“Letter from the Editor” on the MSDN Developer Centers

Jul 23, 2003 1 min.

Hey folks, I’m not sure if you’ve seen this section of the new MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/letters). It is a place where the appropriate MSDN Content Strategist (me for VB, Kent for ASP.NET, etc…) gives a little blurb about the content on the site for that period of time… it is a bit bloggish in nature in fact, but with a bit more editorial polish… Anyway, I was looking at the fairly dismal page views on this part of the vbasic site and I was wondering what would make it more appealing?

Another Updater Application Block Post… moving from one server location to another

Jul 21, 2003 5 min.

The app I am currently working on, and the one that I just recently moved from being an href-exe to being an application that updates itself via the PAG Updater Application Block, has always been located on my own Windows XP machine, that is to say… that is the web server where the .exe and other assemblies reside. Well, that causes me all sorts of problems, because it effectively makes my desktop machine into a production box, and one that many people depend upon… restarting is not a possibility, and I even try to minimize the load on the box as it will tend to wreak havoc on some of my users if I fire up 2 copies of VS.

Converting an Application to use the Application Updater Block from PAG

Jul 18, 2003 1 min.

I recently took an internal MSDN application that I had been running as an HREF-EXE for some months now and converted it to use the Application Updater Block from PAG… it ended up taking many steps, but only a couple of hours (total) to get from start to test.. so I thought I would post my experience with integrating this new block into my application. I have placed it up as a story at http://weblogs.

Visual Basic Bloggers Revisited

Jul 15, 2003 1 min.

“anon” (why not leave a name, it is much more fun) posted a comment in response to my previous entry, asking why am I including Brad Abrams and Chris Brumme… as they are not VB-specific… Perhaps I need to be clearer about my intent. “I’m interested in blogs that contain useful information for Visual Basic (.NET or not) developers.” … the fact that Brad Abrams and Chris Brumme are not tied to any one language is the whole reason why I chose to list them.

Visual Basic bloggers

Jul 14, 2003 1 min.

As some folks may know, I come up with the content for the Visual Basic developer center on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic) and I’m going to list some blogs on a sub-page of the site… starting with a small list, but hopefully growing it with some feedback from the community at large. I’m interested in blogs that contain useful information for Visual Basic (.NET or not) developers. I was going to start with:

I might miss Winnipeg, but I think I’ve moved to a cooler place…

Jul 14, 2003 2 min.

As a parent of a 2yr old, I don’t get out to see bands as often as I used to (I know it is certainly possible, but we are not really connected into a babysitting network, so we only go out when family is visiting)… but it turns out that all you need is a toddler and to live in the right city. I went out to University Village on the weekend to hang out, buy a book on grilling (new house has me out on the patio a bit more than usual), get some Ben and Jerry’s ice cream… and I ended up spending an hour in a little playground in the middle of the place.

A little off-topic, but …. “Verizon Sucks”

Jul 6, 2003 3 min.

I’m sure I’ve worked with more disorganized and unprofessional companies, although I can’t think of any, but I certainly haven’t continued to work with them… but I’m fairly stuck with Verizon. I just moved into a new house, only a few minutes away from my apartment, and I called Verizon to arrange for the move of the phone and DSL (both through them). They were very nice on the phone and arranged to move both as of the 3rd of July… although they had to transfer me to a 2nd person to arrange the DSL, because it seems they are essentially two different companies.

Retrieving File Icons for specific file types

Jul 3, 2003 1 min.

I just uploaded a new sample to microsoft.com, pulling some useful code out of another MSDN sample that was so unrelated that I figured that this little bit of interesting code would never be found. This code sample shows how to retrieve the icon for any given file type and it does it through a pretty cool component that exposes 2 ImageLists to make it easy to use with a ListView or TreeView.

New Editor’s Note (Letter from the Editor… whatever…) up on vbasic

Jul 1, 2003 1 min.

It won’t show up in the MSDN RSS feed(s), but at least it will appear on here http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/letters/

Everything you didn’t need to know about me…

Jun 29, 2003 1 min.

Is now up on the web (I guess it was all up there before, just not in one place) as my interview with mainfunction.com has made it up onto their web site. I think they told me this was coming months ago, so I hope I didn’t mention it to a bunch of people then, because I’m betting it was only published recently. ([Listening To](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dncodefun/html/code4fun04252003.asp): She Hates Me [[Puddle of Mudd](http://www.