Kevin Dente's Blog

According to this LadyBug post, Microsoft is not adding support for executing ASMX requests in an STA thread pool (ie the "ASPCOMPAT=TRUE" directive that is available for ASPX pages). This is something that I complained about long ago, and I'm very disappointed that it isn't being addressed in v2.0 of the framework.

Here's one of those fun issues that may or may not be a bug, depending on how you look at it.

Wow, what a crazy few months it's been. First, my fiance moved in. Next, she ceased to be my fiance and became my wife. Our fabulous wedding was followed by a fabulous 2 week honeymoon in Fiji. Back home for a week and a half, then off to New York for a friend's wedding. From there we were off to Amsterdam for a couple of days - the get-over-jetlag stopover on our way to Tanzania. In Tanzania we went on an amazing 9 day hike up to the top of Kilimanjaro (proof below), followed by a week long safari. Six out of eights weeks away from home, 65 hours on planes - it's good to be home for a while. Now it's time to get back to doing real work, and hopefully a little more blogging.

I've updated the Running Assembly Reflector add-in to be compatible with newer builds of Reflector (the latest is version 4.1.1.0, as of this writing). Sorry it took so long - been wicked busy with moving and wedding planning. I also fixed a couple of UI quirks, and moved the "Open Running Assembly" menu item under the File menu (thanks to Lutz for extending the Reflector add-in API to support this).

I just found out about PureText, a very nice (and free) little utility for scrubbing formatting info from data on the Windows clipboard. Basically, it lets you add "Paste Special/Plain Text" to any Windows application. Fantastic - I've been looking for something like this for a while.

Warning – glass house post ahead.

Update - Boy, did I call that or what? Microsoft has pulled Lookout from the MS Download site. Fortunately, it's resurfaced on the Lookout download page (with a massive “this is unsupported, don't plan on any fixes” disclaimer). I'm left wondering what's going on behind the scenes at Microsoft regarding Lookout. Were they really planning on just vanishing the product, but changed their mind because of the community outcry? I'm certainly glad it's available again, but I definitely would like to know what's in store for the product (or the product's capabilites) in the future. Lookout obviously met a customer need, and that need isn't going away in the near future.

When you right-click on a file in Windows Explorer and select “Open With...”, it pops up an option discover the appropriate application to open the file with by calling a Microsoft Web Service. I have never once actually used this option, so it simply adds an extra mouse click to the process (to dismiss the dialog). I've been meaning to find out if it was possible to disable this popup for ages, and finally got around to consulting the Oracle of Google.