Section: Blogs

aggghhh… I’m melting…

Feb 25, 2005 1 min.

or am I being scribbled? I just noticed that the staged version of the VB developer center (our pre-production version where we publish the site prior to pushing it live) has Brad’s picture and blog on the home page… making this my last post that will show up on that page 🙂 Of course, my blog isn’t going away, but you get to look at someone else’s face and commentary on MSDN instead of me!

Scott Swigart responds to Richard Grimes

Feb 25, 2005 2 min.

Richard Grimes posted some fairly negative thoughts around .NET and VB.NET specifically, comments that Scott decided to reply to with his own post. I have to say that Richard’s comments about C# vs. VB.NET are something that I hear all the time, that it is easy for a VB6 developer to pick up C#, and (just like Scott says) that just isn’t true at all. To pick just one example, case-sensitivity is a language ‘feature’ that leads to confusion and errors, and trying to work in that environment after growing up inside Visual Basic is a lot harder than people make it seem.

New VB Content Strategist has started…

Feb 23, 2005 1 min.

A while ago I moved out of the Content Strategist role and over onto the development team at MSDN, but until this week my position had remained empty! Well, the wait is over, Brad McCabe has joined the illustrious content strategist team at MSDN. No ‘official’ link to point you to yet, but I’m sure a blog will follow soon! Of course, a google MSN search turns up a variety of articles and speaking appearances… even a bio!

Gratis needs to update their banners :)

Feb 23, 2005 2 min.

Gratis, the company behind the various www.free***.com sites (and the original free iPod folks), provide banners for use on sites like mine, but they don’t really keep them up to date. For example, the banner for the Free PC site is all about the Dell machine you can get, but they recently added a Sony Vaio as a possible choice. Now, I’m not sure why, since its specs are not that different from the Dell, but the Sony machine just seems more appealing 🙂 … here is Gratis’s blurb on the new box:

Update 1 for the XBox Media Center Extender..

Feb 21, 2005 2 min.

I saw a newsgroup post (by Todd Bowra) that an update was available for my XBox media center extender, but I can’t find anything about this on any of the media center sites on http://www.microsoft.com or xbox.com, so I thought I would spread the word via my blog 🙂 For those of you who have been patiently waiting for Update Rollup 1 for Media Center Extender for Xbox (aka “the restricted content update”), the wait is now over.

I just love finding code samples :)

Feb 21, 2005 1 min.

Aaron Brethorst has a little page of his code samples up at http://www.brethorsting.com/code/ which include a few interesting items including a software version of the Enigma machine in C#. Cool stuff. Aaron is also the author of iRooster, an alarm clock application (that uses playlists from iTunes) which also looks neat, but runs on the Mac so it isn’t something that I have any real use for… :).

Community Server 1.0 Released

Feb 19, 2005 1 min.

Telligent Systems, the company founded by former Microsoftie (and ASP.NET whiz kid) Rob Howard, has finally released Community Server 1.0. Community Server combines the functionality of forums (based on the ASP.NET forums engine Rob worked on while at Microsoft), blogs (based on the very popular .Text engine created by Scott Watermasysk, who now works for Telligent), and photo gallery (based on nGallery, created by Jason Alexander, who’s also one of the brains at Telligent).

Only 2 away from completion …

Feb 17, 2005 1 min.

I’m up to 6 out of 8 referals on the free flat screen offer site, it will be interesting to see what the ‘order’ process is like if I ever get to 8. Of course, in the time it has taken, I could have probably found some other way to get a LCD monitor for my wife’s computer, but that wouldn’t be sporting 🙂

a new “henge”

Feb 17, 2005 1 min.

SQLServerCentral.com‘s newsletter included a link to a newly built ring similar in many ways to Stonehenge… overall it looks like a really cool project to illustrate how this technology was originally used. Someday, a similar project will be formed to recreate a massive scale version of a P4, that you can walk through and pretend to be electrons… people of the time will be stunned to hear that anything so primitive actually performed calculations 🙂