Those beer drinking, .NET chatting chaps are at it again. This time it's on Tuesday 8th December 2009 starting at 6pm for 7pm at The Portcullis (where the beer is excellent) in Clifton, Bristol. You can sign up here.

I'm a long time fan of Fiddler, an excellent tool for spying on and interfering with HTTP requests. Analyzing the headers and packets sent across the wire has been an invaluable source of information to me many times. Sadly Fiddler suffers from a drawback where it is unable to view localhost traffic by default. There are workarounds but these are not always practical. So recently I was interested to see HttpWatch.

HttpWatch integrates straight into Internet Explorer or FireFox and provides an analysis of browser traffic. In particular because it is simply using the browser it clearly sees all localhost traffic without any workarounds. Now, whether HttpWatch has more features and functionality than Fiddler is still open for debate but in this one issue at least HttpWatch is solving a problem for me. The "Basic" version of HttpWatch is free and the other versions you have to pay for (whereas there is only one version of Fiddler and it does everything and it is all free).

Here we are at TechEd Europe 2009 and there's no surprise to see a rather tragic game show in progress. The big surprise, however, is that it's not the UK's own Ant and Dec (aka The Chuckle Brothers, aka Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, aka Laurel and Hardy aka Richard Costall and Dave McMahon) who are doing it. Nope, it's Germany's answer to The Kings Of Crappy Game Shows, Hyper-D and Hyper-T. And on The Sad And Tragic Scale it's right up there. This one's about putting hats on and taking them off (I don't remember Terry Wogan doing this one). And not a "sometimes working, sometime not" WPF app in sight. The double act may be the same but on The Swagometer you'd have to say that Hyper-D and Hyper-T are in a new league: their prize is a brand new laptop. Kind of takes the shine off a t-shirt and a NxtGen mug a bit.

As promised here are the slides and source code for yesterday's "Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC" presentation at the MVP Open Day. The sister presentation to this one is "Automating Testing Using Virtual Server 2005" and you can download the slides and source code for this one. If you are using Virtual Server 2005 you might like to download both as the Windows Virtual PC presentation is more recent and contains slightly more code that is still applicable to Virtual Server 2005.

I've been bitten a few times by a 'feature' in Windows Virtual PC where all of my virtual machines disappear so I thought I'd write about the problem and how to solve it to save anyone else the grief of rebuilding their virtual machine list.

My current Windows Virtual PC list looks like this:-

As you can see from Primary Disk column on the right I keep all of my virtual machines (except Windows XP Mode) on a separate USB drive. The consequence is that the drive is not always plugged in. The Windows Virtual PC 'feature' is that if I accidentally start a virtual machine and forget to have my USB drive plugged in then it fails to run the virtual machine (fair enough, no problem here) and then removes all references to all virtual machines on that drive (not fair enough and a truly stupid idea):-

The solution lies in understanding that the Windows Virtual PC console is just a view on a folder. On this Windows 7 machine this is C:\Users\Guy Smith-Ferrier\Virtual Machines. Here's what the folder looks like in a command window before Windows Virtual PC has 'fixed' it:-

And here's what it looks like again after Windows Virtual PC has removed all of my references:-

Clearly Windows Virtual PC has simply deleted all of the VMCX files that refer to virtual machines on the USB drive. There are a number of solutions to the problem. The first and simplest is to use the Recycle Bin to undelete the VMCX files from the Virtual Machines folder. This is the best option although I have to say that I am not always convinced they are always present in the Recycle Bin. Alternatively you could have the foresight to have saved a copy of your VMCX files so that you can just copy them back to the Virtual Machines folder. If neither of these options are available to you then the fallback solution is to start each and every virtual machine that used to be in the list by double clicking on the virtual machine's VMC file and then the VMCX file will be automatically recreated.

Windows Virtual PC (for Windows 7 on machines with hardware virtualization enabled) and Windows XP Mode have RTMed and are available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx. There are many new features in Windows Virtual PC beyond those of Virtual PC 2007 but the feature of most interest to me is the fact that unlike Virtual PC 2007 Windows Virtual PC has an API which allows the virtual machines to be automated. The API is very similar but not identical to the Virtual Server API. If you're interested in this subject then stay tuned as I will be posting the slides and more importantly the code for my Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC presentation in the next few weeks.

