As suggested.

The Irish Microsoft Technology Conference (IMTC 2007) was held in Cineworld Dublin yesterday. Not quite the same setup as MIX ‘07 in Las Vegas but it was great venue for a conference, big screens, comfy chairs and Ben & Jerry’s. Three screens held presentations simultaneously so we only got along to a few. Unsurprisingly, a quick hands-up poll suggested that the vast majority of attendees were .NET developers, and that not many non-MS folks had come along.

Tim Sneath was first up with two presentations covering Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 1.1 the full titles being “Rich Web Experiences with Silverlight and Javascript for Developers” and “Building Silverlight Applications using .NET”. Tim, like all the other Microsoft evangelists, keep both talks interesting by mostly scripting demos on the fly. Very interactive including some debugging using Firebug on Firefox. Perhaps unsurprisingly, IE7 was noticeably quicker than Firefox for the demos.

Carrie Longson gave a presentation titled “Desiging the Ultimate Experiences with Expression Studio”. It was absorbing to watch a designer at work particularly for developers who often don’t get to see how it all comes together (using Expression tools).

Steve Marx talked about “Exploring AJAX Patterns” but particularly looking at ASP.NET and AJAX together. Steve was quick to point out that the X (for XML) part of AJAX is more often than not ignored then proceeded to work through a juggling demo highlighting the asynchronous aspects in particular.

Microsoft announced Silverlight earlier this week, to general acclaim.

What’s not obvious from some of the coverage thus far, however, is that the platform demoed at Mix07 will ship in two parts: Silverlight 1.0, to be released sometime this summer; and Silverlight 1.1, to be released at some point thereafter. In the keynote (NB: Windows Media Player link), Scott Guthrie, GM of the Silverlight team, refers to this merely as “Beyond Summer 07.”

It’s the 1.1 release (given that it seems something of a quantum leap over even v1.0, they could almost refer to it as Silverlight 2.0 - and, who knows, they might do, yet) which contains the .NET Runtime support which, in turn, might (finally!) consign Javascript-as-a-general-purpose-programming-language to the dustbin of history.

If Silverlight (or something like it/better than it) takes hold, then I can imagine a time when you simply will not be able to convince a recent CS graduate of just how pointlessly difficult programming the Web once was.

Being, by profession, mostly technical, the ’softer’ aspects of starting and running a new business present the more .. novel challenges to us.

As such, a relative of mine generously lent me her copy of Marketing: An Introductory Text (ISBN:0333625870).

Since it is, thus far, the only book on marketing I’ve read, it’d be meaningless for me to proclaim it the best. But it is easy enough to read, and has prompted me to think about the work we’re doing in new ways, so it’s not hard to recommend it to others.

I had occasion the other evening to transfer a few dozen Waveson-related e-mail messages from Apple Mail on my personal Personal Computer, as it were, to Outlook 2003 on the Dell which I’ve been mostly using for work these days (if only because it has a larger display).Looking on the web, I found that most of the advice available had to do with transferring e-mail in the other direction, but the following work well for me:

1. I exported the messages from Apple Mail to mbox format. I found it useful to export to two mbox files, one for received and the other for sent messages. Equally, I found it useful to save the files with a .mbox extension, the better to be picked up by the next step.
2. I converted the mbox files to corresponding folders of .eml files using IMAPSize. (See the mbox2eml option on the Tools menu.)
3. I imported the .eml files into Outlook Express (OE); you can just drag and drop the files into the application window.
4. I imported the e-mails from OE into Outlook 2003, by selecting “Import and Export..” from the File menu, then “Import from another program or file”, and “Outlook Express 4.x, 5.x, 6.x”. At this point, Outlook warned that “No internet accounts were found to import”, but the next option prompted me to import e-mail messages and addresses from Microsoft Outlook Express, and this only took a second, or two, to run for three dozen, or so, messages.

To try out some of the ideas Dave and I have had, I’ve been putting together some command-line tools with Visual C++.NET 2003 SP1 and the Platform SDK.

Although these tools built without error using the IDE-provided ‘Debug’ build configuration, when I initially tried building them with the ‘Release’ configuration, the linker spat out a ream of errors along the lines of:


Tag.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ)

TaggedFile.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ)

Tagger.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::_String_base::_Xlen(void)const " (?_Xlen@_String_base@std@@QBEXXZ)

Main.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "class std::basic_ostream > std::wcout" (?wcout@std@@3V?$basic_ostream@_WU?$char_traits@_W@std@@@1@A)

Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "public: void __thiscall std::locale::facet::_Register(void)" (?_Register@facet@locale@std@@QAEXXZ) referenced in function "class std::ctype const & __cdecl std::use_facet >(class std::locale const &)" (??$use_facet@V?$ctype@_W@std@@@std@@YAABV?$ctype@_W@0@ABVlocale@0@@Z)

Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol "public: class std::locale::facet const * __thiscall std::locale::_Getfacet(unsigned int)const " (?_Getfacet@locale@std@@QBEPBVfacet@12@I@Z) referenced in function "class std::ctype const & __cdecl std::use_facet >(class std::locale const &)" (??$use_facet@V?$ctype@_W@std@@@std@@YAABV?$ctype@_W@0@ABVlocale@0@@Z)

Main.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: static class std::locale::id std::ctype::id" (?id@?$ctype@_W@std@@2V0locale@2@A)

Main.obj : error LNK2019: unresolved external symbol __Getwctype referenced in function "protected: virtual bool __thiscall std::ctype::do_is(short,wchar_t)const " (?do_is@?$ctype@_W@std@@MBE_NF_W@Z)


A user on the Valve Developer Community wiki recommends removing references to the Platform SDK from the IDE to resolve a not dissimilar problem.

I’ve found it sufficient to remove “libcp.lib” from “\Lib” under the folder/directory into which the Platform SDK is installed; seemingly, the Platform SDK ships with a version of libcp.lib which conflicts with headers and/or libraries included in some versions of Visual C++.

If you know of a better solution or workaround, please share it in the comments.

Waveson is a company founded by Stephen Higgins and David Copithorne. The blog is intended to relate our experiences in both developing our products and running Waveson. We hope you find it useful!