Thursday, October 26, 2006

CodeMash!

The CodeMash website is live!

You can now submit abstracts if you want to present and you can pre-register to hold your spot in line. Official registration should be open soon and will cost only $99 for a two-day event!

Bruce Eckel, Neal Ford and Scott Guthrie are all keynoting the event.

CodeMash – I’ll be there!

You can also download information about the event if you are interested in sponsoring.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Heartland User Group Webcasts

Upcoming Webcast: November 6, 2006 at Noon EST

Heartland User Group Webcasts
Functional Programming and LINQ - Shifting your object paradigm.

Bill Wagner – Ann Arbor .NET Developers

Join us for technical presentations by experts from around our the user groups in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. In this webcast, Bill Wagner will demonstrate the new language extensions in C# and VB.NET called LINQ.

The language features added for the Orcas release of C# and VB.NET start moving those languages out of their Object Oriented roots into the realm of functional programming. It’s a different way of programming. Rather than designing classes with behaviors and data, you create functions that take data as inputs and produce different data as outputs. That radical shift can lead to much simpler ways to express your designs.

In this session, you’ll see the new syntax in these languages, and how you can leverage those additions to create more concise programs in less time.

Registration: http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032314537&Culture=en-US
Event ID: 1032314537

Upcoming Topics:
11/20 – Intro to Workflow. What’s all the Noise About? – Brian Prince, Central Ohio .NET Developers Group
1/8 – Web Services Software Factory – Mike Wood, Cincinnati .NET Users Group

Another Year Down...

Just a FYI to anybody keeping stats at home:  This blog turned 2 years old on October 22. 

Thanks go out to everybody who actually subscribe to and read my posts.  I don't think I'd be writing if I didn't have my 4 regular readers....  Well, 2 readers if you don't count my parents....

Thursday, October 19, 2006

IE7

I've been using Internet Explorer 7 as my primary browser for about 6 months now (various beta versions).  I've always been an IE fan, dating back to version 4--, actually preferring it over the various Mozilla flavors.  This probably has a lot to do with the fact that most of my clients standardized on IE, so any web application that I developed was targeted for that single platform.

I only had a few minor problems with the beta versions of IE7, so my experience has been excellent thusfar.  Yesterday, I downloaded and installed the RTM version. 

Perhaps it is simply a coincidence, but I've been noticing some weird problems now with my laptop.  For instance, it goes into sleep mode when I close the display.  More than once now in the past 24 hours, upon waking up, the laptop does not show the login dialog--just the wallpaper and mouse pointer.  The only thing that I seem to be able to do is power down and reboot.

Also, more than once, the browser has just seemed to stop responding for 1-2 minutes.  It doesn't allow me to switch tabs, or scroll.

I don't want to just blindly blame the RTM version of IE7 for these problems, but I find it strangely coincidental that they started after I installed this most recent update.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Trouble in MVP World

The Microsoft MVP program is a recognition award for leadership in the Microsoft-platform user community.  I'm not a Microsoft MVP, but many of my friends are.  Some things happened during the last round of awards (beginning of October) that make me question the intention and/or value of the program.

First, they awarded, and then rescinded the MVP status for Cyril Paciullo, the maker of Messenger Plus, a free addon for MSN Messenger that is also a distribution vehicle for LOP (nasty adware program).

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/100606-micro...

Next, they didn't renew the award for Jamie Cansdale.  Jamie wrote TestDriven.NET, which is probably one of the most widely used addins for Visual Studio by unit testing advocates everywhere.  The reason cited: Jamie violated the "MVP Code of Conduct" because he happened to make his program work with the Express SKUs (Visual C# Express, Visual Basic.NET Express, etc).   Or, at least this is the speculation of what the violation was.

http://weblogs.asp.net/nunitaddin/archive/2006/10/...

How to get disqualified as an MVP

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

ClickOnce/VS2005 Version Number Issue

This is not severe, but still annoys me every time that it comes up.  Look at this screenshot:

clickonce_issue

Here I have the project set up so that ClickOnce will automatically increment the revision number after each publish.  Well, something apparently is not working,  because it seems that at least once a day, I get "Version already exists on the server" errors.

Blah!  Is it me, or VS2005 that's at fault?  I'm going to blame the latter, since I never make mistakes.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Congratulations, Josh!

A good friend of mine in the Microsoft community, Josh Holmes, has made the jump and became a blue badge himself.  Congratulations!

Details from Josh himself: http://www.srtsolutions.com/public/item/143418

Monday, October 02, 2006

Photo

My work email account filled up (I hate quotas), so I had to find things to delete.  One was an email from Mokee containing a really neat picture of my Bubby (Evan) staring out of Mike's back door at the swingset. 

I simply titled it "Yearning"...

IMG_2309_cropped

(I think it looks great as my computer's wallpaper)