Publishing and testing a Windows Communication Foundation Service in IIS7 on Windows Vista is pretty straightforward, but there are a few pitfalls to look out for along the way. This post is designed to compliment the screencast ‘Creating and consuming your first WCF Service’ which I will publish here soon. I hope sharing this with you saves you some time when deploying your first service.

[ Hosting a WCF Service using IIS7 and Windows Vista Nick Kewney’s Blog ]

Since my last .Net web service was pre-WSE and this is at least 3 iterations later, I have a bit to catch up on. They've certainly complicated things via abstraction, which is probably a great help to many, but seems like overkill for my purposes, but this post helped a lot. Since I need authentication WCF "wants" me to use transport security, ie SSL, so people can't snoop on the credentials. Nice that the framework is enforcing such standards, bad that I have to do that in my development environment. Well, WCF doing a SOAP "basic" webservice via HTTPS is set up on my machine. Now I have to figure out how to implement the authentication headers...

The new Rick Sandoval place, it opened in May of 2008. I went during the first week and thought it was clearly the best Mexican place around. Sandoval places don’t stay great for long, so now is the time to go.

[ Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide: La Sandia ]

I don't know Rick Sandoval from a hole in the wall, but I know Mexican food that I like. I've lamented the decline in quality and service at Tia Queta for a while now, but I must say that La Sandia is better than I ever remember Tia Queta being. I got the Chicken Mole Enchiladas:

Yaty got the Shrimp Fajitas:

She wasn't so impressed, she liked it but prefers the Fajitas as Guapo's and the fresh grilled jalapeño that comes with them. Of course if this is contemporary south Mexican fare, I would expect the fajitas to be less than stellar. The guacamole and the tomatillo sauce that accompanied her fajitas were quite good though.

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM) is celebrated in May to commemorate the contributions of people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent in the United States. Congress passed a joint Congressional Resolution in 1978 to commemorate Asian American Heritage Week during the first week of May. This date was chosen because two important anniversaries occurred during this time: the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants in America on May 7, 1843 and the completion of the transcontinental railroad (by many Chinese laborers) on May 10, 1869. Congress later voted to expand it from a week long to a month long celebration.

[ Asian Pacific American Heritage Month - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ]

Try to do something quintessentially Asian or Pacific Islander this month!

Update: Local celebration for those in the DC area!

Or at least what the fire did, and it fried a bit of my hand too... 

Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters PlayStation2 Sony Computer Entertainment Everyone 10+ C

I gave it two tries. I had tried to play this earlier on the PSP but I found the controls seriously got in the way of the game play. The controls work a bit better on the PS2 version, but since they are just mapping the PSP controls, there isn't really any correction for the lack of some controls. I was playing this on my PS3 and it clearly shows that the quality suffers. It's not wide screen, it's not super hi def, it doesn't even have very good audio. Sure I should cut it some slack since it is a port of a portable game, but even after cutting it some slack I just found that I wasn't enjoying the game. I'd almost like them to make an animated movie about the game so I can just sit and watch the story, which is the best part anyway. And this isn't giving me a lot of confidence about the forthcoming "Secret Agent Clank" either...

Or aren't on Kooshmoose's speed dial, or get all of your gaming news from my blog...

Super Smash Bros. Brawl Nintendo Wii Nintendo Teen A+

What is there to say about SSBB? If you owned a Nintendo 64, then I know you already have this game. If you owned a GameCube and enjoyed the previous Super Smash Bros. Melee, then you have at least checked this out and since purchased a copy. If the Wii is your first Nintendo console then do yourself a favor and at least rent this one (you'll end up buying it anyway).

Who won't like this? I guess if you have no friends or abhor violence then this isn't for you. Of course if you don't like violence then you don't play video games, and if you have no friends you either purchased a PS3 to keep it that way, or you bought a Wii hoping to get friends.

!!! SPOILER ALERT !!!

Perhaps you have a copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee and figure it's the same game, just newer graphics? Essentially yes, except for:

• New playable characters:
• Diddy Kong
• Ike from Fire Emblem
• King Dedede from Kirby
• Lucario from Pokémon
• Lucas from Earth Bound
• Meta Knight from Kirby
• Olimar from Pikmin
• Pit from Kid Icarus
• Ash (though they call him "Pokémon Trainer") from Pokémon
• R.O.B. as himself (Old School NES reference)
• Snake from Metal Gear
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Toon Link from Wind Waker
• Wario
• Wolf from Star Fox
• Zero Suit Samus from Metroid
• New stages to fall in line with the above
• 4 play styles
• Wiimote
• Wiimote + Nunchuck
• Classic Controller
• GameCube Controller (including my beloved WaveBird)
• Final Smashes - with an item each character has a unique "super attack"
• New Adventure Mode: Subspace Emissary (so much better than Melee's Adventure Mode)
• WiFi play!
• Stickers (OK, this one is a bit lame)
• Demo versions of the games the characters come from (so you'll buy the originals on Virtual Console)
• Challenges greatly improved to help you find all unlockable challenges in the game (like achievements on the XBox 360, but only for one game and not viewable by others on your gamer tag which Nintendo doesn't even have...)
• Assist Trophies (like pokeballs but they have non-Pokémon characters inside them)

That is a ton of new stuff, and except for the Stickers all well received. So what are you still doing here? Head to GameFly and add this puppy to your queue, or straight to EB Games so you can get a copy in your hot little hands. Go!

