Looks like my email service has gone down and bouncing all emails to the senders. Not happy with my hosts for this, I'm ok with email going down - but not bouncing them back to the sender!! If anyone is trying to contact me, I am sorry, please bear with them. If anyone knows a good reseller hosting provider cheaply then drop me a email (opps, hmmm, post a comment). Tempted to get everything going to my email forwarded onto my gmail account in future. [Update] Email looks to be back and working - however I do not have my past emails until Friday. All new emails are getting to me.

Great news!! The new vista build works with boot camp 1.1!

Visit below for two photos – notice the glass support…:
http://home.mchsi.com/~khadzic/MyWebsite/files/cfc6211606c6ae86a4169400da828a6d-26.html

Yet another reason for me to get a MacBook Pro

Lucky I just saw a post regarding apple recalling batteries (like Dell did). My poor little ibook is ill!!!! My battery is one of the ones required to be recalled. Finding the serial number of the laptop wasn’t easy. On the website it said you had to remove the keyboard (wasn’t looking forward to that) and then on another page says just load up System Profiler J I always thought it ran hot… Visit below for more information http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml06/06245.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5283424.stm Come on Apple, release that MacBook Pro Core Duo 2!

Announced at the NxtGenUG meeting was “Ed Gibson: On The Road”.  For everyone who was at DDD3, he gave the talk during lunch and gave an interesting in-sight on security and the internet.

There are events around the country so I recommend seeing if you are able to attend one near you, it should be a good afternoon.  The site is:
http://www.nxtgenug.net/EdGibson/

Hopefully I will be attending the Birmingham event.

I noticed that there is a meeting at Leeds University, hopefully if I am MSP (Microsoft Student Partner), I will be able to bring events like this to Hertfordshire University.

First NxtGenUG meeting

Last Monday I attended my first user group meeting held by NxtGenUG in Coventry.  Wasn’t sure what to expect from the evening, however ended up being an enjoyable evening (beer, food and Testing UI – what more do you want?) and hopefully will be attending the next meeting on Security. I also got some swag in the form of a T-Shirt and WinFX toolkit.  

Basically, there was a 10 minute demo of the Atlas framework, some quick news announcements, food and then just over an hour presentation of Testing UIs which was interesting.

Not sure if I will be able to go to the meetings in Birmingham, but if there is one which catches my eye I’m sure I will make the effort.

If anyone wants more information then visit http://www.nxtgenug.net

The finals of the Imagine Cup 2006 where today and I just saw on Channel9 that Italy won!!  Brazil came second, with Norway coming third. Congratulations to Italy and all the other entries….
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=224744


Have a look at there design, and the other finalists here:
http://www.imaginecup.com/finals/Software_Design.htm


Sadly I never got a team together for 2006. However 2007 competition title has already been announced.  The theme is: "Imagine a world where technology enables education for all" (http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/08/11/695473.aspx).  So start thinking about some ideas, and who you want to be in your team.  

If anyone wants to drop me an email regarding this then please feel free @ Ben {at} Ben Hall {dot} me {dot} uk.

Hopefully I will be entering this year, all being well I will be a Microsoft Student Partner and I will have more contacts/developer friends to form a team with. Just getting to the UK finals would be a excellent achievement.

Few pics to cast your eyes over…

http://www.powermax.com/articles_reviews/article.php?id=33

Few days ago, I came across a problem with the MbUnit code that I was looking over to get an idea of the architecture. The problem was that when the reference to the mbunit.framework in the project you are testing is different that the reference in the exe the application would crash with a random error message. The section of code which causes a problem was when it tried to cast a type from one assembly into a type from another assembly. Due to them having different version numbers, they are treated as completely different types and cannot be cast between the two. This happened since we started to sign the assembly, as before, unsigned assemblies do not worry about the version number and treat everything as the same. After a few hours, I found a cool event on the AppDomain object called AssemblyResolve. When a different assembly is loaded in the application with a different version type, the event is fired and calls this section of code: private Assembly AssemblyResolveHandler(object sender,ResolveEventArgs e)

So, no new MacBook for me, lot of students on the forums aren’t happy as like me was all hoping for one to return/go to Uni with.  However, I still live in hope that they will be available before the end of September.

Quick roundup.
New MacPro replaces PowerMac.  Runs on Quad Xeon processors.
New XServe machines.  Looking very sweet, nice little 1U machines at not a bad price. Would love to get my hands on one of these bad boys…
Leopard Preview (top-secret features hidden and not being shown due to copycats…)
Watch demos here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/

This WWDC has got me interested in developing on a Mac again; I have my cocoa book in my pile next to me. One day, I will read it!

Not long now, not much more has come out over the past few days. Set of banner images where online last night, but wasn’t anything special.  Just had “Vista 2.0” on them…think Steve Jobs is having fun.

