Escape the Phonebooth game

Unlike the other escape games, this one is a quick and easy. You are stuck in a phone booth where you need to use what you see and just a few items to get out. Once you've phoned the right numbers and entered the right codes that are hidden all over, you get a little word game where you have to create a sentence out of jumbled letters.

I would say the goal is to beat the clock rather than to struggle with cryptic puzzles. You get timed on your escape.

Fun for someone that is looking of a little brain teaser as a short break. I finished this in 20minutes. What did you score?



M

Skype might Shut Down

Skype has more than 480 million user accounts - almost twice as many as Facebook - and the application comes bundled with more than 50 mobile phones and even the Sony PSP.

The funny thing is that Skype isn't even a financial success story, but it has long been a leader in Internet telephony.

The online auction powerhouse, eBay, bought Skype from entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis for $US2.6 billion in 2005, but the agreement did not include a fundamental piece of peer-to-peer communications technology that drives the software.

eBay may have to shut down Skype due to this licensing dispute.

eBay has since been licensing the technology from the founders’ new company, Joltid, but the pair recently decided to revoke the licensing agreement. eBay is now trying to force Joltid to let it continue using the technology through legal battle in the English High Court of Justice.

Will you be able to function without skype?

Cat of the week

Today's Funny

LOL!

President Obama`s Safe House location leaked on LimeWire

The presidents safe house location as well as his motorcade routes was leaked on the P2P file sharing community called LimeWire. Also unearthed on LimeWire networks was a sensitive but unclassified document listing details on every nuclear facility in America.
Apparently a government employee was running LimeWire and accidentally shared the files.

Now gee golly gosh, you have to really ride the special bus if your not taxing government PC`s with all kinds of proxy servers. I for one knows its impossible for me even to open an application relating chat because of the privileges my computer has.

How secure is America really... I can only imagine Bin Laden in his cave downloading some tunes and suddenly stumbling open this... :P

The full article : Who is your network administrator?

Browser Game: Learn To Fly

This game is like super duper fun! Really enjoyed it. Its quick and simple and fun to do if you 10 minutes to spare. I really recommend playing this game, you will absolutely love it. It does get boring after a bit but your really wanna go get those achievements! Can you make this little penguin try to fly .. give it a try!

Here is the link : Learn to fly

Zero Punctuation game reviews

Zero Punctuation is a video game review series created by comedy writer, video game journalist and gamer Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw and produced by online magazine The Escapist.

In his videos Croshaw usually reviews a recent game or games using rapid-fire speech delivery (which was the inspiration for the name 'Zero Punctuation', although he states that his fast talking was “by accident”). This is accompanied by minimalistic cartoon imagery on a distinctive yellow background, illustrating what is being said. The videos are typically around five minutes in length. The end credits often feature humorous notes about Croshaw's reviews such as 'Systematically alienating every type of fanboy' in GTA IV, and often also contain characters from the review engaging in slapstick.

I enjoy these videos thoroughly. Once you start watching you just can't stop. Ben takes all of the things that you know you were thinking and he tells it to the world as it is.

The videos can be downloaded on http://zp.dbrweb.co.uk/

As most of my friends are playing this game at the moment, I've included a review of Prototype.

M

Today's Funny

This guy is a special case of Toast.

Robotic Firefighters debut in London

Science and technology reporter from BBC News has an article on the awesomeness that is the Robotic Firefighting team. A team of fire-fighting robots has been unveiled by defence contractor QinetiQ at a demonstration in London. The team is quite successfully and featured already in 10 incidents, they will be added to the arsenal of London for at least 2 years. The robots range from a nimble, stair-climbing reconnaissance unit to a diesel-powered robot with a large claw.They remind me a lot off Wall-E. How cool it wouldn't be to see them in action.

Full Article here : BBC Technology News

Website Design and Negative Margins

A lot of us have developed websites, and I for one know that a lot of us are scared of using negative margins. A margin is a CCS property we use to allow an HTML DOM element to be shifted in a certain way. Normally it looks something like this:

#content {margin-left: 100px;}
This will shift the content to the right by 100 pixels.

A Negative margin is greatly underused and miss trusted and it normally looks like this:

#content {margin-left: -100px;}
This will shift the left side of the content to the left by 100 pixels.

I hear a lot of us going say what? I rather not use it then because they confuse me.
But before you throw them away remember that negative margins can help us out a lot and its even supported in IE6
Smashing Magazine has an excellent article on Negative Margins. Very much worth the read.

