I had a strange (at least to me) issue. I’ve created an ASP.NET or silverlight applications on the file system (using the Web Development server as the Web server). When I ran the application, the browser showed it cannot find the web site. The url looks like: http://localhost:53467/WebSite1/Default.aspx

First I suspected an IE/firefox issue, but no change there.

Then I tried to replace localhost with 127.0.0.1 and it worked! Very strange.

Even stranger, using localhost with no port (i.e. port 80) worked (IIS serviced the pages correctly).

Then I though of firewalls, anti virus and such. Nothing worked.

Finally, I looked at the hosts file in System32\Drivers\Etc folder, and there I found this:

127.0.0.1       localhost
::1                  localhost

What was that ::1? No idea really. I removed that line, saved, and presto: all back to normal!

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For all XNA lovers: XNA 3.0 Beta has been released! Here are the main changes and new features (from the XNA team blog):

You can download it here.

Zune

• Compatibility with the upcoming Zune 3.0 Firmware release. Please note that the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP will no longer work once you have upgraded your Zune device to the 3.0 firmware.
• Improved deployment stability.
• Support for Zune deployment on Windows Vista x64 Systems!
• You can now use the Remote Performance Monitor for Zune games.

Xbox 360

• Xbox 360 project templates (You will not be able to develop on the Xbox 360 until our final release. We felt this was important to include so that you could get projects converted over and look at the system, even if you are not able to run the games, yet).
• Support for the Big Button Pad.

Framework & Visual Studio Features

• Enumerate and play back media on your Windows computer or Xbox 360.
• Simple sound effect support on Windows computers and Xbox 360.
• Support for Rich Presence (lets friends know what’s going on in your game).
• Support for Invites (ask your friends to join you in a multiplayer game) and Join Session In Progress (after you see what your friends are doing, you can join their current session with just a couple of button presses, even if that’s a different game to the one you are currently playing)
• Compress your content and save space with the new content compression features!
• ClickOnce packaging support for distributing your XNA Framework games on Windows.
• Upgrade your project from XNA Game Studio 2.0 using the Project Upgrade Wizard!
• Take screen captures of your game running on Zune through the XNA Game Studio Device Center.
• Support for .NET language features like Linq
• Create multiple content projects and leverage cross project synchronization in Visual Studio.
• FBX importer improvements: read materials containing multiple textures, and export custom shader materials directly out of Max or Maya.

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Another update to my CLR Explorer tool. Changes in this release:

• A toolbar...
• Thread call stack includes method signature and values (for the simple types). No generics yet.
• Can create a dump file on a selected process. If a process crashes, the tool suggests creating a dump file that can be examined later in Visual Studio, WinDbg, etc.
• Minor bug fixes.

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Yesterday I gave a presentation for the VB user group about Generics (yes, Generics, not some fancy WPF/WCF/Silverlight/Entity/etc.). It was fun learning Visual Basic...

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So much as already been written...

Something disturbing (at least for me) is the fact that each browsing tab is implemented in its own OS process... I think this is too much, as I'm used to work with (sometimes) 15 tabs at the same time. 15 processes for web browsing? Although this "feature" adds stability -  I wonder if it's really worth it.

Start testing your browser now...

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In the CLR world, there is no real difference between a DLL and an EXE: Both are assemblies, both contain metadata and code, etc. The only real difference is that an EXE has an entry point ("Main").

Because of this, a single OS process can host multiple executables and run them concurrently in separate AppDomains. From Windows' perspective there is only one process. But multiple .NET applications may be running inside. To do this, the host application can create additional AppDomains, using AppDomain.CreateDomain  and call the instance method AppDomain.ExecuteAssembly inside that AppDomain. Here's an application I created, called AppRunner, that can run multiple .NET apps in the same process. You can verify this by looking at task manager and finding only the AppRunner host. Here's screenshot:

Task manager or similar tools will not show the running apps. You can use my CLR Explorer tool to view the running applications as AppDomains.

You can download the source code and executable of AppRunner.

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