Crash of the Titans Nintendo Wii Sierra Everyone 10+ B

Crash? That old PS1 game? Yes, that crash. I never had a PS1, so this is actually the first Crash game I've ever played. Apparently Naughty Dog isn't involved anymore, but the series continues anyway. Why'd I pick this game up, of all games? My nephew Oni was playing the heck out of this thing during our last trip to Indonesia, and since there was a Wii version I figured I'd give it a spin.

Well, there is really nothing new here. The "jack" system allows Crash to use his mask friend Aku Aku to control large monsters, you can then use them to better attack and thereby jack even more and sometimes larger beasties, otherwise it's a basic platformer. Does this mean that there is anything wrong with it? Nope, I'm a platformer guy, so this suits me. Still playing through the first time, not sure if there will be much desire to destroy this game, but so far it's been entertaining.

I'm primarily a web-based interface programmer, I haven't done non-web-based applications for my main gig for a while, though in the before web age I did dial-up applications (in ansi!). They, however, didn't need multi-threading for updating the GUI while doing the work in a separate thread. This is one thing that has always daunted me with Windows applications, perhaps VB and c++ programmers just like dealing with all the threading issues for fun. Finally I found this:

The BackgroundWorker Component allows a form to run an operation asynchronously. This is very useful when we deal with such kind of operations as database transactions, image downloads etc. In this case our user interface can hang (or not appear until loading will be finished). In this article I will show (step-by-step) how you can use the BackgroundWorker Component in .NET 2 applications to execute time-consuming operations. The examples are written using C#.

[ Using the BackgroundWorker Component in .NET 2 applications ]

Perhaps I was supposed to know that was there all along, of course since much of what I do in .net happens so quickly that multi-threading is useless, and the interface is all sent via HTML, etc., I've just never run across having to do this right, until today. Doing a DB import of 25K+ records from access into a local SQL server requires more time than the GUI updating would like, and this was the easy-peasey-lemon-squeezey way of doing that, let me tell you. Just drag this tool onto the playing field, and then double-click a few auto-stubbed event handlers, plus toggle the property "WorkerSupportsProgress", wire up what I want to get done with a call to notify the progress bar, wire in the progress bar updater, and voilà! it's almost like I know what I'm doing...

Anytime you have 7 hours to spare, that is.

Of course I didn't use the Anytime Upgrade but a free copy of Vista Ultimate that Microsoft gave attendees of the HEROES Happen {Here} conference (or however they typed it...).

And after those 7 hours? Had to reinstall audio drivers, reinstall Stardock Central, and download sob jobby to reset my Live OneCare because it couldn't identify me or turn on the firewall.

And for what? I'm not even sure what the difference between business and ultimate is. There is Bit Locker, though I doubt I'll use that, and there is Dream Scene, which amazingly doesn't seem to affect the performance of my laptop, but I'm sure it will get old quickly. There is increased media capabilities, but I don't have a TV Tuner card, so really what does that do for me?

InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration.

[ InfraRecorder ]

They forgot to mention their sense of humor:

Burn baby, burn!

Note: ISO in question? Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop, hopefully running on a few PCs throughout the house soon...

Ever wonder how they went from Mario Bros. to Super Mario Bros.?

And that's (also) why they're not called the Super Luigi Bros

[ Dueling Analogs :: Without the Super, He's Just a Man ]

Makes sense to me. Though technically when the name change happened Luigi looked exactly like Mario but wore different colors...

And this is the view...

Considered the crossroads of the Far East, Malaysia assimilated cultures and cuisines from China, India, Thailand and the Middle East. Peanut Satay, Malaysia's signature dish, delicately blends exotic spices, coconut milk, tamarind and fruit and crunchy peanuts into a robust sauce for Hokkien noodles.

[ Amazon.com: Ka-Me Noodle Box, Peanut Satay ]

Not sure how authentic these are, but I do love Hokkien noodles and peanuts, so as far as I'm concerned it's authentically yummy!

In Rockville I had the fastest connection Comcast would sell me, and in Bethesda I now have the fastest connection Verizon (FiOS) will sell me. I am going to say that Fiber allows for more speed than Cable, though this is clearly not scientific in any way...

Results provided by ZD Net Australia.

This How-To provides step-by-step instructions for creating a Universal Wireless Repeater appliance: a device that you can place anywhere and it will wirelessly repeat the strongest signal, onto another wireless network (with or without security). This functionality is also known as Wireless Client Bridge, or Range Expander. Unlike WDS, once you have this appliance setup, it will work with any open network.

[ Universal Wireless Repeater - DD-WRT Wiki ]

Since the FiOS router they give you does the WiFi for you, I can flash my old Linksys and turn it into a repeater to help get the signal upstairs to my wife's PC. Just have to figure out where I packed it first...

Update: the Linksys that I had would only allow for the "micro" version that can't be a repeater. However, I was able to set it up as a Wireless Bridge which allows it to replace the WiFi dongle that Yaty had been using. Since you can boost the signal of the Linksys, it can much more easily reach the FiOS router and she reports that the speed is much improved. Once again, thank you Linux.