BTW if you are planning on installing Virtual PC 2007 on your Windows 7 box it will not install with Windows Virtual PC present so you will have to uninstall it first.

It is always a happy day for me when a new version of one of my favourite tools is released. ZoomIt 4, the presenter's best friend, was released in August. The main new feature is LiveZoom. To be honest LiveZoom (by default available from Ctrl+4) is the way I thought the regular Ctrl+1 zoom facility should have worked from the beginning: it allows you to zoom in on something on your screen but leaves the computer still functioning so you can click and type and generally use the computer whilst still zoomed. Perfect. The caveat is that the LiveZoom feature only works on Windows Vista and higher but this is not a problem for most presenters.

Back in April 2009 I wrote about the Microsoft Translator (aka the Bing Translator), the various APIs that it exposes and in particular the REST API that it exposes to allow the automation of translation. At the time I also added a Microsoft Translator class to the list of translator classes used in the tool suite for my book, .NET Internationalization. In this post I join the dots and show you how to make use of these classes and automatically translate your resx files to another language.

1. Get your Microsoft Translator "app id" from http://search.live.com/developers/appids.aspx.
2. Download the free source code for the book from here.
3. Extract the source code to a folder of your choice.
4. Open ResourceAdministration\ResAdmin\App.Config and change the "value" of the "MicrosoftTranslatorApplicationId" key to the "app id" that you were given for the Microsoft Translator.
5. Build the source code by opening a Visual Studio command prompt in the folder that you extracted the source code to and running "msbuild BuildAll.proj". If FxCop is not installed on your machine there will be build errors but these are not related to the translation tools and you can ignore these.
6. Connect to the internet (the Microsoft Translator needs an internet connection).
7. In ResourceAdministration\ResAdmin\bin\debug you will find ResAdmin.exe. This is the Resource Administrator which is a developer tool for managing resources. Run ResAdmin.exe.
8. You will see the following dialog. In the "Source of Resources" enter the base directory containing your resx files. In the "Invariant language" enter the language code that the original resources are in (e.g. "en" for "English"). Click OK.
9. Next you will see the main form. You need to tell the Resource Administrator what language(s) to translate to. Select Tools | Languages and enter all of the languages to translate to (you should probably de-select Albanian at this point). Click OK.
10. You will be asked if you want to automatically add the necessary resx files for the new language(s). Click Yes. At this point if "Automatic Translation" is on (see the status bar) the text in the resx files will be translated.
11. The Resource Administrator tool uses a collection of machine translators to translate text where it falls back to other suitable translators if one fails. You can configure which translators are included in the list by selecting Tools | Translators.

Note that the Resource Administrator utility is not hard wired to use solely resx files. You can use the same utility with other sources of resources (including a database) by selecting Tools | Resources Source.

For more information on how to use the Resource Administrator see the .NET Internationalization book.

I have updated the Silverlight Globalization Namespace Comparison document that I wrote a while back for Silverlight 3. The document compares all of the classes (and their properties and methods) in the System.Globalization of the .NET Framework with the same namespace in Silverlight. The update, however, is disappointing because there have been no changes in this area so the answers for Silverlight 3 are the same as for Silverlight 2.

Last week I attended the Localization Research Centre's 14th annual conference in Limerick, Ireland. My role there was to present a poster session. This is a new format for me so I thought I'd take a moment to explain it. The idea is that you create a poster (A0 size in this case) about your chosen subject and the organisers print this out and hang it in an area with many other posters. At a given time (lunch time in this case) you stand next to your poster and answer questions about it to anyone who takes an interest. Here's a composite of 3 photos before anyone started (the composite was created by Microsoft's Image Composite Editor):-

Here is my "Internationalizing Silverlight" poster (complete with pasting error) together with another very interesting poster on English To Chinese Translation):-

I found it a really interesting idea and I think it would work at events in our industry. In some ways it is like the sadly unsuccessful Ask The Experts that was tried a few times at DDD in Reading. In the Ask The Experts format lots of experts hang around waiting for people to come up and ask them any question at all. It seemed like a good idea but it never worked which was a shame and at the time we couldn't see how to fix it. The poster sessions appear to solve the Ask The Experts problem by having a physical focus, a clear subject matter area and a ready made set of discussion points. We might try this out at DDD South West 2.