Section: Blogs
New MSDN RSS feeds are live…
Oct 6, 2004 1 min.
In an earlier post, I mentioned that I had written a new system for producing MSDN’s RSS feeds, and those feeds are now live at the same URLs as the previous versions. You might get some duplicates in your aggregators, (since these are new feeds but with some overlap of items from the old feeds) but that should be temporary. Anyway, check them out (here is the one for VB) and let me know what you think.
Oct 4, 2004 1 min.
As Chris already noticed, Charlie Kindel is discussing home data storage and home servers… both topics that interest me for about the same reasons as Chris. I’m a big fan of Windows Media Center, I have a ton of WMA files, digital photos, and I’m starting to have 3 seperate places where I store digital recordings of my TV shows… Storage at Home – How to store that precious data – Part 1 If you are into home networking, storage and servers… Charlie’s blog is worth reading.
An interesting response to my database usage poll…
Oct 2, 2004 2 min.
Mike Dimmick comments on SQL Server’s licensing policy and compares it to Oracle… which puzzled me. I’m no licensing expert, but from my days in MCS I used to read up on Oracle a bit and it seemed to me that they used a similar model to ours in determining per-user licensing costs. So I looked it up. Oracle’s per-user pricing is defined as per “Named User Plus”… from their own licensing material ( http://www.
Looking for ideas for articles on “Getting Stuff Done”
Oct 1, 2004 1 min.
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… and if you’d be interested in submitting something, just let me know! Thanks!
Sep 30, 2004 1 min.
Yesterday I started up my first Fable game, 3 hours of my life lost already. Lots of fun though. Tonight wasn’t as much fun; I tried 3 times to play and each time I was stopped with a dirty disc error… not sure why that is, but after 3 times I figured it was a divine hint to get back to work 🙂
MVPs… we love ’em!
Sep 28, 2004 1 min.
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! Visual Basic Visual C#
Getting the .NET Framework Installed as part of your application’s setup
Sep 28, 2004 1 min.
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… Visual Studio .NET Framework Bootstrapper Plug-in The Visual Studio .NET Framework Bootstrapper Plug-in modifies the behavior of the Setup project’s Bootstrapper property to include the .NET Framework bootstrapper as well as the Windows Installer bootstrapper. Got a .
I’ve been working on a new RSS generation system for MSDN for the past little while
Sep 27, 2004 2 min.
… and it is almost ready to ship…. The new system will result in a few changes to the MSDN feeds, the most notable of which is that our feeds will no longer reflect a certain time span (they currently contain all of the appropiately attributed items from the past 30 days), but will instead contain a certain # of items. They also have a bit more data in them, including the author of the article (in the dc:creator element) and a collection of category elements containing all of the attribution that we have applied to that article in our back end system.
Running a new poll on databases…
Sep 24, 2004 1 min.
I’ve put up a new poll on my site: What type of database do you use for the majority of your applications? If your answer is “something not on this list”, why don’t you post a comment on this blog entry to let me know what item was missing from my list?
Sep 23, 2004 1 min.
Had an interesting coffee with Serge Baranovsky,founder of vbCity.com and owner of a cool license plate: We discussed a variety of topics, including the idea of adding a ‘user submitted links’ section to MSDN that functions somewhat like what http://www.asp.net has on the home page (a list of resources that have been submitted by anyone who cares to do so, and then approved by a small body of insiders). What do you think of this idea?