Find it here : Guide to using Negative Margins

10 Free games you should play

Recently i have been reviewing browser games. My search has led me to quite a few peculiar places, but none so informative and fun as this site. 10 Top free games that you absolutely should play is a blog entry dictating about 10 games you can download and play for free. Some of them are incredibly fun. Please do give it a try if you have nothing to do :)

Here you go: 10 Free Games

Pleasure positions for nerds - Geek Kama Sutra

Us geeks have our own Kama Sutra. I've tried quite a few of these before, especially the dominant butt-crack squat and captain Kirk's lust thrust. They are not as easy as it seems at first. It takes a lot of flexibility, strength and focus to get in there, if you know what I mean... ;-)

Let me know if you have tried some of these and if there are any more. I always enjoy trying new "positions"


M

Today's Funny

Haha .. Woman with big chip on her shoulders

Bot Arena 3

Bot Arena 3 is a fun way to waste time. The aim of the game is to build a robot that fights other robots. You start by building a small bot with some simple weapons and end up managing a team, making sure you meet the wait requirement and wondering what will be the best combo to beat the next level. It is difficult, but it is really a lot of fun.

Something to do, when if you like to click and watch. The instructions is a bit long and tedious but in general is an excellent game.

Play it here : Bot Arena 3

Hacker group L0pht makes a comeback

L0pht is a hacker group focusing on security. This group did crazy theoretical stuff with the internet, one of the crazy things they did was to tell the U.S. Congress that they could take down the Internet in about 30 minutes.

Impressive stuff, these guys are really helping out the security companies.
Here is their punch line:
Watch http://www.hackernews.com for the ALL NEW Hacker News Network! Featuring your charming host, Space Rogue, and his velvet wonderglove John Tan, this video documentary and news coverage channel will keep you firmly in your chair as it chronicles the exploits and goings-on of the underground's finest. Don't be a f00l, watch HNN!

Airport in Gibraltar

This is an actual airport in Gibraltar. It seems as if they didn't have enough space for an airport,so they just smacked it in the middle of everything. Well thought out, but I can just imagine how strongly controlled this must be to make it work. Well done if you ask me. I know this would definitely not work in South Africa.






M

The Heist 2

The Heist 2
If you were a fan of the original The Heist, you will absolutely love The Heist 2

It Brings a bit more a dynamic to the game, by giving you the option to manage your thugs weapons and the ability for them to level up.

While this will kill an hour, it wont keep you satisfied. After completing the game you will have the opportunity to drive around a special vehicle, but when you reach that stage your thugs will be so strong you wont need it. Unfortunately it will get tiring soon as the game has no replay value.
Something to do, but not quite there yet. :)

Find it here: The Heist 2

Crush The Castle

Today i am reviewing Crush The Castle.

Crush the Castle is one of those browser games where you stare at the screen an click to achieve your objective. The game was developed by Armor Games, and they really do make awesome flash games. Unfortunately i was left with the feeling of "is this it?"

The objective of the game is to crush an unstable castle with a trebuchet. There is load of levels but it isn't really that captivating. You get weapon upgrades but they still leave you with the feeling of ugh. Something to do if you have 10 minutes but don't expect to be hooked because it gets repetitive very fast. When you finish the game you will get the opportunity to build your own castle, but this irritated me more than kept me entertained.

Here's the link : Crush the Castle
Enjoy.

Guess your number

This game could be considered a magic trick by most, but the truth is that these type of stuff are usually worked out mathematically. It still remains fun to try and work out how they always get your number right. Check out the Guess your number game.


Enjoy

M

Handy Cheat Sheets

The Web Designer Depot has accumulated 30 handy cheat sheets for when your developing and you just need to know how to implement or what to implement where. This list ranges from cheat sheets for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to Tweet Sheets.
Really Nifty site to look at and to bookmark :)

Here you go: 30 Handy Cheat Sheets

Cat of the week

Darth Vader Deathstar Canteen

This is the classic death by tray video where Darth Vader takes a trip to the Deathstar Canteen. We all have watched it a million time, we all love it and most of us can quote it. Now you can watch it over and over and over. ;-) If you haven't watched it yet, enjoy.




M

Female Programmer - Coder Girl

This is a song dedication to all of the other female programmers out there. You boys know, she is not hard to like with her pretty interface and her source is tight. ;-)



M

Today's Funny

Production of F22 Halted

The senate voted that the production of the F22 must be halted by a margin of 58-40. Not only is this a major victory for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates but for president Barack Obama as well.
187 F-22s, which have cost $60 billion to develop, build, and maintain to date,is more than adequate to handle the extremely narrow and unlikely range of threats for which they might be suitable in the future. I wonder what they are going to develop next, and where all that money will go?

