc. Generally, I hate buying tech books. Always seems to be that 60%-70% is fluff that I know, like glorified Hello World apps. But I definitely learn by doing, so I look for textbooks that do give step-by-step examples versus the cooking-show equivalent of "take sugar, flour, and egg...and poof on the CD included in this book you will find the complete project." So, I'm looking for any suggestions on good learning books for someone that knows their way around C# and VS2005, and is looking to ramp up on VS2008 and latest .Net features. Some books I would consider: -Apress Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform, Fourth Edition -Apress Pro ASP.NET 3.5 in C# 2008, Second Edition -MSPress Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5 -O'Reilly C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, Third Edition -Wrox Professional ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB -Wrox Professional C# 2008 Any recommendations regarding one publisher over another, one of these books in particular, or even another book I might not have considered is greatly appreciated! Cheers, Carl

I am also just getting my feet wet in LINQ, and I see the advantages you list. However, I'm still stuck with the "it's better because it is easier for the developer", which doesn't quite seal the deal for me. In terms of real world applications, how does LINQ fare performance-wise and memory-wise? Specific example, I have an application which performs calculations based on a user-provided data file which could be on the order of 20Gb to 30Gb in size. The application also uses a couple of data files we provide that are needed for the calculation, and the results are retained in an encrypted file. Various steps in the process scan through the input files to pull out data needed to aggregate the results as the calculation progresses. (...this is a very poor and rudimentary description, however it's best I can do due to the nature of the project...) In any case, originally I would read into DataSets and use them for the filtering and querying I needed for the calculation. I found these to be way too memory expensive. I've switched to SortedLists, which work great and provide a much leaner memory and performance profile. So, can LINQ help me here? Would it be better, or just different? Better for the application, or just better for me the developer? Cheers, Carl

A couple of follow-on questions to this thread...

Michael Sync wrote:

There are three majors versions such as Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 2.0 (1.1) Alpha and Silverlight 2 (not 2.0) beta1 in Silverlight. If you are new to Silverlight, I suggest you to start with Silverlight 2 beta1.

What are the compelling reasons to start with Silverlight 2 beta 1 versus 1.0 or 1.1?

Michael Sync wrote:

You need to install VS 2008 and SL 2 Tool for VS 2008 (it includes all required softwares (runtime, hotfix for VS, SDK))[^]

Is there any reason to need Expression Studio or Blend in order to do Silverlight 2 development? Thanks in advance for any advice/guidance... Cheers, Carl

David, Thanks for the response. I don't have a profiler on both platforms, but do on a development XP system. I had some time the other day, and tried to get some decent info out. Unfortunately, I'll need to find more time to put to it, my quick attempt at profiling did not yield much useful information. But thank you for pointing me in that direction. I don't think I'd ever used the profiling tools provided with VStudio, though I have used things like BoundsChecker and RedGate ANTS Profiler, so I get the general concepts. Thanks again for the suggestion. If you know any parituclarly good tutorials on using PREP and PROFILE, I'd appreciate it. Otherwise, I'll research and see what I can find... Cheers, Carl

I have an application that has been brought out of mothballs, and am trying to determine the root of an obvious difference in performance between running on a Win2K machine and running on a WinXP machine. Originally, the application would crash sporadically on a Windows XP machine. The application had been compiled many moons ago, so I set up VStudio 6 on a Windows XP machine, and recompiled the source code. Now the application will run on either Windows 2000 or Windows XP, but exhibits a definite performance decrease on a Windows XP machine. The source code is not mine, so I don't know it intimately, and it has been many moons since I coded in Visual C++. But I have been able to recall enough to debug into it some. The UI is a thin layer on top of a calculation engine written in (from what I can tell) very generic C/C++ code. In other words, file I/O operations are done using fopen, fprintf, etc. The main calculation loop has 4 main steps, and it loops for every day of a given year. I placed local variables to track average tick count for each of these steps, and can see that one of these steps takes significantly longer than the rest. But again, diving into this function, all I see is standard C/C++ code. My basic question is, are there any known performance differences when using C/C++ code on these two platforms. Does calloc perform awful on WinXP for some reason unless a particular compiler option is set? Does qsort perform fine on Win2Kbut awful on WinXP? Everything in my experience tells me, there should be no difference. So I think I'm looking for a needle in a haystack. Has anyone come across anything similar? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated... Cheers, Carl

Russ, Thanks for the response... Yeah, as I was writing my original post, I was starting to consider that rather than having the systray app be capable of driving the service, I should just hav ethe two operate independently, but reference the same core library which does the work. And the important addition is that the core library needs to persist its state in a local database. I'm trying to keep the client pieces very light however, so hopefully I can construct a reasonable XML file that can maintain all local information... Thanks again... Cheers, Carl

