Code, Life and Community
This is what happens when Longhorn is put on a cheap machine ... (building a bigger, better, badder machine right now):
I have done six .NET books all with the same editor. Today was her last day as she has decided to move onto less-stressful pastures than book acquisitions. I used to always joke in my house and say that I had two ladies that would boss me around in my life - my wife and my editor. All the best Sharon .... what am I going to do now?
Rob Howard is bringing ASP.NET 2.0 to St. Louis via the ASP.NET Roadshow. We are excited and we are ready! We have around 300 people already signed up for the event and there is a bus of folks coming from Kansas City as well (4 hour drive). This will be our first meeting at St. Louis University and we have a ton of giveaways for the event. As I know it so far, we are giving away: 5 Pocket PCs MSPress books for everyone who fills out an evaluation T-Shirts Books from Sams Publishing Books from John ......
I read this press release and was a little shocked. In Microsoft's battles with
Lindows.com, it seems that they opened a can of worms. Now the jury is going to be deciding whether the word “Windows” predates Microsoft's use of it in 1983 and Microsoft is in jeopardy of losing their trademark over the Windows name.
Read the entire release here.
I got this in a Microsoft email this morning: Don't Miss the New Winter Fun Packs! Download these free Fun Packs for Windows Media Player 9 Series, Windows Movie Maker 2 and Windows XP games. I downloaded the Windows Media Player 9 Series Winter pack - which has a pretty interesting visualization that I like. I also downloaded the digital photography Winter pack (not mentioned here ... but it is there) and that has a neat screensaver changer with six real nice desktop wallpapers that change at an ......
FINALLY! I got a machine together - not all the parts I wanted - but good enough to get Longhorn on it. Final piece was the DVD drive. I did a clean install of Longhorn. I was quite interested in how the install process would proceed. So I will detail it out as much as I can for those people that are strange and love these details (like me). First off, there was no blue install screen where you would see the default drivers and such being installed. The first things requested was a page where I had ......
I just got notice that I will be speaking at ASP.NET Connections! That's cool. My sessions will include: AWF201: Secrets of Working with HTML Server ControlsBy using the languages that are offered with the .NET Framework and ASP.NET, you can gain programmatic access to specific HTML elements. Using a little bit of ASP.NET code you can change these HTML elements into something that you can easily control and manipulate on the server before the complete set of HTML is constructed and sent to the browser, ......
Intel came out to St. Louis today and met up with me and some others. It was nice to see them and they showed us some pretty interesting tools that they are using to optimize code. We are running tests with their tools tomorrow and seeing if they are telling us the truth. ;)
Any of you out there use vTune much? Seemed like a nice tool for monitoring performance?
This article just goes and shows you that you shouldn't try and win a vodka drinking contest. The “winner” died 20 minutes after drinking 3 half-liter bottles. Geez.
Didn't go to PDC and can't get the PDC Bits? Wondering what we got? Here is what was labeled as “the goods” that every attendee got: This set also contained: SQL Yukon and the Visual Studio Technology Preview “Whidbey” ......
I am a big fan of desktop wallpapers. I usually head to
National Geographic's site for these kind of things ...
but I saw this post and had to use the Rally Sport one myself. AWESOME!
I love Fall. It is probably my favorite time of year. I have three huge sycamore trees in my yard that drop leaves that can be 12 inches across. I also like the foods and drinks that come out at this time (except Starbucks does a poor job). My favorite is Bluemoon's pumpkin beer.
If you haven't tried this beer, look for it and try to pick up a six-pack ... it is quite tasty!
Looks like from this post that XML documentation will be done with 3 clicks when the beta hits the shelves (when is that btw?):
''' <summary>
''' A method.
''' </summary>
That is nice and convenient.
Bill Gates Comdex keynote that was done yesterday is available online. Look how the guy who introduces Bill works his hands .... note to other speakers .... don't do that. The disappointing part of this video is that all the videos that Bill shows are cut out of the presentation and replaced with a 'Coming back soon' type of screen. Geez.
I liked the videos that Microsoft shows at conferences. You can tell they put a lot into them. I was lucky enough to see the 'Behind the Technology' video at PDC. That was pretty dang cool. Though it seems that I missed another cool one showing Microsoft and the Matrix. Ballmer is Neo and Gates is offering him the BIG BLUE pill or the Red pill so that he can continue to stay in Wonderland. hehe. If you find where the video can be downloaded on the Internet, post a link here please. UPDATE: Jason ......
I found this article which just says that Microsoft has stated that they are going into the music downloading business next year! WOW. They will then be competing with the likes of iTune (
Apple) and
Napster.
All the SYS-CON radio interviews that were done at PDC are now available. You can find a long list of .NET folk talking about what they are doing with .NET - many it seems pitching their services. ;) The one that I want to point out is the INETA interview done by our own Brian Loesgen and Dave Noderer. Check it out! PS - Why is the site done in Cold Fusion ......
Kinda funny. I was excited to install Longhorn this weekend. I have got an average machine from work and got a new 60GB hard drive for it. Installed the hard drive. Plugged all the wires in to a switch so I can work off all these machines with one monitor and keyboard. Got the PDC discs out of my backpack...... wait a minute. This is a DVD, hmmmm ..... only a CD drive in the machine..... damn .... next weekend.
I was working with some others on a book that came out about a month ago, 'ASP.NET Professional Secrets', and I am finally seeing it in the book stores. That is nice as book store sales are the largest that a book can make (Borders and Barnes & Noble). Now that the book is out and I went to PDC, I am already planning the ASP.NET 2.0 version of the book and have already started outlining it. Dang ... technology moves so fast! My biggest concern is how the heck I am going to possibly fit all ASP.NET ......
