Glavs Blog

Doug Reilly passed away today. I met him only a few times and he was a good guy. Fellow MVP, ASPInsider, and lover of technology. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

I have installed Vista Ultimate, and I have been unsuccessfully trying to get a whole bunch of older video files playing on Windows Media player lately. I have to say the general codec support that comes shipped is pretty poor. At least 75% of my files cannot be played. You might be saying, just go download the codec’s. Well thats often easier said than done, particularly when it comes to the .ASF format. I have a small video camera that uses the .ASF format, and the software that comes with it, that I assume installs the ASF drivers, if ofcourse incompatible with Vista. Trying to find an ASF codec to use is pretty damn hard and I have had no luck thus far.

In a previous post, I talked about how to go about creating your own ExtenderControls. Lately, I have been busy creating another control to add into the Ajax Control Toolkit, however this control is based off a ScriptControl.

Wally sent me some log files that show how much traffic we are getting for the latest ASP.NET Podcasts. We are getting some really good stats (well I think they are good, but are probably pretty small compared to the bigger sites and more popular podcasts). We have been clocking in at up to 12,000 downloads for one of the more popular videos that Wally did, and I think my Scott Guthrie interview is getting around 6000-7000 downloads.

Wally has produced a new video on the subject of the ASP.NET AJAX Updatepanel and the Clientside Page Lifecycle.   The video contains information about the UpdatePanel, the clientside page lifecycle, and handling errors.  This video is an updated version of the show from this past summer.

The release of Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions is due very soon, and it contains a wealth of functionality. The AJAX Control toolkit is an open source, free library of controls and additional framework that sits on top of the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Extensions. If you want to create your own controls using the ASP.NET AJAX extensions, you can either create it using the base classes of the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions itself, or you can use the additional features that the AJAX Control toolkit provides.

I saw a link on Andrew Stopford’s blog which pointed to yet another blog by John Rayner that showed a way of installing the WPF/e template into VS2005 without Web application projects. Well, my templates still didn’t install properly and I did have the Web application project extensions installed.

readify have managed to get Juval Lowy to come to Australia to present an Industrial Strength WCF master class. Juval is Regional Director, a principal at iDesign and is listed by Microsoft as a Software Legend. (His details are at: http://www.idesign.net/idesign/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabindex=3&tabid=5)