Just heard of another banner phase “Mac OS X Leopard -- Redmond has a cat problem”

I will post an update after the event…

WWDC tomorrow at 10:00AM PST / 1:00PM EST. Be There.

Just a few more pre-event photos to wet your appetite.


http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/06/wwdc-tomorrow-at-10-00am-pst-1-00pm-est-be-there/

I know I will be on engadget waiting for the outcome.

Creating objects dynamically with C# 2.0

So I have been playing with some code this morning on how to create objects in the assembly dynamically just based on their class name.

Basically, I created a console application with an interface and three subclasses. The application will print out a list of object names they could create, and asks the user to select which one to create.  Based on the user input, the name is passed into the method below and returns an object of type IPayment (the interface).  The console application then calls a method on the object which returns its name and prints it out to the console.  Simple but effective.

This is the most important method, which does most of the work.

        public static IPayment GetPaymentObject(string className)
        {
            //Get the current assembly object
            Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();

            //Get the name of the assembly (this will include the public token and version number
            AssemblyName assemblyName = assembly.GetName();

            //Use just the name concat to the class chosen to get the type of the object
            Type t = assembly.GetType(assemblyName.Name + "." + className);

            //Create the object, cast it and return it to the caller
            return (IPayment)Activator.CreateInstance(t);
        }

Works well as a simple example, and demonstrates the important concepts.

Download the full code here:
http://blog.benhall.me.uk/Code/DynamicFactory/Program.cs.txt

Let me know what you think.

One Day hopefully I will be able to attend…

Pre-Event Photos
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1941

Found this to be an interesting read, it is about upcoming Apple products and WWDC.  Lot of talk about WWDC online at the moment.

http://www.dvdnewsroom.com/news/breaking-inside-apple-on-blu-ray-macpro-and-apple%e2%80%99s-media-center-strategy-what-to-expect-and-not-to-expect-at-wwdc/

Most interesting bit for me personally:

<quote>
A. Any truth to an Apple Tablet?
Q. Prototyped of course. Price is the issue, without cannibalizing the MacBook. The ideal price is $599. But it’d cost too much to make. Take an average guy visiting an Apple Store at his local mall. If he had to choose between a $1099 MacBook or tablet, the MacBook would win. A tablet is too niche at that price – only the Apple elite would buy. We’re becoming generalists and the Apple Store supports that strategy. Generalists with superior products.
</quote>

Like a lot of other people, I would love to see an Apple Tablet, but I wouldn’t pay $1099 for it (ok, I would, but I wouldn’t like to).

TechNet magazine is now free! in the UK and US

Personally, I have been waiting this for a long time.  US have had free TechNet for a while, but we in the UK have been missing out.  Now, we too can have free TechNet magazines.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/subscribe.aspx

I have subscribed, also renewed my subscription to MSDN Magazine.  Why TechNet? While my heart is with Development, I do have a keen interest in everything Microsoft/Software related, and so this is just another way to keep me updated.  Plus I find networks and administration really cool and interesting.

I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I thought I would post an update on what’s going on.

• Finished reading GTD. Interesting book, with a lot of points I wish I knew earlier. I am following some of his ideas and approaches but difficult as I don’t actually have that much to do at the moment apart from Read and Code (the difficult life of a student! ()


• Reading Craig Larman’s Applying UML and Patterns book at the moment.  Very good read, some I already knew, some of it is new to me.  Giving me a nice firm foundation for next year which is good.  I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about OO design.  Check out Computer Manuals if you want to purchase it (like at the side).


• Been doing some work with the TFS Verison Tree Browser over at CodePlex recently ( http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=TFSVTreeBrowse ) which has been interesting.  Coming from a Visual SourceSafe source control, this is new to me, but one I am looking forward to getting started in.


• I have also been having a chat this morning with Andrew Stopford (seems a very nice guy, his blog is http://weblogs.asp.net/astopford) from the MBUnit team about helping with the development of the software.  Downloaded the source code this morning, so will definitely have a look at that this afternoon.  In case you don’t mind, MBUnit is a testing framework like NUnit with more bells and whistles, a topic I have a keen interested in at the moment.


• Girlfriend came to see me for a few days, loved seeing her again (meet at Uni, she lives in London – I don’t). Had a really nice few days, went to see Cars which was cool (nice work Mr S. Jobs), the visual effects where amazing.


• Finally, WWDC 2006 is almost here!!  This is the Apple Developer conference, keynote is on Monday. I can’t wait to see what is coming up, I love apple, their ideas and products. Personally I am hoping they are going to announce the MacBook Pro Core Duo 2, think I would buy it straight away (get student discount) with 2Gb of ram, and dual boot with Windows for development.  Girlfriend would kill me, and so would my bank balance, but they are such a cool machine!

Can’t think of anything else to write at the moment. Cool dudes!