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2006

  • 1 min read

Visual Studio DSL/GAT – How to load a DSL model

On IStaySharp.NET I created an article that shows you, how you can load a DSL file. This is necessary if you need to access your model from GAT, a Visual Studio AddIn, custom library, etc. The last couple of weeks I am digging into DSL and GAT for creating a set of software factories at Real Software that will be used as a baseline for building applications.

Learning two (DSL & GAT) simultaneously and combining them was not so trivial and there is some learning curve. For GAT there are some interesting resources:

The MSDN forums is a good resource when you have some issues and/or questions. DSL has also a specific forum. The capabilities of DSL are really impressive. Now you have finally the tools to write for example your own dataset designer with code generation!!!

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External Harddisk with eSata connection

Last week I bought an external harddisk, Vantec Nexstar 3 (NST-360SU-BK), that can be connected through USB 2.0 and eSata. eSata is simply a new standard for connecting external SATA drives at full speed! I use the external harddisk to share data between my laptop (through USB 2.0) and my desktop PC (through eSata). I use extensively Virtual PC for development, and it's a good thing when developing on my desktop PC I can use the full speed of my HD.

nexstar3-sata01

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Virtual PC 2007 Beta Released

Microsoft released the beta program for Virtual PC 2007. The new features are

  • Hardware-assisted virtualization
  • Support for Windows Vista as a guest and host operating system
  • Support for 64-bit host operating system

You can participate on the beta program through the Microsoft Connect web site.

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Switched to GreatNews as RSS reader

Recently I switched from RSSBandit to GreatNews as RSS reader (noticed by a post from Bert Jansen).

The speed for aggregating feeds using GreatNews is really fast! I think it was better called SpeedNews ;). Besides that, it has a nice user-interface and all config & feed data is kept in the installation folder. This means that no installation (MSI) is required, and that it can easily be deployed to other computers.

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Create your own web server

Cassini is a ASP.NET sample application that shows how to write a web server using .NET. This means that you can host ASP.NET using the ASP.NET hosting APIs (System.Web.Hosting). This is really an alternative to IIS. There is also a second project called UltiDev Cassini Web Server which is based on the Cassini source with the following additional features:

  • Comes ready for distribution with Visual Studio ASP.NET applications
  • Runs as a windows service
  • Hosts and runs multiple ASP.NET applications
  • Provides management UI and simple API for configuring web applications
  • Comes in two flavors: 2.0 version for ASP.NET 2.0 applications, and 1.1 for applications compiled for ASP.NET 1.1

If you have the need for an offline version of your ASP.NET application, where easy deployment is required (without IIS), then this is a very good solution.

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Ubuntu on Virtual PC

Ubuntu is a free linux-based operating system. Ubuntu works very well on Virtual PC, and I didn't encounter any problems during installation. A detailed step-by-step explanation can be found on the documentation site of Ubuntu, How To - Configure Ubuntu for Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.

Setting Ubuntu to the same screen resolution as the host in full-screen mode didn't worked for me. I tried the following post, but without any success.

One of the reasons for installing Ubuntu, was to see if my blog site rendered correctly in Firefox. Only the line under the post title was not positioned correctly. I will update the business theme soon.

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DasBlog 1.9 released

DasBlog 1.9 is released. It's a major update with a lot of extra features and fixes. I contributed to this release for improving DasBlog in a multi-user setup. The following features has been added (will update the documentation on dasblog.info):

  • Top Posters macro & Profile Combo control
  • Every admin/contributor can create/edit a personal profile page
  • A Contributor can be notified by mail for certain events and can be configured through the 'User Settings' screen
    • Notify when a new post has been added
    • Notify when comments has been added for ALL posts
    • Notify when comments has been added for OWN posts

I also created a new theme called 'business', which is running on my weblog now. It's not yet included in this release, but it's available through the subversion repository. I am also planning to create a theme, based on 'business', for in a multi-user setup.

Soon I will update RealDN (corporate blog of my company I am working for) to DasBlog 1.9.

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A new home

It has been quiet for some time on my blog, but that will change now. It was mainly due to the fact that we bought a new house in Hombeek, we didn't know that little village before :). Every weekend we spend time on painting and some chores. But the fact that we moved now, and that practically everything is done, I can again spend more time for programming and sharing with the community.

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Office 2007 Beta 2 Released

That's right, a public preview of Office 2007 Beta 2 is available. You can download the bits from here. Note that right now it is very difficult to connect to the server, due to high traffic.