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Ramon’s tips helped me a bit further, because they enabled me to test some of the settings and try where the problem is.

I now encounter a very nice but weird phenomenon: when I use DualView on my NVidia card, I can drag Media Center to my TV. This works and shows up properly. When I maximize Media Center the image is all garbled up. But: when I open another window (this can be anything: notepad, display properties or the DirectX Control Panel (By the way: thanks for that one Ramon!)) and give this other window the focus, my Media Center display perfect. As soon as Media Center gets the focus, its image garbles up.

It’s been a while since I’ve been blogging, because my project has been extremely hectic. Now I’m enjoying a week off, so I’ve got time for toys now… 😉

One of these toys was going to be Windows XP Media Center Edition. I installed it, bought a compatible TV card together with a MCE remote and yep: everything is working fine. At least, as long as I am watching it on my monitor. As soon as I switch to TV (through the TV Out on my GeForce Ti4800 SE) there’s trouble. I found that when Media Center is not maximized, it shows up on my TV. But when I try to maximize it, it garbles up the image up to a point where you cannot even recognize Media Center in it. It feels like the TV doesn’t support the refresh rate or something, but I can’t alter that in my NVidia driver.

I ran in to something strange today…

The ASP.NET 2.0 Menu control renders differently in a browser and in the W3 validator. Loading the page in a browser results in the usage of the correct attribute ‘vertical-align’ for the image which is used to indicate a menu has subitems. I checked this in IE and FireFox and both browsers rendered correct XHTML. When you copy the source of the rendered page and paste it in the validator-textbox at W3.org, it validates the XHTML. When you check the page directly by entering a URL, the menu renders using the non-correct attribute ‘valign’, causing my page to fail validation.  But the copied source passes validation!

As a follow-up to my previous post..

Eventually a colleague of mine pointed me in the right direction. The System.Runtime.Remoting part of a configfile can also contain a tag. Setting it to “Off” made that I got the expected exception. Thanks Jasper!

We are using binary .NET remoting over http for a client-server application. At the server, we have implemented custom error handling which results in the Service Interface (the facade layer) to throw a decent exception, with lots of information. The problem we encounter now is that most of the time the client displays these exceptions as BinaryFormatter exceptions, in stead of the ApplicationException or the normal Exception we throw serverside.

When you use No-touch deployment, reading your config file might cause some problems.

I experienced this when I received a ‘No message was deserialized prior to calling the DispatchChannelSink’ error last week. It took me quite some time before I found the problem, because of the strange error. After a while I thought about the way my app was starting: I started a separate thread which configured a remoting interface based on the config file: RemotingConfiguration.Configure(). This because of the non-standard binary formatter that was used. The thread didn’t throw an exception (I know, bad programming, but it was a proof-of-concept 😉 ) and so the app tried to communicate with the remoted object….. which resulted in the error above.

Last week I played with VS2005 a little. My first overall impression is: sweet! Partial classes, nullable types, generics, master pages, new controls, great extra debug info… they all make our life a little easier.

I’m having a good weekendstart today: I took an exam for Rational Unified Process this afternoon, and passed with a score of 91%! I am now an IBM certified Rational Unified Process professional. Sweet.

If you would like to (for example) make sure all the jpegs on your site are displayed including a copyright text or something like that, you could use the example I posted before. But it would be easier to write a custom httpHandler. Here’s a small howto:

Today I stumbled upon the Dutch Microsoft blogs and found an interesting post at the blog of Robert Fransen: the IE Developer Toolbar beta is available! The Toolbar offers you lots of handy features:

Normally, if you would like a singleton implementation of a class, you would go about it a little bit like this:

public class BloggingAbout
{
    private static BloggingAbout bloggingAbout;
   
    private BloggingAbout()
    {
    }