Duncan Mackenzie .NET

Robert Green and I are planning a series of articles focused around Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition... quick articles, not a lot of text, but with enough code to do something cool and useful... but we need ideas, and we are looking for submissions of content. If you have some ideas, comment away.. […]

Yesterday I started up my first Fable game, 3 hours of my life lost already. Lots of fun though. […]

And nowhere is that more evident than in our recent update to the VB and C# home pages here on MSDN.... check out the rotating (changes occasionaly, not on every refresh due to the magic of caching, but from time to time) featured MVP on the front page of both of these sites! […]

I'm working on the bootstrapper chapter for my upcoming ClickOnce book and it occured to me that a lot of people probably haven't heard about the bootstrapper for Visual Studio .NET 2003... […]

... and it is almost ready to ship.... […]

I've put up a new poll on my site: What type of database do you use for the majority of your applications? […]

Had an interesting coffee with Serge Baranovsky,founder of vbCity.com and owner of a cool license plate: […]

Lots of pretty pictures.... lots more info coming, but I thought I'd let you folks know that I have put some of it up onto the site... but nowhere near all... about half the 'productivity' section is still pending and I still have the debugger and platform sections to build out... […]

Everything comes down to that one of those two groups to my son, and he seems to really like that idea (wouldn't we all like the world to be that clearly defined). Today he is a bit sick and my wife sent me this message; Connor's feeling pretty sick today. He still has a fever. […]

I took Scott Watermasysk's 'book control' and modified it recently to display more than one book (moving it to VB.NET along the way), and I reduced the file it pulls from down to just a list of ISBN #s.... but then I wasn't able to display the title of the book as a tooltip (like the original does). […]

As part of the United Way's Day of Caring, I went into Seattle today and did some work for a non-profit counseling center... specifically creating an Access system for them.... a few tables, 3 forms, and a bunch of analysis queries and reports all around stats... […]

I've recently signed up for NetFlix, but earlier I had tried out GameFly, a service I like to think of as "NetFlix for Games"... and I remembered that I had planned to describe my experience on my blog at some point, but I had never gotten around to it! Basically Gamefly is the same deal as NetFl […]

"Dynamic Systems" recently submitted a suggestion into the MSDN Product Feedback system, looking for a way to add a shortcut (link to their app) to the user's desktop, startup folder or other location.... well, I don't have a built-in .NET Framework answer for that, but there is a relevant Code Proj […]

My Advanced Basics column from the October 2004 issue is now up online... Building a Progress Bar that Doesn't Progress and if you think that title is odd, here is what Chris Sells had to say when he first heard it... (comments used 100% without permission, but I figure he won't mind)... "I can’ […]

Juanito27 posted this question to the VB.NET forum on GotDotNet last week... […]

I was reading an entry from David Kean about some inconsistencies in 2.0 Framework classes, and I decided to jump up a level and read through some of his others posts... holy code samples, Batman! Seriously, almost every post includes a code or XML sample of some sort... that is a high signal-to-noi […]

I was staring at my bandwidth usage tonight and it is quite high.... and thanks to this cool SVG based stats system that easerve provides, I can drill down and figure out which pages are causing the bulk of that traffic... well, the biggest offenders for # of hits were the aggBugs that .Text […]

Olav Gausaker, a programmer who reads my Coding 4 Fun columns just emailed me with something cool... he wrote (before reading my column on the topic) a web based version of my "Halo2 Countdown" application from July... very nice... in fact, with the large images (refresh to see a variety of differen […]

I can't find any other landing page for this, so check out the blog entry from Georgeo Pulikkathara for all the details... Soup to Nuts – A Webcast Series for Windows Forms DevelopmentTune in and learn how to build Windows Forms applications and smart clients in .NET. We’ll take you through all […]

I noticed the cool ads rotating on the side of the developer centers (VB and C#) so I “Viewed Source” and grabbed the relevant HTML... voila, I'm now showing MSN Ads on my site... totally inappropriate? Perhaps, but very easy... <div class="mnpAds" style="width: 181px; height: 100%; padding […]

Shawn, my boss, recommends this AW book by Rebecca Riordan, which is one of the few .NET books I've found time to read lately, and I have to agree... I have doubts on whether or not it will sell as many copies as it should, as people seem to cluster around very focused books even when this book is e […]

Anytime people talk about developing shareware with .NET, the discussion centers around the download/install of the Framework, because that is the issue that seems like the biggest hurdle to non-corporate developers... I could go on and on about the various methods of getting the Framework installed […]

I created a Pocket PC remote for Windows Media Player, but I only had speakers right next to the music system... so the remote wasn't all that useful... but I just picked up this wireless speaker; and suddenly it is time to install that software again ... my wife now puts the speaker wherever s […]

Wes shows us how to avoid the '*' character and use the same black circle that windows XP uses...

Hey folks, this chat is coming up and it would be great if you could make it... if you have a lot of opinions, good or bad, around C#... please show up and let the team know.... [C# Chat] What's on your mind regarding C#? The C# Team wants to know what's on your mind. Here's your chance to ask tha […]

In a previous post, I mentioned that a flaw in the installation routines for telligent's forum system resulted in the deletion of a fairly important set of data... well, after posting that, a few things happened that impressed me... My web host, easerve, contacted me and let me know they had daily […]

I need authentication and role based security for another project that is coming soon, so I've put forums up at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/forums/ ... nothing there at the moment, but feel free to visit the 'discussion' forum and contribute your ideas... What forums should I add? I was thinki […]

Ok, so any action you take against your database is your own responsibility... so this is my fault, but I'm still miffed. […]