Month: July 2005

Bug in Indigo (RC1 to Beta1)

If you are hosting, your Indigo service in IIS, then you need a .svc file which basically tells IIS what assembly do you want to wire up to handle the request. Seems like on RC1 Beta 1 and another prior build (June CTP – I think, not sure though), there is a bug in the parser. Lets look at the example which in some places does break and in others does not break:

<%@Service language=c# Debug=”true” class=”Indigo2.Math” %>
<%@Assembly Name=”Indigo2″ %>

If you notice the language attribute (on line 1), is it not in quotes and this works ok on RC1. But it does break if you do put in the quotes in some other builds, so if you had the same line as below then someplace’s it will break:

<%@Service language=“c#” Debug=”true” class=”Indigo2.Math” %>

This of course is not a show stopper, but if you are getting weird errors in IIS and are not seeing your service’s MEX, as you were expecting, this could be one of the areas among others you can look out for.

My Beta1 is still downloading, so have not had a chance to try this on that to see if it has been fixed or not; if any one has tried it then let me know; alternatively, when I finish downloading it and try it out, will post my feedback here.

MS makes hard statements on performance improvements in Longhorn

From OSNews: Microsft has made hard statements about perfomance improvements in Longhorn. They claim that applications will load 15% faster than in XP, while boot time is decreased by 50%. They also claimed that Longhorn will be able to wake up from sleep in 2 seconds. Users should also expect half as many reboots during patching. Time to dust of those trustworthy stopwatches.

Why persistent storage is a good thing

Mike Calligaro talks about the Mobile team’s decision on using Persistent Storage in Windows Mobile 5.0 – first time ever for a Pocket PC (Smart phones already have this since 2002); and how this will affect you as a end user – as it talks about RAM vs. Battery life – both things which are very dear to our hearts.

Problems with the MCE Remote Control – repeats the keys you pressed

I had this very irritating issue with the remote control of Media Center, where mostly whatever key I pressed, got pressed more than once (even though I pressed it once); it it would cause things like as you move around – very irritating as you would skip over channels you wanted to change or navigate to music or pictures, etc. But it seems like this issue of Stickiness is because there are two buffer overruns in the eHome infrared receiver (read Q331913), and although Microsoft has this patch to fix it, I would recommend installing the new Update Rollup1 for the eHome receiver as the earlier patch was released in 2002 and even though I have MCE 2005 it was a suspect of not fixing the issue (mind you I did not do extensive testing).

But I did installed the Update Rollup1 for eHome Receiver and it does fix the issue with the sticky remote and also adds support for the MCE Keyboard – which is soon to be released.

Update: Had a grammer error in the title, just fixed that. And yes, spellings are still overrated 😉

DVD Audio not loud enough

Well, we have a very nagging problem on the MCE, Live TV, Recorded TV, Music, Radio – all was fine, the only issue was whenever we saw a DVD, even with the MCE and Windows volume all the way to maximum, the sound was not loud enough to hear and quite often we had to switch on the sub-titles just to follow what is going on.

Finally, though it seems I have found a fix – and it seems to be working. I was using the AC3 filter and the DTS/5.1 encoding. In the AC3 Config, you need to change the preset default to an aptly one names Loud, which fixes the issue.

Update on MSMQ ver 3.5 and Indigo

Now that I am not sleeping and read my earlier post (*grin*) about MSMQ (ver. 3.5) and Indigo, I would like to clarify a couple of things. One, you don’t have to have MSMQ 3.5 installed, only if you want to use MSMQ (i.e a queue channel). If you are using tcp, udp, http, etc, then you don’t need this. And two, if you do install MSMQ, then on Windows 2003 Server you need to install the SP1 first. Also, you might want to get the checked build on a dev box as that has debug info.

MSMQ Ver. 3.5 for Indigo

As I found the hard way, if you require queued channels to work in Indigo, then you need to install MSMQ Ver. 3.5 which is specially required for Indigo. Interestingly, the installer does not install this (for check that even MSMQ is installed), but then by design Indigo can use any kind of channel. This version of MSMQ provides functionalities like per-application dead letter queue and remote transactional read that are used by the “Indigo” queued channel on Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. You can get the downloads from here. Below are the direct links:

Also make sure to get the COM+ hotfix and to get any of this working of course, you need the Indigo RC1 Beta – yes it is a release candidate for the beta, not a RC for RTM. Off to catch some zzzzz now.

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