Section: Blogs

Winners of the Channel 9 “Summer of Express” contest annouced!!!

Oct 18, 2004 1 min.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/express/ for full details, but here is a quick list of the winners: Visual Basic – Exercise-it Visual C# – Peg Games Visual C++ – Voxygen Rendering Engine Visual J# – Windows of Love Visual Web Developer & SQL Server Express – Media Tracker All winners have been notified via email. The Channel 9 page will be updated to show the winners shortly and the code for all entries will be made available in the coming weeks.

Supporting LiveBookmarks in FireFox 1.0

Oct 18, 2004 2 min.

When we originally added RSS feeds to the various developer centers on MSDN, we included a line (shown below) in the HTML of those pages that let browsers and other software know that there was a RSS feed available that was related to the content of the page. <font face="'Courier New',Courier,monospace"><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Visual Basic Developer Center" href="rss.xml" /> Later, quite awhile after that initial launch, someone (ok, it was me) decided to create a set of page templates for all of the pages in use in the Developer Centers, and when they did that work, they inadvertently removed this line of HTML from the Developer Center home pages.

I&#8217;m leaving the MSDN Content Team&#8230;

Oct 14, 2004 2 min.

Recently I transitioned the C# Content Strategist role over to Frank Redmond, but that was only the first of several changes for me at MSDN. Today, my boss made the rest of the changes public, so now I can talk about it 🙂 I’m going to be leaving the Content Strategy team completely and joining the development group within MSDN, focusing on the tools and infrastructure that MSDN runs on, instead of the content that it publishes.

A post about new MSDN Content? Nope, not quite&#8230;

Oct 13, 2004 1 min.

I’ve been a bit busy lately, and it hasn’t just been with MSDN work… there is a new addition to the Mackenzie family! Jada Elizabeth MackenzieBorn on October 10th at 2:27 pmAt home now, healthy and happy!!

Justin Rogers with another great blog post series&#8230;

Oct 13, 2004 1 min.

Justin worked (and still works?) on the Terrarium system and uses that experience as an example as he discusses various gaming topics in his blog… including yesterday’s post on creating random world content. Gaming: Generating random world content and some consistency algorithms… _Generating random world content is one of those tasks that gets written off as a trivial matter. It isn’t hard to throw some stuff around a virtual space and call it good.

Cool VB.NET Utility&#8230; the VB.NET Class Builder

Oct 13, 2004 1 min.

_ (via the Powertoys Blog) _ Sure… I think the Whidbey Class Designer rocks. But you don’t have Whidbey today, so you might be interested in a class building utility like this one from Mod2Software. Check it out here “This program allows you to build, maintain, and deploy Visual Basic .NET classes quickly and easily, with no fuss. Simply point and click to add class items, tweak their settings, and deploy your class to your project – it’s as simple as that!

X-Men Legends is great&#8230;

Oct 9, 2004 1 min.

I’ve been playing through x-men legends for the XBox, which has been a lot of fun… kinda like Gauntlet but with the X-Men … it isn’t as much fun right now though, because I went and got stuck 🙂 We are trying to save Colussus from the Nuclear Facility, and we found out what we needed to do, and found the spots where we needed to weld some brackets back together (doesn’t it sound like a cool game?

UI Patterns and Techniques

Oct 7, 2004 1 min.

This is not about .NET. I just found a site full of information about standard patterns that are being used in user interfaces in both desktop applications and web sites, that I thought you folks might like. _There’s nothing new here. If you’ve done any Web or UI design, or even thought about it much, you should say, “Oh, right, I know what that is” to most of these patterns.

You just have to &#8216;love&#8217; wikis&#8230;

Oct 7, 2004 1 min.

(I’m kidding) Wikis seem to be nothing but free space for spammers… yes, yes… I know.. they have good aspects, but it seems whenever I get a link to a wiki, the odds I’m going to see what I expected are very low (and the odds of seeing farm animals in disturbing poses is high). Today I decided to click on a link to see screenshots of GTK#, the UI engine in Mono, and they decided to post these shots onto a Wiki.