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Currently reading: The Security Development Lifecycle

My post Novatel Wireless Merlin U630 on Windows Vista generated quite some feedback like "How did you install the drivers?". So I decided to take the latest and greatest build 5456 and see if I would get it up and running there too. Here is the list of things you need to do:

Obviously, the first thing to do is to insert the card. You will be prompted for driver installation, and it will try to do just that. However, it will only succeed in installing a "Generic Multifunction PC-Card". The two ports (later identified as multifunction device) will fail because it cannot detect the drivers.

Now we have to rectify this problem. Let's go to Device Manager (via Control Panel / Hardware), and right-click on the "Generic Multifunction PC-Card".  Choose "Update Driver":

This will magically turn it into the Novatel Wireless UMTS Modem Parent. And this in turn will allow auto-detection of the two ports:

Please note that the secondary port will show up under COM ports, not Modems:

And here things get hairy - as I pointed out, I am using MWConn. The current 0.9 version (as a reminder: at this time, German-only) assumes that the secondary port is above the primary (ie COM4 for primary, COM5 for secondary). However, on one of my laptops (Samsung X20) - the screenshot above - it is exactly the other way around and MWConn cannot cope with that at the moment. The IBM X31 orders the ports nicely right - and as such, UMTS works like a charm!

By the way, use MWConn with administrative rights because it does create network connections:

I will report back on the inverted port problem, the author of MWConn promised to send me an updated version that can deal with this issue. So stay tuned!

Update I got the new version - and I am modifying this blog entry under Windows Vista 5456 using the Merlin U630 in UMTS mode, on the Samsung X20. Now both laptops work! Proof:

• Microsoft Pre-Release Software Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 - June 2006 CTP (Note: on Vista, only build 5456 is supported!)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Community Technology Preview – Development Tools for .NET Framework 3.0
• Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Extensions for Windows® Workflow Foundation Release Candidate 2
• Hands-on Labs for Windows® Workflow Foundation Release Candidates
  

And if you still haven't had time to take a closer look at WinWF, check out Karsten's My Five Day Course For Hitting the WPF Curve/Cliff.

The Beta 2 UAC experience was somewhat annoying, but the current interim's experience was able to actually top the user aggravation c'mere (my definition of UAC):

UAC prompts appear as minimized dialog boxes! Guys, get your act together.

Today, Daniel held a talk comparing AJAX frameworks for ASP.NET. He limited the scope to indirect frameworks, which means: those AJAX frameworks extend ASP.NET, and you don't necessarily need to know much about AJAX. On his Web site, you will find a comparison of AJAX frameworks for ASP.NET (direct as well as indirect).

Now, that scalability documents list is way cool. A lot good stuff on IIS performance, and especially real-world debugging of Web applications.

The blog post ADO.NET vNext: The Entity Framework, LINQ and more on the Data Access Blog has links to all relevant articles on the next version of ADO.NET and the Entity Data Model (EDM). Make sure to read at least the vision document.

As promised, here is the list of links / articles / samples that I used for preparing my talk "Build Provider in ASP.NET 2.0":

• Provider Toolkit
• Extending ASP.NET 2.0 Part I: Creating Custom Build Providers
• Jaw-dropping experience with custom build providers
• DLINQ ASP.NET Build Provider and DLINQ DataSource (Andres sent me a newer version for the May CTP)
• RSS Toolkit (sports two build providers, one for .rssdl, the other for .rss)
• Web Services Contract First: Drop Schema in app_code with a Custom Build Provider

Hope you will find those useful.

Half an hour ago, I completed my talk "Windows Workflow Foundation & ASP.NET 2.0". As promised, here is the list of links to sites / documents that I used to prepare this talk & accompanying samples.

• Coming improvements to ASP.NET hosting of Windows Workflow Foundation after WF Beta 2.2
• Cutting Edge, Windows Workflow Foundation Part 1, Part 2
• Examples of using Persistence and Tracking in ASP.NET
• Using WF to run a page-flow
• Of course, http://wf.netfx3.com/ (Webcasts et al)

Also, see my last post on ASP.NET PageFlow CTP. This was the last part on "future technologies".

Update A foto from my talk on Monday (debugging a workflow in ASP.NET):

Yesterday night, I watched a WebCast from TechEd Boston - "An Overview of ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation". What this innocuous title hid was the fact that Kashif Alam (PM in the Developer Division) was presenting vNext features for ASP.NET workflow integration: Page flow (PageFlow) as well as UI flow (UIFlow), plus the accompanying extensibility model.

What do those two separate approaches provide? Well, you get MVC (model-view-controller) support for same-page (UIFlow) as well as cross-page (PageFlow) scenarios. Pretty neat was the included "Choosing the right solution" slide to get an idea what's in store:

As developers, we will get our hands on this later this year in the form of the "ASP.NET PageFlow CTP" (at least that's the current name), and it will be deployed with Orcas.