I start to install Windows 2003 in a VM Machine from my MS DVD that has all the operating systems you would ever want on it, only to find I get an error reading a file. Doh! I've been fighting for a few hours trying to enlarge a VM machine I have, with no luck, so I decided to do a fresh install, this time allocating a lot of hard drive. To my surprise, my DVD is completely destroyed. We've had several refurbishments in our house and unfortunately my DVD's were all in the office where most of the work took (and is taking) place. Seems a few DVD's hit the floor, including the MSDN ones. Anyway, to cut a long story short, after pulling out my hair, thinking of everything that I could use to repair, I tried some "T-Cut Car Scratch Remover" I had. Wow! It did the job alright. Not one single error anymore. Definitely going to try it on some more DVD's I have. 

Consuming Collections from Web Services is not something new. However, if you have ever tried to bind the collection to a DataGrid for example, you might be surprised why your data does not appear, and instead you get a nice error saying that a field named "xxxx" was not found.

The reason for this is that the wsdl.exe tool that creates a proxy class for your web service publishes the public properties you had created in your class as public fields and not properties. For Collections to be used directly in databound controls, the fields have to be public properties. So what to do? Well instead of explaining the problem from scratch; take a look at this article by Jan Tielens. It gives a very concise explanation of the problem and provide an elegant solution. There is only one catch: it will not work from an ASP.NET application. That is because the class wrapper depends on a call to GetEntryAssembly. This call looks under the current App Domain for the assembly, and the ASP.NET application is not in there. One solution is to pass in the calling assembly when calling the Web Service Wrapper. I've been in contact with Jan and he's kindly given permission for me to make modifications to his wrapper and post it. As soon as I get a chance I will do that. Until then.....

If there ever was a software application that deserved a WOW, that is Acronis's True Image. I mean WOW! Seriously. I have never seen such a powerful, intuitive and beautifully designed back-up software as True Image. It lets you backup your entire disk, including operating system, etc. Not only that, it has an amazing compression ratio. It lets you explore images, restore. And here's the best part: you can do incremental backups of existing images. When you first install it, it prompts to create a boot up disk so that in case your system fails you can restore any image easily. Wow! I am VERY impressed. Well done!

And if all that wasn't enough, it costs less than 40 Euros!

Very impressed with Google Talk. Both the Chat and the Voice are clear and simple to use. I really hope it takes off. I've been using Skype since the early days and I loved it. Problem I had was with the company. Their purchasing system sucks! They have this fraud prevention attitude that is denying honest customers to purchase and making it virtually impossible to use the paid system. Their tech support sucks and in general the company's attitude is of not being very considerate with it's customers. I hope Google kicks their **** a bit.  It's a shame about Skype though...seeing they use Indy as part of their system (Yes, not the VoIP but still). What is funny though is the reviews that are coming out about Google Talk. I've read some stuff that simply amazes me:

"...yuck! It's like going back to DOS it's so simple"

"...It doesn't have multi-user chat"

Do these people understand that this is the first version of a product that is currently in beta (or alpha?). I think Google has taken the best possible approach. They have deployed a system to existing "beta" users, therefore I feel it's logicl that you require a GMail account at this point, and let them test the "technology", the BASIC technology, i.e. two-way chat/voice. Once they have that tested then they can start adding fancy stuff and features. Bloating up a client with stock market quotes, etc. in it's early stage where it hasn't been tested out in the "wild" yet, IMHO is a waste of time. To be honest, I've never understood why people that use something such as ICQ (and in particular ICQ for Windows Mobile) would want to have stock quotes. Most people I know that use IM are developers or "geeks" that love chatting. They are not high-flying executives or people that are actively investing in the stock market. Anyway that's beside the point. This a the first "public" version of a beta product, I'm sure we'll see many exciting and new features shortly. And btw, I loved DR-DOS, what's so bad about DOS?

For those of you who use FireFox, the Charamel theme looks extremely nice and it takes up little space so you get more work area

I'll be at the Entwickler conference in September giving two sessions on Security. If you're in Frankfurt, make sure you do not miss out on this conference. It's one of the best in Europe and it's not only dedicated to Borland technology.