Google Wave

Google wave have been described as real time email on crack. Google Wave is best described as a big web page where customers is allowed to create a customizable communications and collaboration tool without any software other than an Internet browser. This poses a big threat to the Microsoft Business Model. It is still in beta, and i think it still has a long way to go, but the benefits this will create for the business world will be huge. Looking forward to collaborating with you soon :)

HTML 5 ,whats new?

HTML 5 is supported by Firefox already and other browsers are catching on. The question remains as a standard what will html 5 bring us?

Well in this article underlines the new features.

After reading this article it seems that developing pages is going to be fun. You will have a lot more freedom and it will be easier to design really nice looking pages. :)

I am really looking forward to html 5 and an industry adopting it.

Today's Funny

Haha... so there you have it folks. We have sparkling vampires because harry is an a whining idiot.

After losing an iPhone, Chinese employee kills himself.

25 year-old Sun Danyong committed suicide after the fourth-generation iPhone went missing.

Foxconn is a company partnered with Apple in manufacturing the iPhone. 16 Prototype phones were entrusted to employees for testing purposes and one went missing. After the search of the factory turned up nothing Sun reported the incident to his boss. Soon there after an illegal search on his apartment was done by the company. Sun was also allegedly detained and physically abused by the company for the duration of the investigation.

Shortly after the investigation at 3am in the morning Sun jumped to his death from his apartment building.

I get loyalty to a company, but what was so horrific about the ordeal that a young man should take his life. Is Apple to blame for being so secretive about their products? Is Foxconn to blame for jumping to all sorts of conclusions. Should the price of loosing a product be the same as a man's life? The corporate world sure sounds a lot like the Mafia.

5 Ways to lose your girlfriend

If you are in a relationship and the other person is a complete monster. Here are some comic ways to get rid of the person if nothing else works.








M

The New Firefox

Firefox 3.7 will be shipping in 2010 and will offer many changes. Some of these changes involves converting any website into an application so you can share and run it on your desktop. Impressive stuff i know. But what will the browser look like? Below is a few screen shots. You can really see how they took the best of most browsers and combined it to give you an a fast and clean way to surf the internet. With beta changes like this, I cant wait to see how the final product looks like.

Today's Funny

I dint like the new Harry Potter movie all that much, but at least we have a silly funny thanks to it.

The Video Game Vault

If you can't get any cooler than you already are, you must be a g1. Screw Attack is a website devoted to games. You can find game trailers, the latest news, forums, gaming events and random awesomeness. It's great!

My favourite part of the site is The Video Game Vault. Craig reviews all of the games that are long forgotten. We are talking about balloon fight, mortal combat, Mario brothers, contra,California games, Adventure Island and many more. I've spent hours watching these critic clips. It's done brilliantly and it brings back tons of memories. Every now and then they share some useless knowledge on cracks and cheats.

Download some or check out the latest news.

M

Overclocked Remix

Overclock Remix is a website were you can download kick ass albums and songs for free. But its not the conventional type of music. The albums they offer for download is for example: Street Fighter II HD Turbo Remix, and the newly released Final Fantasy IV: Echoes of Betrayal, Light of Redemption.

It really is amazing and worth the listen. Head on over to overclock remix :) and make a listen for yourself.

Hiding a building from an Earthquakes

The best place to hide is in plain sight. If you had Harry Potters invincibility cloak ooh just think of the possibilities. We hide because it offers us protection, and if we can hide buildings from earthquakes imagine the lives that could be saved.

Recently, physicists have been developing better and better invisibility cloaks, which hide an object from sight by causing incoming light waves to bend around the object, and come together behind the object. The idea is the same for earthquakes. It is still just a research paper but hopefully in a few years we will experience safe city's and buildings because of this research.

Here is the full article

Mona Lisa Burgers

Burgers are delicious, I enjoy having one every now and then. If you think about it, the burger is one of the few meals that contains one of each food group. In the same breath I would like to state that this doesn't mean that the meal is balanced.

Check this video where a guy actually uses the grease in the patties to draw a replica of the Mona Lisa.



M

Neutral's room escape games

From my previous post on room games, we played Vision. It was a bit long and it had less direction than the first game, but I must say I enjoyed it. Especially at the end when you open a door and you get hope, but it's just a balcony.

The same author made some more escape the room games.

Lights
Sphere
and RGB

According to their rating system, these three are a bit easier than Vision, but just as fun. It seems to me like they used elements from these three games and created Vision as a combination.

Once again. Enjoy

M

Points-demerit system in South Africa

An email has been going around claiming that the point system has been implemented in South Africa. This is not true. I have received about ten copies of this email and I think it's just fair that we all have the facts. Below is an article that proves differently.

