NullifyNetwork

Microsoft have just released version 5 of Silverlight, the tools for VS2010, the developer runtime and the full runtime!

Hopefully this isn't the end of Silverlight as the media are currently speculating, I'm hopeful that there'll be an announcement of a Silverlight 6 but either way Silverlight 5 has a ten year support cycle and is the underlying technology behind Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 (albeit with different naming, etc.).

I've been very impressed with the capabilities of WPF/Silverlight and hope that it gets the resources it deserves.

This has been delaying my release of an upgraded version of this blog for months now, and has also meant that I have chosen to use Linq To SQL on several large projects when working (Linq To SQL fully supports this scenario despite being the 2nd class citizen in entity mapping at Microsoft), Paul Patterson explains it quite well here so I can be lazy and just link to his article:-

http://www.paulspatterson.com/technology/dot-net-development/entity-framework-4-and-sql-uniqueidentifier-bug/

I wasn't willing to employ his fix though, it was frustrating and would get overwritten whenever the schema was updated however I have just found that there is a hotfix for this now available from Microsoft so that you can correctly configure the EDMX in entity framework to support the rowguid correctly:-

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=37957

This isn't perfect as you still need to manually set the StoreGeneratedPattern option on the rowguid columns to Identity, but it is certainly better than the total failure that was the case before!  Hopefully they will consider better support for replication, guid's and server-generated values in future versions.

I guess this means I can finally switch to Entity Framework and get my new site version released... :)

haven't had time to blog around work (figured I should at least post once a year though), but I'm pleased to see large companies suddenly enabling their IPv6 implementations today, it has been a rough ride.  I've seen a gradual climb in IPv6 end users (and web and mail servers) for some time now and it's very pleasing to see it gradually approaching critical mass.

With my network fully IPv6 enabled for some time now thanks to Hurricane Electric (and more recently Goscomb Technologies too) I am looking forward to the time when there's no more NAT being deployed, or at least not in the same fashion.

Edit: I'm glad to see Microsoft as one of the first companies to get their sites advertising their AAAA records today, curtesy of Akamai.  The rapid climb towards 100% amongst the participating companies is excellent to see, partcularly as the agreed start time is midnight UTC rather than british summer time when this post is being made (visible at http://www.worldipv6day.org/participants-dashboard/index.html and http://v6day.ripe.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi)