In early 2000, Mike Woodring moved Heaven and Earth to write a tool that would inject a DLL into a process’s memory for purposes of finding the command line with which the process was launched. While hanging around Don and Tim this week, Don was all hot on WMI, so we fired it up in .NET and rebuilt Mike’s tool like so:

using System;
using System.Management;

class cmdline {
  static void Main(string[] args) {
    if( args.Length != 1 ) {
      Console.WriteLine(“usage: cmdline <processId>“);
      return;
    }

    ManagementObject obj =
      new ManagementObject(string.Format(“Win32_Process.Handle="{0}\“”, args[0]));
    Console.WriteLine(obj.Properties[“CommandLine”].Value);
  }
}

This makes WMI pretty darn cool in my book. I’ll be reading Jon Fancey’s article on WMI + .NET in the latest MSDN Magazine.

BTW, I have to admit that I’m nowhere near as manly as Mike. I’ll take this sissy code any day. : )

Don “XML” worked a little PhotoShop magic on a poster for a movie that I loved growing up (it was one of two record albums I had and I listened to it over and over and over):

Don “XML” Demsak
DonXML Demsak’s Grok This

Looks like CodeProject is getting into the Longhorn act with a nice Hello, Longhorn sample by Deepak Kapoor.

Before watching this episode of The .NET Show, I used to think that Don’s speaking ability made the Indigo team somehow special, but after watching this episode on Indigo and seeing John Shewchuk and Steve Swartz wax elopquent about the high level interop and functionality goals of Indigo as well as the programming model goals, I think Don is just the guy that’s willing to be publicly naked (not that I can really point that finger : ).

John and Steve provide *such* a compelling story. If you haven’t heard the Indigo story or even if you have, this is the place to get it.

Following up on Steve’s places to go for more:

• Indigo newsgroup
• Joe Long’s prescriptive guidelines on preparing for Indigo
• Indigo site on the Longhorn Developer Center

BTW, does anyone have some recommendations for Indigo bloggers? I subscribe to Don, Yasser and Aaron, but don’t see much Indigo traffic on those sites.

I would say that I’m really living two lives. The first is what you see and today it’s very boring as I’m sitting very still looking at a 14″ LCD panel all day long making almost no noise. When my family comes home, that’ll be more outwardly interesting, but it skips the entire reality of what I’m doing while I live that second life inside the machine.

In the upcoming documentary, Almost Real, Ann Shin explores folks living the extreme virtual life, e.g. monks leading prayer and SM folks doing their thing, all over the Internet (in case you need it, my safety word is “yellow” : ). These people are living very real virtual lives, often more real than there normal lives. Is that OK? Is that unnatural? I think it *is* OK. Why should the virtual life inside of our creations be any less valued than our so-called “normal” life (which was just created by the Overlords to test their simulation machine : ).

Anyway, it all boils down to one thing: impact. Are you impacted by the things that happen in the virtual world? I know I am. Sometimes it’s negative and sometimes it’s positive, but it can be just as strong as the impact I feel in my “normal” life. For me, most of my most meaningful impact happens in the “real” world, but as technology advances, I think more and more of that balance will tip, whether that’s OK with you or not.

David doesn’t get many questions to answer about the present and future of .NET, but the ones he gets asked, he answers well. My favorite:

“As for code identity, I love the vision. But I’ll acknowledge that it hasn’t taken off as we’d hoped. When people tried to write partial-trust apps, it always turned out there was one thing they needed to do and couldn’t. We have to do more work to find the right scenarios where you can do a functional smart-client app that runs in partial trust and doesn’t require the user to micromanage permissions. In WinFX, I want to make it viable to write partial-trust apps that can do real things.”

The emphasis is mine.

[via Don Box]

I’m always nervous about going to see the teacher about my kids’ performance this year. They’re both very bring, but the older one is easily bored (like his father) and the younger one is social and emotional charged (like his mother). Also, I’m of the belief that at this age (9 and 8), the parents still have an enormous influence over their children, which includes how well they do in school. All of that is wrapped up into that 20-minute meeting at those tiny little desks and it’s nerve-wracking.

On the other hand, I find myself pleasantly surprised by Jon Udell’s .NET Report Card. To be sure, there is room for improvement (Don always says, “The largest room in the world is the room for improvement” : ), but two As and two Bs is pretty damn good in this age of very high expections, so I’m a proud 2nd cousin right now (the product teams are the real parents, of course).