SDNET – all about .NET and computing

About one year ago I wrote a small library which had as sole purpose the interpretation of the MethodBody.

What if this usefull for? Well using standard reflection mechanism from .NET one can find out from an Assembly what modules are inside, what types (classes, interfaces, enums, etc) and for each one can get the definition of the methods, fields and so on. Unfortunately when you get to retrieve the body of a MethodBase you stumble into a deadend. Microsoft does provide just a single method that can help: MethodBase.GetMethodBody. This returns an array of bytes that represent the body of the method. How in the nine hells can this be interpreted? We might want to know if a certain method is called from another method. By looking at an array of byte this task is dauting.

Still, if one looks at Lutz Roeder’s Reflector one can see that you can interpret this and even retrieve actual C# code from it. I managed to do something similar and the library I mentioned is a lightweight tool that creates a set of Intermediate Language instructions from the body of a method by looking at that array. I won’t get into details here because it is described pretty well in the codeproject article posted by me: http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/sdilreader.asp.

Check it out

While browsing through TomsHardware site I stumbled upon a mindnumbing computer case. You would ask what about a case? Sure there are alot of custom cases and mods that make them special … but this is actually a BIIIIIIIG cooler.

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We all heard of the new technology from Microsoft called Silverlight. What Silverlight is? Well you could say it’s a king of flash like technology only that it is based on AJAX and .NET technology. It’s public version 1.1 was recently released and promises alot although personally I find the tooling a little bit crude.

Well not guys from Mono thought why not make it available also for linux platforms. They started a build-a-thon and managed to get a version up and working, in 21 (twenty one) days!!!

The project is called Moonlight (nice touch) and it is not dependant on Mono, which means you do not have to have mono installed.

Well, if they manage to port also Visual Studio …

About Microsoft’s clashes in courts with other companies and goverments can be a book written and still we may add another chapter.

A Californian court ruled out that Microsoft’s Instant Search functionality embedded in Windows Vista is to be removed. Why? Well because it was not part of any previous versions of Microsoft’s OS’es and gives no choice to the consumer for another 3rd party similar tool, that’s “Google Desktop Search”.

Microsoft complied and it said it will remove this with the service pack due at the end of the year.

My opinion is that this is bullshit and most users know how and when to install additional tools if Microsoft’s offering is not to their liking. The strenght of Microsoft is not quite the “excelence” of their tools but the way they work with eachother. I don’t rule out the strenghts of Google Desktop Search but still it won’t be as seamleasly integrated in the OS and thus in the end won’t add that much benefit.

Just my two cents.

It’s been six months since the release of Windows Vista and there are still suprises. A blogger discovered something interesting when looking closer to the images printed on the Windows Vista Business DVD. It’s a picture, 1 square mm in dimension with three guys grinning

At first Microsoft stated it did not know where this easteregg is coming from and started making inquiries among it’s employees on how this came onto the dvd photo layer. Later they stated it’s a anti-piracy feature supposedly to make replication of dvd’s harder.

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Mnemonics – quick access keys that appear as underlined letters on buttons or menus and which are accessed by pressing the ALT key and the corresponding letter (the one underlined).

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I always hit a wall when trying to present the user with the possibility to enter a time (in format hh:mm or HH:mm). It ain’t an easy task and the sollutions are countless, but I won’t get into them. Instead I will unleash the power of the DateTimePicker upon you .

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I guess everyone heard this but for those who did not: Fallout 3 is in the making and the gaming community is in turmoil.

Bethesda (who bought the IP rights to the Fallout franchise from BlackIsle) has anounced that it is working on this long awaited sequel to the postapocaliptic games Fallout 1 and 2. To stir up the imagination a small (2 minute) trailer was released. It was generated by the ingame engine and brings back some of the memorable elements of fallout: the Pipboy, the Great War, the vaults and of course the armored suit from Fallout’s 1 cd cover.

The developer stated that the game will use a version of the Oblivion engine and the game should be available somewhere in the fall of 2008.

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A few days ago a coleague asked me to help him with a small program that generates a corporate email signature. The trick was that each user would have its own signature with the information being taken from its Active Directory account. At that time he was using a visual basic script that run from a shell and was using a XSL file for generating an HTML signature. It was an easy feat modifying the XSL to generate the wanted result but soon I hit a wall. How can you read a custom telephone

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