MEDIA STATEMENT: AARTO DEVELOPMENTS [6 July 2009]

During his address at the National Assembly on 3 July 2009 the Minister of Transport committed to the implementation of the AARTO (Administrative Adjudication of Road Traffic Offences) throughout the country in 2010. The AARTO seeks to effect an efficient road traffic management environment in the country.

The objective of the AARTO is to enhance road safety and instill the culture of compliance with road traffic safety legislation. To ensure compliance, the introduction of the points-demerit system will be implemented as part of the national roll out in 2010.

The purpose of the pilot project both in Tshwane and Johannesburg was to identify problem areas in the legislation and operational environment as the forerunner to the national roll out in 2010. Currently, attention is being paid to both aspects of the pilot project namely legislation and operation which includes communication to ensure a smooth roll out.

Infringers issued with infringement notices in both pilot projects will be aware of the allocation of the demerit points on the infringement notices received. This is part of the educational and communication awareness drive to inform infringing motorists of the workings of the demerit points system. Currently motorists are not being penalized in terms of the demerit point system. However, as from 2010 when the demerit point system is implemented throughout South Africa, these demerit points will reflect against the driving license of infringing motorists on the National Contravention Register (NCR) on eNaTIS.

The demerit point system may lead to the suspension and ultimately to the cancellation of the driving license.

The best source of information is the website of AARTO at www.aarto.co.za

For demerit points visit the AARTO Chargebook at http://www.aarto.co.za/public/downloads/027_AARTO-Chargebook-July-2008-Part3.pdf

M

Geeky Habbits

Geeks, you have to love them. While we have many habits that may be annoying we also have alot that's very endearing. I found these 2 articles and thought i have to put them up for a read. I really saw myself in these. Its a great read.

Hope you enjoy them aswell

Top 10 Endearing Habits of a Geeky Spouse.
Top 10 Annoying Habits of a Geeky Spouse.

Designers vs Developers

There is a thin line where a Software Developer and a Designer meet. They don't meet to eat they meet to collaborate on systems and the Internet. As a software developer myself I wanted to kill my fair share of designers over the years. I stumbled upon this article which highlight 5 pet peeves about designers and developers and i thought it to be quite interesting. Here you go : 5 Pet Peeves enjoy :)

Ashes to Ashes

The saggy green wife beaters (apparently the Australian cricket team) are back on our shores and they have brought a team of dead ringers with them. It is your duty to protect us all.

Ashes 2 ashes is fun game where zombies slowly "run" towards you as fast as zombies can run and you have to hit them with the cricket balls that are being bawled at you. Naturally you have to kill the zombies before they reach you and eat all of your flesh.

Enjoy

M

Cat of the week

Streaming Audio

Microsoft is going to launch a streaming music service soon. This service that will hopefully launch at the end of July will attempt to stream you audio for free. It will be similar to Spotify, and they are still trying to iron some business related issues out. Spotify is a uk based streaming audio service that allows you to listen to anything for free, all they ask in return is that every half an hour you listen to an add. They will tie the technology to MSN and there is a hint that the xbox console might be able to leverage this technology.

If only South-Africa had better internet services we would be able to enjoy this service aswell :)

Migrating from .net Framework 1.1 to .net Framework 3.5

We are looking at the painful task of migrating from .net Framework 1.1 (scary I know) to .net Framework 3.5. I couldn't get any thorough material on the topic, so I decided to post my finding to help anyone else who has the painful task of migrating.

Firstly ask yourself the question, "Do I really have to migrate?". If this is the case, I can tell you that migrating web application is more of a pain then win application, due to all of the core changes on asp.net in 2.0. My research is mostly based on migrating win apps, but is also applicable to web apps.

Visual Studio 2008 is a superset of Visual Studio 2005 and given framework multi-targeting and the layered approach of Framework 3.0 and 3.5, it makes perfect sense to move your development environment over.

When migrating from Visual Studio 2003 the issue is that: you are on a different CLR version (1.1) which has some breaking changes compared to the CLR 2.0 (which is used by Fx 2.0/3.0/3.5). You are also on a different framework version (1.1) which has some breaking changes compared to Framework v2.0 (which is also an essential part of Fx 3.0/3.5). There is no reason for you to go to VS2005 as an intermediate step, so by all means go from the IDE of 2003 to 2008, but be prepared to face all the issues people faced when they moved from Fx 1.x to Fx 2.0.

