An Avanade Blogging Community

I ran into this strange error today and it's strange because both the error and the solution has nothing to do with "Window1.xaml".  Typically, this is the message you receive if you misnamed "Window1.xaml" in App.xaml's StartupUri attribute.  That was not the case for me today as everything checks out so something else was going on.

I was able to find the solution on this MSDN forum post.  Seems like many people ran across this while trying to run downloaded samples on their local workstations.  The resolution?  Add a space to App.xaml , remove it, then rebuild.  Strange solution but it worked.  I suppose this is a bug in the code .NET 3.0 generates and a simple rebuild on your local workstation fixes it. 

This is in VS 2005, not sure if this has been resolved in VS 2008 yet.

Greg and I presented a Technology Showcase for ACM members last week on the UC Irvine campus.  Aside from introducing Avanade to the UCI students, we wanted to get students excited about Microsoft's new technologies.

We showed demos of WPF as part of .NET Framework 3.0 and ASP.NET AJAX.  We really wanted to emphasize how easy these frameworks and tools allow developers to focus on solving problems.  At the end of our presentation, we gave away tech books on WPF and AJAX.  I believe the books are in good hands and will be put to good use!

The one thing I regret about this demo is that I forgot to pray to the demo gods.  Huge mistake.  Never underestimate the live demo!  The projector had a tough time displaying WPF.  Luckily, I was still able to show some of the more polished apps like NY Times Reader, Otto Store, as well as the Ch9 Grand Piano WPF/E example. 

I also went through a quick example of using (and switching between) Expression Blend and Visual Studio in creating a WPF video player.  Mostly I followed tutorials from ContentPresenter.com, which has some cool tutorials that are easy to follow.  Later on, I showed the students a version of the video player with WPF Interactive 3D.

In time for CES, Yahoo announces the new Yahoo Messenger optimized for Vista in WPF! No downloadable version yet, but the video demo is very impressive.

Over at Ryan Gregg's blog, PM for Microsoft Office, he announced the release of the first two official Office gadgets.  I've used Office 2007 since beta and I think one of the best new features is the To Do sidebar.  With these gadgets, it brings the awesome To Do sidebar to your Vista desktop!   

Links:

Outlook Upcoming Appointments

Outlook Tasks

Gadget Gallery

I've recently discovered this gmail feature where it allows you to basically unlimited number of free email addresses to use when you sign up for various service or junk websites or just to track who is causing you all the spam you are getting. 

Some basic built in gmail features I knew was that gmail does not account for any dots (".") in email addresses.  This means if you have first.last@gmail.com any emails sent to with the dot (".") anywhere (i.e first.last@gmail.com or fi.rstlast@gmail.com) or even w/o it (i.e. firstlast@gmail.com), would go to the same original address.

Now to take that even further, gmail users can add "+" to the end of your gmail user name and add any text/description/tag to your gmail email address. 

So following the example I started, all of the following are valid gmail email addresses that would be sent to first.last@gmail.com :

• first.last+bills@gmail.com
• first.last+schoolnewsletter@gmail.com
• first.last+aolspam@gmail.com
• first.last+jesseiscool@gmail.com

Hopefully you get the idea.  So you can dump that junk email account that you use to sign up for stuff and just use your favorite gmail account and just filter out emails based on the address you used to sign up for stuff and delete them as you need space.  Like I said earlier, this is a great way to track who is spamming your account!