Section: Blogs
Updated C# Sneak Preview is (mostly) online…
Sep 22, 2004 1 min.
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… Anyway, check it out if you wish by clicking here.
Sep 20, 2004 1 min.
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. We’re definitely not going to preschool. I explained to him that the cold is a “bad guy”, and that he has good guys in his body that are fighting him.
Amazon Web Services 4.0 … what are you using them for?
Sep 19, 2004 2 min.
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)… so I signed up for Amazon’s web services and added some code to pull the book’s info through the web services and cache it for use in the control.
Spent the day doing Access 2000 work…
Sep 18, 2004 1 min.
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… Great stuff…. helping out a non-profit, but it was my first time building anything in Access in ages…. I used to do it all the time as part of past jobs, etc….
My experience with GameFly…
Sep 16, 2004 2 min.
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 NetFlix. You fill up a queue with games you want, they send you the first 3, then send you the next whenever you return one of the ones you have.
A recent Product Feedback suggestion “Placing a Startup Icon on the Desktop”
Sep 15, 2004 1 min.
“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 Project article available… Creating Shell Links (Shortcuts) in .NET Programs Using WSH By Jim Hollenhorst It’s easy to create shortcuts using the Windows Script Host Object Model
If you are an MSDN Magazine subscriber, then you already saw this….
Sep 14, 2004 1 min.
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’t wait to read ‘Building a Progress Bar that Doesn’t Progress.’ I assume follow on articles will cover ‘Building a Button that Doesn’t Butt’ and ‘Building a Status Bar that Doesn’t Stat?
Creating a VB.NET Windows application using the command line
Sep 14, 2004 1 min.
Juanito27 posted this question to the VB.NET forum on GotDotNet last week… Command line compile Windows vb app I need to have someone show me how to compile via command line a vb.net windows app. Could someone show me the minimum code to get a window/form up with maybe a label or button on it. so I posted up a sample to the samples page on my personal site that shows creating two programs via the VB.
Like Code? Like FxCop? Then you should read David Kean’s blog…
Sep 12, 2004 1 min.
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-noise ratio folks… all on fairly interesting .NET topics, including quite a few discussions of FxCop… you should definitely check this blog out (link below)….
Reducing the size of my pages….
Sep 9, 2004 2 min.
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 includes (because my blog posts, including the aggbugs, are shown on MSDN, and therefore generate 3 aggBug requests for every single view of the Visual Basic or C# Developer Center pages), but the biggest use of bandwidth was by far the mainfeed.