Turns out I am going after all…

Oct 22, 2003 1 min.

I had planned on missing this year’s PDC, because we had been planning on launching a new application during that same week (one of many!!)… but now that particular launch has been postponed a bit so I’m free to attend! That wouldn’t have made any difference though, since it is sold out (and yes, that applies to us staffers too!), but I’ve just taken over from another colleague who won’t be able to attend… so off I go to buy an overly expensive last minute ticket!

New VB article up from a fellow ‘weblogs’ author…

Oct 16, 2003 1 min.

Darren Neimke, Mr. RegEx himself, has written a cool article that shows you how to create a fairly generic markup system to turn text into marked up HTML based on keyword information stored in XML… cool stuff; http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dv_vstechart/html/vbmarkup.asp Surf on over and let him know what you thought of it!

Pretty cool MSDN TV Topic up..

Oct 15, 2003 1 min.

From: Erica Wiechers Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2003 6:05 PM Subject: New MSDN TV: Validating Business Rules with XPath Assertions, Pt. 1 After a break, while we updated our media publishing system, MSDN TV is back! This episode is Pt. 1 of Aaron Skonnard’s talk at the XML DevCon: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdntv/episode.aspx?xml=episodes/en/20031007XMLAS/manifest.xml Validating Business Rules with XPath Assertions, Pt. 1 Some XML applications don’t require validation to function properly but others absolutely require it in one form or another to avoid disasters.

New Dancers… but still no ‘Master Chief’?

Oct 15, 2003 1 min.

Ok, maybe a night of Halo with my coworkers has skewed my perspective on this topic, but come on… wouldn’t that just be the coolest… maybe the little alien guys, the chief, Cortona (not sure on the spelling for that one)… Ah well, the update seems pretty cool, even without the Chief…http://EraBlog.NET/filters/19351.post

Visual Studio .NET Bootstrapper Plug-In

Oct 14, 2003 1 min.

The VS team has produced a ‘preview’ version of a new plug-in… Setup projects in Visual Studio .NET 2003 can be used to install the .NET Framework with your application, but only if you have installed the optional Visual Studio .NET Framework Bootstrapper Plug-in on your development computer. 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.

Hmm… interesting side affect of Google AdSense

Oct 13, 2003 1 min.

Now, it is helping me to find things! The blog page on my personal site has become stuck in DVI/HDTV/Component Video land after one of my posts, all of the ads are about HDTV related stuff… but, this just appeared and it looks pretty cool. Not the most visually appealing device, but I’m thinking that it could be hidden away and just controlled by a IR emitter…

Ok, so *now* I’m loading up Halo on my PC

Oct 13, 2003 1 min.

I have to learn the keyboard/mouse commands, and quickly. My boss just sent out an invitation to a Halo PC LAN fest… so, while I managed to resist tempation for two days… now I just have no choice.

Home Machine is up and “loaded for code…”

Oct 11, 2003 2 min.

Kent used a phrase a few days ago “loaded for bear”, and while I can’t even really explain what it meant (though Google certainly can), it makes me laugh every time I think of it… Anyway, I recently bought a home machine (from Dell, because I realized that if I built it myself I would probably spend weeks doing it for 20-30 minutes a night), and I’ve finally loaded it up with VS.

Adhoc and Random

Oct 10, 2003 1 min.

I see by Kent’s latest post that we’ve gone public with our new aliases.. in the great tradition of Early and Adopter, we have decided we should be known as ‘adhoc and random’. Details won’t be coming, but let’s just say that we have a reputation at our workplace as being a bit too quick to write and ship code when we want something done… We are working on that problem though… I think we are scheduled to attend a support group next week, and we aren’t allowed to code during the meeting….

So many things going on at one time

Oct 10, 2003 1 min.

It has been one of those days… so much content being worked on, almost none of it visible on MSDN yet… but it is coming! If you were watching closely (and I didn’t expect you to be), you’ll have noticed some subtle changes on the Dev Centers… my pic went up onto http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic, I created a new books page at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/using/books and there are quite a few changes coming for the C# Developer Center as well…