Breaking changes are categorized in design-time changes (Visual Studio changes: design, compile, project upgrade) and runtime changes (.NET Framework). Runtime changes impact application compiled with 1.0 or 1.1 running on 2.0, but can also impact application originally written in 1.0 or 1.1 and then recompiled for 2.0. Instead, design-time changes do not impact application compiled for 1.0 or 1.1 and just running on 2.0. You just get design time changes if you recompile your application to 2.0. So, my advice is of course to have a look to this list and if your application implements one of the presented issues, then implement the described workaround.

Migration Steps

1. Make Backup
2. Open the application in VS2008 and run it through the conversion wizard.
3. Check out the list of breaking changes.(below)
4. At this point, the most common error will be conflicts with names that have been introduced. For example, the new personalization feature introduces classes with the names like Profile, Membership and Operator. To fix this kind of error, you can either fully qualify existing names with a namespace or rename the members so they do not conflict. Often, name-related problems can be solved by enclosing the offending term in brackets (e.g., "[_Operator]").
5. You will maybe get warning about using obsolete members. When you get a warning of this type you always get an alternative method to call (the compiler suggests you to use another method).
6. Finally start the application and validate all the functionality.

Migrating from 2.0 to 3.5 requires some changes because there is a new assembly that has been added alongwith System.Data. The new assembly is System.Data.DataSetExtensions which has some DataSet properties transferred from System.Data.

If you plan to convert from 2.0 to 3.5 and if you are using System.Data with dataset in existing project, the dataset extension properties will not comppile.

The solution will be simple when converting .prj file to use framework 3.5 you have to add new assembly reference to it.

Check these very interesting posts on migrating. It will help us a lot

http://blogs.msdn.com/swiss_dpe_team/archive/2008/04/10/migrating-from-net-1-1-to-2-0-3-0-and-3-5.aspx

http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/2007/10/migrating-from-net-framework-v1x-to.html

http://blogs.msdn.com/peterlau/archive/2006/05/11/595294.aspx

Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 and 2.0 Compatibility

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms994381.aspx

Compatibility Testing Scenarios

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms994387.aspx

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BREAKING CHANGES

Below is a list of all of the breaking changes made in the newer versions. The links next to the issues contain the work around solutions.

.net 2.0

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t357fb32.aspx

Design Time Breaking Changes

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa570326.aspx

C# http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497232.aspx

• Delegate Co and Contra variance effect binding
• Protected constructors can no longer be called
• Conditional Grammer ambiguity
• Ambiguity between comparison and generic definition
• Redefinition of Dispose() no longer allowed
• Cscompmgd.dll is now obsolete
• /incremental flag generates warning
• Referencing two types with the same name from different dlls generates error
• Compat: Migrating an RTM project containing an “invoke” doesn’t compile in v2.0
• Params on an explivit impl shouldn’t be allowed unless it’s also on the interface method
• Changes to the way we convert to/from Booleans in Jscript result in more ambiguities in resolving multi-argument methods
• Referencing multiple assemblies with the same type gives compiler error
• Having a filed with the same name as an internal class doesn’t compile
• Sealing a property with just the getter (or setter) seals both of then in v2.0
• In v1.1 the compiler would allow an explicit implementer to add the params modifier. In v2.0 we report and error

System.Data http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497234.aspx

· Design time connection string will not get upgraded automatically from native ODBC to managed client when upgrading a VS6 database project. Data designers in v2.0 do not work with ODBC connections.

Visual Studio http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497236.aspx

· Solution configuration changes after migration so that a peoject will be marked “Do not build” even though it was marked to be built, for solution with the same GUID

· Extensibility no longer uses Microsoft.Office.dll

· Build Error after migrating an application that compiles in VS2003: Invalid characters in resx files

Windows Forms Design http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497237.aspx

· V1.1 Controls with an AutoSize property that is not a Boolean will throw an exception when used in the v2.0 designer

CLR Design http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa570329.aspx

· Aligning TlbeExp behavior with run-time behaviour

· New String.Split overloads make certain existing calls ambiguous

· System.DirectoryServices.SearchWaitHandler class is removed

XML and Serialization http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497238.aspx

• Generating poperties not fields will break existing code using regenerated proxy for some languages
• Generated Proxy contains XmlNode[] instead of Object[]
• Regression in code generation for from xsd schema while using choice
• XslTransform throws IncalidOperationException in v.2.0, XsltException in v1.1
• After updating a web reference the user may see an error ( CS0029)
• After updating a web reference the user may see the following run-time exception: Value of ItemsElementName mismatches the type of custClass; you need to set it to ItemsChoiceType.@custData1