A question of architecture/implementation... I have a Windows service that periodically contacts a central server with status information and the intent is that it can also make a request for work to perform. I have also created a systray app that can be used to manually contact the central server and will also have the ability to make a request for work. Think SETI@Home... What is the best way for these to work together? I've seen plenty of samples on how to get a Windows Forms app to communicate with the SCM to start/stop a Windows service, but what I want is a bit deeper than that. I want to know if the service's last request for work resulted in it starting a job, and if so, what is it working on? I moved all the common code out of both the service and systray app into a central library that they both reference. Should the common library just be maintaining some local status database that either can query? Or can the service do all the work all the time, and the systray simply connect to the service and drive/monitor it? Any suggestions/tips/thoughts greatly appreciated. Any references to online samples also appreciated... Cheers, Carl ...Every time I press the little black button on the black panel, a little black light lights up to let me know I've pressed it...

...your adventure has already begun! I checked in at 9am, and found the same thing...somehow it did not feel quite as adventurous as the countdown. I suppose those watching when it did click over to 00:00:00 could make up all kinds of rumors such as the Halo guys all hopping on a Greyhound bus marked "Redmond"...:-D Cheers, Carl

For me, it still appears there is 15 minutes or so. I'm on the East Coast. So does that mean they set up a countdown to 9AM, and didn't think that people in other time zones would see it reach zero before their intended deadline of 9AM EST? ;P -Carl -- modified at 8:55 Monday 12th March, 2007 I confirmed this by remoting to a computer on the West Coast...for them the adventure begins 3 hours later!

For years, my wife and I would go visit my grandfather in England, and when we were there, we would drink PG Tips. We would come back to the states and try to find something comparable. A couple years ago, we found Tetley's "British Blend" was about as close as we could find (other than paying 4 times as much for PG Tips in an import shop). It's a tea-bag type; and we make it my grandfather's way. Put teabag in cup with a spoonful of sugar, pour in boiled water, add milk to taste, remove teabag after a minute or two. We've even got some of our friends who've moved to the states from England hooked on it... I was in Hong Kong in 1997, and at that time loved the green tea I found in many restaurants. Have never found an equivalent here though... Cheers, Carl

First of all, thanks to everyone that replied to my request. After a lot of deliberation (I'm a terrible shopper), I bought an iRiver 256MB player, the iFP890. I was very tempted by Chris Maunder's recommendation of the MPIO, I hadn't looked at them before. In the end, I selected the iFP890 because of the whopping advertised 40 hour battery life and slickness of packaging. When I downloaded the manual for the FY200 from the MPIO site, it seemed to have tons of PDF errors in it. Feature-wise, the iRiver and MPIO players seemed very similar. More storage would have been nice, but the models that provide for gigs of space were bigger than I was looking for. And it would have meant yet another expense for the models that take cards. I've got a couple different cards for my digital camera, in reality I only ever use one. Anyway, thanks again everyone, and now I've got some music to go listen to...:cool: Cheers, Carl

Lauren, Thanks for the response! I hadn't really looked at the iRiver because I'd read some review that did not like the supplied software for the PC. Of course, I suppose if I can just use Media Player to transfer files to and from it, I'm happy enough with that. Saw an iRiver last night in Best Buy that (supposedly) offers 40 hours of battery life? Would be nice not having to buy stock in Duracell... Thanks again... Cheers, Carl

Chris, Thanks for the response! I hadn't heard of the MPIO players, but after looking at a couple last night, and browsing the website, they're now a serious contender. A couple questions for you, especially since you've got one that is SD expandable. -Any problems with needing to resync with the MPIO Manager when you swap cards? In other words, do the cards just allow you to up the overall capacity but you still need to upload via connection to PC, or can you actually have different libraries of songs on different cards and "hot swap" at will? -Any problems with uploading multiple folders of music? One person's post mentioned about the player freezing up when uploading more than a couple folders ([Occasional] freezing[^]) Thanks again. I love CodeProject, keep up the good work! Cheers, Carl

Chris and Maximilien, Thanks for the responses. I'd discounted the iPod because of annoying things I'd heard about not being able to replace the rechargeable battery, and people having to send them back to Apple... No matter what I get, I expect battery life to be an issue. Although I saw an iRiver last night that claimed 40 hours of battery life? (on standby perhaps ;P ) Thanks again for the response... Cheers, Carl

Steven, Thanks for the reply...Hearing what people don't recommend (and exactly why) is as useful as hearing what people do recommend. Memorex hadn't made my list, certainly won't now, and I've now added playlist support to my list of desirable features to check for... Cheers, Carl