Technology Archives - Page 5 of 14

Windows Mobile 6.1 for Samsung SCH-i760

July 28, 2008
Chinh Do
Gadgets, Technology, Windows Mobile / Pocket PC
2 Comments

Good news for i760 owners: Windows Mobile 6.1 update is now available.

This update fixes one major annoyance: support for SDHC cards with more than 2GB. I use my i760 as a music player and it’s kind of tough to have to fit my music selection into 2GB (or 4GB if you use the hack but didn’t want to use a hack).

Some features of note in WM 6.1:

Support for SDHC cards beyond 2GB. 8GB cards seem to be working fine for people.
Threaded SMS reader.
View YouTube videos (m.youtube.com).

Download the update from Verizon here.

More information here.

A word of warning: the upgrade utility provided by Verizon/Samsung looks like a major piece of rushware. Many people reported no problems with the upgrade, but others reported of bricked phones, partially upgraded phones, and having to try the upgrade process multiple times to get it to work.

Finds of the Week – June 17, 2008

June 17, 2008
Chinh Do
Dotnet/.NET - C#, Gaming, Programming, Silverlight, Software/tools, Technology
3 Comments

.NET, C#

ReSharper 4.0 is released.
Andre Loker shared a very cool trick available with C# 3.0: Getting rid of strings (2): use lambda expressions.
Official Guidance: New Recommendations for Strings in .NET 2.0. By Dave Fetterman, BCL Team Blog.
Scott Guthrie announced availability of Silverlight Beta 2. Looks like there are a ton more controls.
Sending SMTP Email Asynchronously with SmtpClient.SendAsync().
Igor Ostrovsky gave an easy-to-digest summary of concurrency in .NET Framework 3.5.
Tools And Techniques to Identify Concurrency Issues. By Rahul V. Patil and Boby George, MSDN Magazine. Lots of good information on concurrency issues, how to analyze/detect problems, and pointers to tools.
Did you know about AppDomain::UnhandledException Event? I didn’t, until my Windows Service started to die without even leaving a nice goodbye… stacktrace. Well there was this mysterious looking entry in the Events Log. MSDN.
Add color to your Console apps with ConsoleColor. MSDN.
Exceptional Performance : Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. Yahoo! Developer Network.

General Development

15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages by Jacob Gube (Six Revisions).
Nick Beradi showed you how to Turn Google App Engine into your own Personal Content Delivery Network (CDN). App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.
An interesting look at Gmail client-side code: Gmail Client Side Architecture Part 1. By Sajith .M.R.

Software, Tools, etc.

FireFox 3 is out. To get the most of of it, check out lifehacker’s Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3.

Gaming

Jeff Atwood discussed Physics Based Games.
If you are a PC gamer, don’t miss Is the Market for PC Gaming Finished? by Aaron Stannard (Aaronontheweb).

Something Different

Battle at Kruger (video).

Finds of the Week – June 9, 2008

June 9, 2008
Chinh Do
Dotnet/.NET - C#, Programming, Software/tools
1 Comment

.NET/C#

Microsoft project code named “Velocity” is a distributed in-memory caching platform that provides .NET applications with high-speed access, scaling, and high availability to application data. Download the Community Preview here.
Danny Simmons enumerated various reasons for using Entity Framework.
If your netMsmq WCF service shows signs of a handles leak, you may want to make sure you have .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 installed.
Bryan wrote a timely article on TDD Tips: Test Naming Conventions & Guidelines.
Microsoft announced the release of Microsoft Source Analysis for C#.
“Source Analysis is similar in many ways to Microsoft Code Analysis (specifically FxCop), but there are some important distinctions. FxCop performs its analysis on compiled binaries, while Source Analysis analyzes the source code directly. For this reason, Code Analysis focuses more on the design of the code, while Source Analysis focuses on layout, readability and documentation. Most of that information is stripped away during the compilation process, and thus cannot be analyzed by FxCop.”

General Programming

Warn the User when Caps Lock is On in web apps. By Scott Mitchell.
Denis Gobo put together a very good and extensive list of SQL Server Programming Hacks. Many of the tips are not really “hacks” but still good to know nonetheless.
Not sure how useful this is with most networks blocking everything these days, but it’s cool anyway: you can now access the Sysinternals tools on a fileshare directly at \\live.sysinternals.com\tools.
Damien Guard released a new version of his Envy Code R monospaced font designed for programmers.

Tools

The Query command line utility displays active Terminal Service/Remote Desktop sessions, among other things. This replaces the qwinsta utility.

Something Different

10 Amazing Chemical Reactions.

Finds of the Week – May 31, 2008

June 1, 2008
Chinh Do
Dotnet/.NET - C#, Gadgets, Programming, Software/tools, Technology, Tips
1 Comment

Programming

Borland Turbo Pascal was my favorite language in my early days of hobby programming. I feel a little sad to hear that Borland recently sold their CodeGear division to Embarcadero.
Day-to-day with Subversion is a good and detailed write-up on procedures most developers need to perform daily. By Bil Simser.

.NET/C#

The evil sou file – fighting and winning with Visual Studio. By Brian Noyes.
Joshua Flanagan had an interesting idea on a Readable Regular Expressions framework.
Derik Whittaker posted a tip on how to share config files between projects.
Jon Galloway: //TODONT: Use a Windows Service just to run a scheduled process.
You can throw away your own TitleCase method now. Because there’s one in the framework. Via ASP.NET FAQ.
Operator~ and BinarySearch. By Shahar Y.
Steven Harman detailed a hack to get Visual Studio to use more than 2GB of RAM.
Frank-Leonardo Quednau: Lazy instantiation one-liner of instance fields with the coalesce operator.

Software and Tools

Google Maps Street View is in Richmond.
Goo
It looks like the Street View images were taken around September 2007 because according to IMDB, the movie Game Plan was playing in the US starting 9/23/2007:
Google Maps adds user-created photos, videos, maps. Via CNET.
Goog

Something Different

Top 50 soccer goals (video).

Finds of the Week – April 6, 2008

April 7, 2008
Chinh Do
Dotnet/.NET - C#, Programming, Windows Mobile / Pocket PC
1 Comment

Programming

Omar AL Zabir discussed tips on how to reduce website download time by heavily compressing PNG and JPEG.
Jeff Atwood wrote a detailed how-to on how to set up Subversion on Windows.
Poorly Formatted Code Costs You Money. By Jakub Korab.

.NET/C#

For when I finally find time to learn LINQ: Architecting LINQ To SQL Applications, an 8-part series by Ian Cooper.
Unit Testing with Silverlight. By Scott Guthrie.
Toolico.com has a nice Silverlight utility to lookup/generate string formatting codes.

Windows Mobile/Pocket PC

First Impressions Of Windows Mobile 6.1. Information Week.

Gaming

StarCraft 2 videos.

Something a Little Different

New Version of Google Maps with expanded Street View released.