Run Time Breaking Changes

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497239.aspx

CLR http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497241.aspx

• Three overloads of Marshal.WriteInt16 that accept char as one of parameters write only one single byte
• TlbExp naming generation change
• Trailing slash behavior changes for DirectoryInfo.Parent, and Name
• NativeOverlapped constructor changed from taking an int to IntPrt
• Greater precision introduced in Floating Point calculations
• Some DateTime Parsing which was acceptable but interpreted badly, is now no longer accepted
• ToString behavior on RegistryKey has been modified
• Check the type of type(class vs. struct) specified in a TypeRef in metadata to ensure that is correct. A TypeInitializationException will be thrown if the TypeRef is incorrect.
• WaitHandle.Wait* will throw when the wait completes due to an abandoned mutex will continue to be held
• The 2.0 runtime looks for and consumes the /cor command line switch on all applications
• Throw AccessViolationException when an AV reaches managed code
• Unhandled exceptions will always be fatal to a process
• Adding unmanaged code permission link demand on some of the functions in the tracing classes
• Disable inheriting from COM invisible classes and making derived classes COM visible
• GetTypeFromCLSID returns the same type always, regardless of environment
• This breading changes rewuest has two parts: 1) Always initialize main method as MTA usless user specified [STAThreadAttribute] on the main method. 2) Always initialize new threads as MTA unless user initialized it STA before thread started
• UTF7Encoding need to override the Equality
• Change the Equality operation in SortKey class
• StringInfo need to implement the Equality and GetHashCode
• UTF8Encoding needs to change Equals() implementation to consider throwOnInvalidBytes
• Encoding.GetBytes() may not emit unpaired high or low surrogate characters for certain encodings (e.g. UTF-8 encoding and UnicodeEncoding)
• Breaking Change: DisplayName of version 2.0 assemblies to contain processor architecture
• CompareInfo.GetSortKey should throw an exception when CompareOptions is out of range
• Change SortKey.GetHashCode() to match SortKey.Equals() behavior
• RSACryptoServiceProvider and DSACryptoServiceProvider delay creation of a random key, causing exceptions to be thrown later than they were before
• Kyrgyzstan tag is now KG, matching official ISO tag
• Globalization: DateTimeFormatInfo; ‘U’ format string for Datetime are missing
• DATA: Breaking Change – 4 cultures (ar-MA, nn-NO, kn-IN & div-MV) have misspelled day or month names
• DATA: Breaking (rarely) month/day name changes
• Breaking Change: _Module in System::Runtime::InteropServices conflicts with global CComModule(ATL) object _Module
• DCR to make Boxed Value Types read-only
• String comparison and sorting for sr-SP-Latin(Serbian) culture is incorrect
• Type.GetType(String typeName) throws if the type name contains the ‘&;’ character
• Canonicalization issue affecting Demand semantics in FileIOPermission
• BCL: StringBuilder constructor doesn’t work as expected if capacity=0 and Maxcapacity 16/td>
• Behavior change: % format produces different results under version 2.0 and EVE
• StreamReader used to ignore invalid UTF-* characters. Now it replaces them with “?”
• Order of invocation of cctors has changed from v1.1 to v2.0 for beforefieldinit types in NGENed code
• Environment.UserDomainName now returns the correct value for name conflict scenarios
• Cache load failures in order to ensure that different app domains do not have different dependency loading success/failure characteristics in domain neutral sharing scenarios
• Change Activator.CreateInstance and Type.InvokeMember to determininstically choose binding preferences, rather than depending on declaration order
• Enterprise Library June release configuration tool fails when run against v2.0
• NullReferenceException when calling GetEnumerator on a SynchronizedHashtable cast to ICollection
• Releasing an unowned monitor throws an exception
• WaitHandle.WaitAll throws an exception that seemingly cannot be caught if ther’s a null element in the array of wait handles; this is different from v1.1 behavior
• Applications dependent on the implementation of private fields could be broken if the type of the filed changes for example from an IntPtr to a SafeHandle
• String.GetHashCode and Object.GetHashCode algorithms have changed
• Stack Trace was misreporting nested classes in v1.1, this has been fixed in v2.0
• Private typedefs may not have the same name in assemblies built for v2.0 as they did in v1.1
• Loadform after Load bypasses Load context cache, and now loads for Cache
• Unhandled exceptions will always be fatal to a process
• Order of invocation of class .ctors is changed from v1.1 to v2.0 for beforefieldinit types in NGEN
• A LockCookie for one ReadWriterLock can be used to restore a different ReadWriterLock
• The values inside 2 enums (PerformanceCouterPermissionAccess and AttributeTargets) have changed
• V1.1 stores raw handles in the WaitHandle.Handle property, while v2.0 wraps all raw handles in a SafeWaitHandle
• Code that calls virtual functions non-virtually in partial trust fails with a System.Security.VerificationsException when run against .NET Framework 2.0

