Author Archives: JohnHowell

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About JohnHowell

I am a professional software developer with over 20 years of experience. I currently specialize in Microsoft technologies such as VS, TFS, C#, VB.Net, WCF, WPF, WW, etc.

Windows Installer 4.5 is now available!!!!!!

Sorry for the belated notice, this was turned loose on 6/3/08.   Great news!!!!   Windows Installer 4.5 is now available!!!!!!   New and improved features in Windows Installer 4.5:      The following new and improved features have been implemented in … Continue reading →

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Windows 2008, the new Windows Mobile Center & Windows Mobile 6

On the 64-bit platform, these work great together.  The new UI is great and (at least for me) the sync’ing was much better than under the old platform and software.  However, there is a major gotcha that you should watch … Continue reading →

Posted in Computers and Internet | Leave a comment

Windows 2008 continued

Oh and I forgot one more thing.  On my new machine (Dell Precision T5400), when I installed 64-bit Windows 2008, I could no longer use the DVD-RW.  It just wouldn’t recognize any disk I put in.  But I found a … Continue reading →

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Windows 2008 & Hyper-V

OK, I was yet another one that ran straight into the Windows 2008 brick wall.  Lots of stuff didn’t work right out of the gate, lots of things to adjust and the one thing that I had been drooling for … Continue reading →

Posted in Virtualization | Leave a comment

Cool SQL 2005 Tool!

This is soooooo cool!!!!   TableDiff.exe • Table Difference tool allows you to discover and reconcile differences between a source and destination table or a view. Tablediff Utility can report differences on schema and data. The most popular feature of … Continue reading →

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And over the XML we go…

Feeling like Homer Simpson… Sorry for being out of touch for so long.  We had to get ready for beta in a foreign country and we’re rocking and rolling toward full production.  (I now have less hair!)  It’s all fun, but … Continue reading →

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RE: The shocking truth about the C# lock statement

OK, so my example was a bit contrived.  In most cases what we do in our critical sections would be more than just adding to a List<>.  And in those cases, if an exception is thrown, we would hold the … Continue reading →

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The shocking truth about the C# lock statement!

In delving deep into C#, the CLR, IL and what really happens under the hood, I’ve discovered a shocking truth about the commonly used lock statement.  Everyone knows that when it’s compiled the lock statement actually uses a light weight … Continue reading →

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Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1

As you know, Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 was turned loose on the 5th, but one of the things I didn’t know was that it had Adaptive Streaming – The Silverlight client can adaptively determine the bandwidth between the client and … Continue reading →

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The ‘volitile’ myth

OK, I think I should clarify something about what I said in regards to all of the Microsoft JIT’ed assignments are volatile.   Yes, that is a true statement, but you cannot simply take that out of context and say “Well, … Continue reading →

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