My World

As a recent purchaser of a set of bluetooth headphones, I frequently run into the situation of loading a media file before realising that the wrong default audio device is selected. As a result, I've had to shut down IE or WMP in order to change the default audio device before I can hear the audio from my chosen media.

Thinking this was just an issue with Vista, I put it to the back of my mind and tried to keep a mental note. Today I checked my blog subscriptions and found that (once again) Larry Osterman has done a great job of describing why this happens.

Larry's short answer: "It's the responsibility of the application to deal with handling errors.  The audio stack bubbles out the error to the application and lets it figure out how to deal with the problem."

What I love about Larry's blog is that he always gets into the nitty-gritty. In this blog post, he goes into how applications access Vista's audio functionality and what developers can do to make their applications handle this situation.

My question for today is, if any application can handle this situation, then why doesn't WMP 11...?

Larry Osterman's WebLog : What happens when audio rendering fails?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a short presentation on using loop containers in SSIS.

I promised a few people that I'd publish my code, so here it is.

For those that didn't make it, the package demonstrates a basic ForEach Loop container. I decided to demonstrate something that was absolute hell to accomplish in DTS.

Back in the SQL 2000 world, if you wanted to send an automated email to customers, the basic procedure was to write a nasty ActiveX script that would hit the database, loop through the results, create and send an email, then update the database.

In SSIS this is easily accomplished with a ForEach Loop. I show this in the sample from my demo that executes some SQL using an Execute SQL Task to produce a Result Set and looping through the rows with a ForEach loop container to send an email before updating the current row with another SQL Task. I created the package (almost) from scratch within 10 minutes in my demo on Saturday.

I've tacked in a change, which enables a package configuration to demonstrate how you would configure the package in a more practical environment. Please check out the Readme to get an idea of what you need to do to get the package working.

If you have any issues with the package, leave a comment or use my Contact Me form to send me an email.

This year I not only attended, but presented at my first SQL Code Camp hosted by Greg Low and SQL Down Under.

Overall, it was a great weekend. I took a lot out of several presentations and had the chance to chat with some of the *real* SQL nuts including Kevin Kline, Rob Farley, Dave Glover, Peter Ward, Jeff Wharton, Peter Myers and of course Greg Low.

I also really enjoyed chatting to several other people about my presentation on SSIS and various other side topics.

I'm looking forward to next year. Hopefully they'll have me back... :)

It looks like Microsoft's trying to improve the user experience of their mobile devices.

As a recent purchaser of a WM6 Motorola Q 9h, I think this is a great step forward. I've played with Blackberries, Nokias and iPhones and when I pick up my Q I can't help feeling that WM6 could have been done better.

I like the fact that I can do just about anything on my phone, but I think that it's just become too complicated. I've always thought that the way the Xbox Dashboard works with its Blades was a great concept that could be put into other interfaces in the Microsoft world. When HTC announced the Touch I was quite excited because it looked like they were beginning recognising this.

I'm definitely liking the look of the interface put forward in the patent photos. Hopefully it's not limited to the touch screen devices.

Microsoft patent app shows off new user interface for mobiles - Engadget

The good people at PC Mag have gotten their hands on the Vista SP1 Beta, and are apparently quite pleased with it.

It seems that the performance and responsiveness of the overall system is obviously increased. The time taken to wake a machine from hibernation along with copying and extracting files has been noticeably reduced.

A couple of security enhancements have been made as well including the ability to use BitLocker on secondary hard drives, signing Remote Desktop files, the addition of Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol and the ability for anti-malware software to extend the 64-bit kernel.

The only issue reported in the review was that upgrading an existing installation of Vista didn't install properly on one of the test systems.

Continue reading for the full review...

Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 Beta - Review by PC Magazine

Pure gold! Thanks Paul.

The Zune is starting to look like a version 2 product.

Check out the video here...

Zune 2 bits and pieces, plus an in-depth interface video - Engadget

New 80GB HDD and 8/4GB Flash Zunes have been announced to be released sometime in November.

New features?

• funky new dpad
• h.264 and MPEG decoding
• WiFi sync to host
• 3x3 file sharing DRM has been changed to a 3 play limit (i.e. no more 3 day limit)
• Zune PC software rewritten (from scratch apparently)...
• Zune store will be DRM FREE!!!

Can't wait to see some reviews. No word on if they ever plan on being released outside the US though...

Microsoft's new Zunes: officially in 80, 8, and 4GB sizes - Engadget