Fusion http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497243.aspx

• Assembly.Load* will prefer the serviced version of the assembly in the GAC to enable the central servicing scenario
• Remove native image support in the assembly cache viewer. Current support causes confusion and leads to inconsistent state
• Changed assembly textual identity (display name parsing/generation rules)
• Binding succeeds with http config as appbase where in v1.1 it thres an exception

Localization http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497244.aspx

• SortKey.GetHashCode() was incorrect in v1.1 and has been fixed in v2.0
• 7 bit encoding behavior changed to remove insecure mapping when 8^th bit is set
• String comparison (and sorting) for sr-SP-Latn (Serbian) culture is incorrect
• Misspelled culture day & month names were corrected. Culture data is unstable and should not be relied upon
• Update Turkish currency to New Turkish Lira (YTL)
• Encoding.Unicode.GetMaxCharCount returns different sizes than previous versions
• ‘U’ format in DateTime.ToString() has different behavior for Japanese Calendar between
• The culture identifier ky-KZ was changed to ky-KG to match international conventions
• UnicodeDecoder throws when handling surrogate characters

System.Data http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497245.aspx

· RejectChanges() to have cascade semantics like AcceptChanges, it is to be independent of the current DataRow state

· V2.0 has a new set of Performance Counters that are specific to each provider; all counters in the .NET CLR Data category have been obsoleted

· In 1.0 and 1.1 if a user does not specify a value or set the Size to zero on the Parameter object the Size was reported as Zero for OleDB, Odbc, OracleClient. Internally these 3 providers, we inferred the size and when we bound the parameter to the underlying stream to send to the server, we inferred the size and reported that to the server. SqlClient inferred from the value if a value exists and reported this inferred size.

· In v1.1 DataTable.rows.Remove(row) does not actually remove rows that are in ‘deleted’ state. Removing is conditional, based on the state of the row being removed

· Introducing type checking for UDTs/Object, may break applications relying on *no* type checking

· The new XML inference engine assigns different Column ordinals in some specific cases

· Deprecated unused property DataTable.DisplayExpression in v2.0

· DataRow is cleared when the value of one column (cell) is changed

· XSD: a Fixed value compares to be the same as in the schema, even though it has multiple Cyrillic-E ( 0x0400) characters

· XmlDataDocument uses internal APIs to create partially initialized DataRows. A DataSet containing such rows if merged into an empty DataSet may result in a constraint violation exception in version 2.0. In v1.x, no exceptioni was being thrown

· Introducing type checking for UDT DataColumns may break applications relying on *no* type checking

· The behavior of LinePosition in XmlTextReader.ReadChars method differs between v1.1 and v2.0

· Casting the return value from SqlHelper.ExecuteXmlReader to an XmlTextReader, worked reliably in v1.0 and v1.1. In v2.0 this may throw a cast exception, indicating the underlying type was an xmlTextReaderImpl.

· In v2.0, DataView[DataRowView.Index]== DataRowView while this was not guaranteed to v1.x

· In v1.x DataSet.Merge(DataRow[] rows) used to use DataTable.TableName to lookup tables in DataSet whereas c 2.0 uses the combination of DataTable.Namespace and DataTable.Name to lookup tables. This results in a change of semantics for v2.0 Merge.

Enterprise Services http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497242.aspx

· AuthenticationTypes.Secure will be used as the default authentication type for DirectoryEntry

Windows Forms http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497247.aspx

· Addition of missing values to the KnownColors enum in order to support new System Colors

· TabControl Enter and Leave events are raised for Tabs being clicked in addition to when focus leaves a TabPage

· Mouse Enter and Leave events are now raised for scrollbars and ScrollableControl

· Calling TreeNode.Bounds.Location in the Form’s Load event returns 0,0

· The first RadioButton in a group doesn’t become checked when the first RadioButton in the group gets focus

· No KeyPress event for (Char) 127 + different handling comparing th v.1.x

· ComboBox.PreferredHeight does not return the correct value as expected

· BindingContextChanged event fires less number of times when LB is added/removed to a form

· January PAG blocks are broken on v.2.0

· Layout events occr more frequently and earlier in v2.0 than in v1.1

· The Cursor property is now respected for the ComboBox Text area

· Windows Forms will now throw an IllegalCrossThreadException when a debugger is attached and a property of a control is accessed from a thread it wasn’t created on.

