Effective immediately, the request limit for Basic Auth has been reduced from 15/hour to 0. You’ve now got to use the newer oAuth method.

The documentation Twitter provides is pretty good. Or, if you don’t want to use that, and you have an open-source, personal project written in VB.NET then someone has already done all the hard work for you and called it TwitterVB.

The BBC produce an output of TV listings in XML format, which they make freely available at http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/feeds/tvradio/. It’s hosted on a HTTP webpage, zipped into a .tar.gz, but it’s XML all the same.

I’ve taken this feed, converted it into a SQL Server database, and put it out again on Twitter, at the time the program is just about to start.

So far, so simple. What I’m hoping to find is that the BBC feed also includes genre meta data, so I can hashtag particular types of program. That’s when the service will become actually useful.

In the meantime, however, you can follow the progress by following @OnTvRightNow, viewing the tweets or following the #OnTvRightNow hashtag.

Good though the BBC data is, it’s frustrating not having the full spectrum of UK terrestrial channels. It would be great to find a source of program data that isn’t limited to just the BBC.

Essentially it allows you to step into the code running on the dev server – in this case the webservices and see what’s happening without having to go back to the original project, fire it up locally, re-point the front-end application configs etc. It saves a lot of time!

At the heart of the thing is the Remote Debugging Monitor: essentially a program that sits on the remote machine and listens to requests that Visual Studio sends for debug access.

There’s a couple of security things to be aware of, depending on your setup. Obviously, once you fire up the Remote Debugging Monitor it will accept requests from anywhere, unless you’re clever with permissions. You can tie it down to local network use only, but your firewalls are already doing that, right? For many people, that’s probably good enough.

Anyway, to install, you can find the installer on the Visual Studio install DVD, the /RemoteDebugger/ folder. There’s a fairly simple wizard that steps you through first installing it, then configuring it. You get the choice of using it as an application you can start and quit, or a service you can fire and forget.

Once it’s installed, for me it was just a case of going back to the front-end code and trying to step-into a call I knew was hosted remotely. There’s a warning about attaching to the debugger, a short pause, then a prompt about the code file.

Basically (I think) – Visual Studio knows the DLL you want to debug, but it can’t find the code on your machine (usually because remotely the location is different, such as under /inetpub blah blah). The location on the remote machine is shown at the top of the dialog box.

You then provide the location of the source files on your machine, wait a second, and then your step-in will be honoured. You can step in and out, set breakpoints, move the flow cursor around just as you would with local code.

Additionally, Visual Studio seems to remember your choice of local code location, so you don’t have to do it next time.

If you need it, you can get a bit more information from MSDN here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y7f5zaaa.aspx

This is a really valuable feature which I was previously unaware of. For anyone who writes front-end applications that communicate with code elsewhere in their stack, it’s a brilliant way of saving time and effort when debugging.

Ctrl + E to bring focus to the search box in the top right hand corner.

Work on IE and Firefox.

Sometimes, you will want to provide the option to exclude or include a particular set of data. For instance, when showing car sales over the last quarter for Jolly Roger’s Car Showroom, you may want to include second-hand sales, or specifically exclude them, looking only new car sales. (Assuming our sales table has a column for ‘SecondHandSale’)

This is a bit different for showing ONLY second hand sales or ONLY new sales: you want to show either both or just one sort.

You can achieve this in SQL using a CASE statement in your WHERE clause:

WHERE IsSecondHandSale =
CASE WHEN @ExcludeSecondHandSales THEN 0
ELSE IsSecondHandSale END

What you’re saying is that if second hand sales are excluded than the value in the IsSecondHandSale should be zero, otherwise it should be the same as it’s value. This will always be true, and so will ensure that all rows are returned.

This neat trick makes extending reports easy, and means you’re not duplicating reports just to show slightly different data.

Yikes!

Clicking the link took me to this summary, where I changed my password. Thanks Google!

One thing that would be really good though: the ability to lock down my account so that I can only log in from, say, UK-based IP addresses. I know that proxies would still mean I wasn’t totally safe, but given that I hardly ever use email outside the UK, and I’d be happy to have to ‘enable roaming’ on my email account, I think it would be a worthwhile security option.

It turns out that, out of the box, loads of stuff is disabled when you install 2008. This is totally understandable and a very good idea, but it isn’t immediately obvious when it happens. Sometimes the OS will notice when you’re trying to do something and prompt you to enable a feature (the sound is a good example of this) but sometimes it doesn’t.

Wireless connectivity is a good example of this. You have to add this as a feature format via the Server Management console and then, hey presto, it works straightaway.

I just thought it was really good – thought provoking and original.

Anyway, here’s the pic:

Well now I know. I’m very glad to find out that it isn’t just a film quote,and that there’s a real story behind it. (in fact, the real-life quote IS slightly different, but not really.

Anyway, should you also be wondering about the origin of the famous quote meaning that an unexpected problem has occurred, then you can read an account of the events by the guy who spoke it: http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-13-1.html

There’s some fascinating other stories there as well.

One of the slides addresses the number of Windows Developers that are out there and who they are looking to target any new version of Windows to:

~39 million STEM-D (science, maths, engineering and tech developers)
~8.6 million professional developers
~104 million non-professional, hobbyiest developers

That’s a lot of development capacity!

There’s also talk of combining the LogOff and Hibernate functionality into a new state, which will be “Faster on from 0 Watts combining the best of each of our off states”

Read, digest, enjoy, and look forward to it!

Windows 8 plans leaked.