Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers

Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers

Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 01:00 AM PDT

The folks over at DonorsChoose.org are running an "open data" context in April that I thought you all might be interested in! DonorsChoose is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need. The difference is that the Donor can target a project directly...you can choose where your $1 goes. So far, more than 165,000 teachers at 43,000 public schools have posted over 300,000 classroom projects supported by 409,000 citizen philanthropists who have made >900,000 project donations at DonorsChoose.org to date. That makes for a whole lot of data that is publicly accessible for a contest, after of course scrubbing identifying information about teachers and donors. The resulting info will include everything from...(read more)

Binding to Dynamic Properties with ICustomTypeProvider (Silverlight 5 Beta)

Posted: 24 Apr 2011 06:40 PM PDT

Silverlight 5 Beta introduces a new ICustomTypeProvider interface that enables data binding to objects the structure of which cannot be known until runtime. This is a common problem when you work with data in any format from databases to metadata or XML...( read more )...(read more)

MS11-025 Visual C++ Update Issue

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 11:27 AM PDT

Greetings, I'm Raman Sharma, Program Manager with the Visual C++ team.

 

As part of the April Security Bulletin Release, Microsoft released security bulletin MS11-025. Since then, we became aware of some issues with this bulletin that impact some users on Windows 2000 and a subset of developers using Visual C++. Our team has identified the cause of these issues and is currently testing the fix. The update will be publicly available once testing is complete, and we will update this blog. As customer protection is a top priority for Microsoft, we are providing some workarounds for the impacted customers.


 

MFC applications running on Windows 2000

Issue

We discovered that the redistributable packages for Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 were propagated through Microsoft Update to Windows 2000, which is no longer a supported platform.

Developers who use Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 to produce applications for use on Windows 2000 machines are expected to distribute the appropriate redistributable package themselves. As a result of this automatic update, some applications dynamically linking to the MFC libraries on Windows 2000 were broken, as the updated MFC binaries happened to use an API unsupported on Windows 2000.

As soon as we became aware of this issue, we stopped automatically offering these updates on Windows 2000. We believe the exposure is fairly limited as this impacts only those applications that are not statically linked to MFC.

 

Workaround

  • For those Windows 2000 users who were impacted, the process to remove the updates is as follows:

Windows 2000 users with "Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package"

To recover a machine:

  1. Uninstall the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable" from Add/Remove Programs.

  2. Install the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable" from:
    http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=766a6af7-ec73-40ff-b072-9112bab119c2&displaylang=en

 

Windows 2000 users with "Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package"

To recover a machine:

  1. Uninstall the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable" from Add/Remove Programs.
  2. If you are on Windows 2000:
    1. Install the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package" from:
      http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=2051a0c1-c9b5-4b0a-a8f5-770a549fd78c&displaylang=en
    2. If you rely on any of the following KBs, re-install the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package" that came with these KBs:
      KB974479, KB979335, KB980848, KB982062, KB982107, KB982637, KB2435853, KB2465361, KB2495003

 

  • For developers the problem is slightly more complex. Visual Studio had specific updates that make the above changes to the files used to create applications so any application built on a machine, whether statically or dynamically linked will exhibit the problem. If you are currently building applications that you expect to deploy to Windows 2000 machines then you will need to do the following:

 

Developers with Visual Studio 2005

To recover a developer machine that has KB2465367 (Visual Studio 2005):

  1. Go to the Add/Remove Programs
  2. Make sure 'Show Updates' is checked.

  3. Under the "Visual Studio 2005" product node, there should be a KB2465367 entry. Select and uninstall.

 

Developers with Visual Studio 2008

To recover a developer machine that has KB2465361 (Visual Studio 2008):

  1. Go to the Add/Remove Programs
  2. Make sure 'Show Updates' is checked.
  3. Under the "Visual Studio 2008" product node, there should be a KB2465361 entry. Select and uninstall.
  4. Uninstall "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtimes for x86"
  5. Uninstall "Microsoft Visual C++ Runtimes for x64"


 

Visual Studio 2010 RTM with Windows SDK

Issue

If you have Visual Studio 2010 RTM and Windows SDK 7.1 installed on an x64 machine, then the Visual Studio 2010 update (KB2455033) fails to install on your machine.

 

Workaround

The workaround for this issue:

  1. Go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall the package "Microsoft Visual C++ compilers 2010 Standard – enu – x64"
  2. Try installing KB2455033 again.


 

Please note that the above workaround will not actually remove the compiler bits from your machine and you should still be able to use the x64 compilers. The workaround just addresses some incorrect definitions in the patch.

We hope to release the permanent fix for these issues soon. In the meantime, customers who follow the guidance above should not be affected.

If you have any questions please let us know.

 

 

Thank you,

Raman Sharma
Microsoft Visual C++ Team

Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes–Silverlight and IE9 in Windowless Mode

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 06:26 AM PDT

Note: these are early notes based on some initial experiments with the Silverlight 5 beta, apply a pinch of salt to what you read. If you search the web for something like "Silverlight windowless performance" you'll find a bunch of articles that talk...( read more )...(read more)

Silverlight 4, UserControls and the dreaded “name already exists in the tree”

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 04:52 AM PDT

I was doing some work with Silverlight the other week which involved using UserControls where the control named itself. That is, a situation such as; <UserControl x:Name="foo"> <!—Content of control –> </UserControl> and, under unpredictable...( read more )...(read more)

Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes–Ancestor Relative Binding

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 04:39 AM PDT

Note: these are early notes based on some initial experiments with the Silverlight 5 beta, apply a pinch of salt to what you read. There's another new tweak to the binding engine in Silverlight which now allows for a RelativeSource with a Mode of Ancestor...( read more )...(read more)

Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes–Implicit Data Templates

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 03:13 AM PDT

Note: these are early notes based on some initial experiments with the Silverlight 5 beta, apply a pinch of salt to what you read. One of the powerful new features around templating in the Silverlight 5 beta is the ability to produce a DataTemplate that...( read more )...(read more)

Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes–Markup Extensions

Posted: 26 Apr 2011 02:34 AM PDT

Note: these are early notes based on some initial experiments with the Silverlight 5 beta, apply a pinch of salt to what you read. One of the WPF features that's been missing from Silverlight has been the ability to extend the XAML language by writing...( read more )...(read more)

Application Events in Silverlight

Posted: 25 Apr 2011 02:00 PM PDT

During the lifetime of a Silverlight application, some application-wide events are triggered automatically. While they are important from the perspective of Silverlight, they can come in handy as well for us as application developers: they can be seen...( read more )...(read more)

Silverlight Cream for April 25, 2011 -- #1078

Posted: 25 Apr 2011 10:22 PM PDT

In this Issue: Derik Whittaker , Morten Nielsen , Jeff Prosise ( -2- ), Harold Martinez , WindowsPhoneGeek , Jesse Liberty ( -2- ), Martin Krüger , and Xianzhong Zhu . Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Multithread Programming in Silverlight 4" Xianzhong Zhu...( read more )...(read more)
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