· Backgrounds that were transparent in v1.1 are showing up as grey in v2.0

· Setting the ImageList.Stream property to null now clears the images in the list

· Controls with a FlatStyle property now render using VisualStyles with FlatStyle.Standard set

· Accessibility changes completed in v2.0 may affect users using an accessibility reader

· Windows Forms parameters have had some name changes

XML and Serialization http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497248.aspx

· MarshalByRef should be removed from System.Uri signature

· Bug fix for invalid URI construction logic when working with a URI scheme unknown to System.Uri

· If a callback function of an asyn delegate throws an exception, the callback will be invoked twice

· If a MBR object (whick already has an identity) is cloned, the identity is cloned as well, whick means any future remote calls to the cloned object get dispatched to the original object

· Invalid nntp and news URI’s should not be considered valid by System.Uri

· When creating a WebPermission with Regex people usually go with a simple regex like this: new Regex(“http://myhost.com/.*”) When user wants to Deny on above created permission, there are many ways to by-pass that user requirement by using a URI string with userinfo and/or explicit port, so the regex won’t match. To improve WebPremission story with Deny we want to canonicalize the user URI string by roundtriping it through System.Uri class and also we want to strip userinfo part before calling Regex.Match(). As the result some WebPermission form like using the following Regex will stop working new Regex(“http:/myshost.com:80/.*”). This is because we strip default port as part of URI string canonicalization so Regex parser will not find it anymore hence won’t match

· Supporting Nullable by default can break existing code when proxy is re-generated

· Uri.LocalPath returns excaped string for HTTP in version 1.1 but unescapes the string in version 2.0

· HTTP: acme.org now throws a parsing exception

· MarshalByRef removed from System.Uri signature

· We throw when generating WSDL if the service has duplicate [WebServiceBinding(Name=…)]

· Breaking Change – [WSS – PD7 – P2] System.Net.WebClient.UploadValues() method adds to the end of its output in ciolation of the application/x-www.form-urlencoded content type encoding scheme

· ASP.NET Web Service requests always send the AcceptEncoding: gzip HTTP header on v2.0

· Whenever an HttpWebResponse gets a 404. 500, or other error from the server, we automatically read a portion of the response content into memory and attach it to a WebException.

· GlobalProxySelection.Select behaves differently from v1.1 when an empty system.net tag is present in machine.config

· The proxy by pass list now has escaped(regex) significant characters

· NetworkStream now honours the FileAccess parameter.

· The wrong version of assembly may be loaded when deserializing in Simple mode

· XML Serialization generates AssemblyResolveEvents in v2.0 but not in v1.1

· The default for serializing DateTime is RoundTrip which is breaking

VS tools and Office http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa497246.aspx

· VSTO orkloadr requires .net 1.1 to load policy

.net 3.0

The .NET Framework version 3.0 was issued solely to include the following technologies in the .NET Framework and in the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK):

Windows Communication Foundation

Windows Presentation Foundation

Windows Workflow Foundation

Windows CardSpace

There were no feature changes to the core .NET Framework for this version.

.net 3.5

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb332048.aspx

.net 3.5 SP1

Breaking Changes SP1

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd310284.aspx

Common Language Runtime

Performance Improvements – NO MODIFICATIONS REQUIRED

ADO.NET - NO MODIFICATIONS REQUIRED

C#

Queries over non-generic collections now use standard C# cast semantics MODIFICATION

UIFX Server, ASP.NET, IIS

IIS Integrated Mode MODIFICATION

Integrated Windows authentication MODIFICATION

CDOSYS MODIFICATION

ASP.NET request validations MODIFICATION

URL validations MODIFICATION

Session states MODIFICATION

URL encoding MODIFICATION

DefaultHTTPHandler on IIS MODIFICATION

Server and client number formatting consistencies – NO MODIFICATIONS REQUIRED

ASP.NET hidden fields MODIFICATION

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

BitmapEffect classes are obsolete MODIFICATION

Assembly name change– NO MODIFICATIONS

Hyperlink behavior– NO MODIFICATIONS

Internet Explorer in Protected Mode on Windows Vista – NO MODIFICATIONS REQUIRED

CanConvertToString methods on ValueSerializer classes – NO MODIFICATIONS REQUIRED

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

Schema matching – NO MODIFICATIONS REQUIRED

Security improvements for authentication MODIFICATION

Partial trust support for event logging – NO MODIFICATIONS REQUIRED

RemoteEndpointMessageProperty availability – NO MODIFICATIONS REQUIRED

Running multiple .net Frameworks on the same server

Migrating To Visual Studio 2008 & .Net Framework 3.5

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