In the EU trial that is going on, Real Networks used Windows XP Embedded against Microsoft. Windows XP Embedded allows people to select the parts of Windows XP that they need to create smaller versions of the operating system - for things like ATM machines and the like. Real Network contends that just the existence of this product shows that things don't need to be bundled. Ouch! READ MORE HERE ......
MSN has made a $50 million profit. This is the first profit the .com has made in their eight years. Cool.
Read it in detail here....
There seems to have been a lot of questions in the community about WROX - if they existed and what was going on. Let me report that Wrox is alive and well and is upgrading a lot of their most popular books at this moment. I worked on Professional C# 3rd Edition and the Wrox Professional VB.NET 3rd Edition. Both these books will be coming out in a couple of months time. Rob Howard and gang are working on the 3rd Edition of the Professional ASP.NET book. There are also some new books on the way. I ......
Reuters picks Accenture for all of our customer's integration projects (and there is quite a few of them).
Read more here.
Watch what you do Europe! Just
read this article about a Microsoft threat that they may get a substandard version of Windows if they continue down the path that they are going.
I go to New York City a lot for my job. Every time I come to NYC it seems that I run into someone famous. Kind of funny for a city sooo big that this would happen, but it does. Statistically, it seems that it wouldn't though. Last time I was here (Oct) I ran into Donald Trump: See the guy waving at me? That is actually his body guard coming to yell at me for taking his picture. But it was neat to see Donald. This time, I am staying at the Hilton Times Square and I was heading to the lobby in the ......
Seems the Senate is debating the issue again.
Read the article about it here ...
I am quite upset today. Tomorrow Jeff Prosise is coming to town (St. Louis) to speak at our C# SIG and I am out of town - in NYC actually. Jeff is one of my favorite people, EXTREMELY nice and one of the best .NET people out there by far! Devin and gang will be there though, so it will go quite well. Jeff coming to St. Louis has actually caused quite a bit of buzz in St. Louis ......
Every wonder where the name "Longhorn" comes from? I did and heard a little story that went like this: Come and listen to a story about a man named GatesA rich pioneer looking to keep Windows rich (with features of course)And then one day while skiing Blackcomb and Whistler tooHe had to make a pit-stop along a highway 99 jewel...Longhorn bar that is, pints of beer, burgers too.... Well the first thing you know ol Gates got an ideaThe patrons said "Longhorn is what we got here"said "Vector GDI is ......
Rafael Munoz and family, the lead for the VB.NET
MVP program, just had a new baby! Congrats to him and his wife on that as it is the best thing in life!
Whew! Another article done for MSDN. I am way late, but I should be able to pump them out now that I am done with the C# book. I just wrote a pretty cool article (at least I think it is cool) on effective uses of JavaScript in your ASP.NET pages and the best ways of employing JavaScript in ASP.NET. I used to use a lot of JavaScript when I was an ASP 3.0 programmer and I noticed that I pretty much abandoned it when I moved to ASP.NET thinking that - why bother - I can keep doing these postbacks. But, ......
My FAVORITE radio station and one of the best news sources around got a
bequest of $200 million from the late widow of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc - Joan Kroc. Everyone at NPR was totally surprised and their 2002 budget was only something like $103 million - so this will keep them going strong for awhile! Outstanding!
I turned in my last chapter for WROX's Professional C# 3rd Edition. Whew! Now that the last chapter is in, it will get technically reviewed next and then I will receive what is called AR (author review) where I have to go through the chapters and address all the comments and concerns of all the reviewers. After that, the chapters go back to the editors and they review them again and then off to the printing. I understand that we won't see the book in print for another five months or so. The biggest ......
The ASP.NET Roadshow is touring the USA right now. This is a roadshow conducted by the greats Scott Guthrie and Rob Howard. You can see a advert (as the Europeans would say) on the side of my blog. Steal the jpg and use it on your own blogs/websites as well and make it click through to http://www.asp.net/roadshow. Help promote a great and FREE event to show America ASP.NET 2.0! I am excited about this tour. There are a ton of people already signing up for the event. I heard from a Microsoft friend ......
I am always so particular about names and the use of proper names. I have also thought about naming issues in past posts. Some people just say ... oh who cares about what the name is ... just use it - oh, I don't know why this is an obsession of mine, but it just is. Now the problem I have is that I have seen the mention of the next version of the .NET Framework being .NET Framework 1.2 in people's posts (including MSFT people) as well as reference to it being the .NET Framework 2.0. So what is it ......
Interesting .... INETA gets a mention on Miguel de Icaza's blog. I understand that the Mono interested folks did have a meeting separate of the BOFs at PDC and that there was a rather large group in attendance. In the middle of the week at PDC, I did end up having lunch with Miguel and some of the other INETA folks and we did talk about the situation. ..... ummmm .... buy me a beer if you want to know! ;) ......
OK ... I HAD to post this .... I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. This guy (Stone) put some of the world's worst album covers on his blog. FUNNY FUNNY FUNNY!
There are some interesting conversations going on about refactoring in VB that shouldn't be missed from the VB team. http://www.panopticoncentra... (first post) http://www.panopticoncentra... (follow-up post) ......
Looks like Microsoft is going to lower the cost of the
XBOX in Japan down to around $45(USD). Wow! That is a heck of a price cut. They are doing it because the XBOX doesn't seem to be taking hold in the country of video games and if you are going to make it big in the video game industry - you have to be big in Japan!
Well, all I have to say is that
it is a lot like Pearl Jam. The
first album was great and then they just went downhill after that!
I travel a lot (ask my friends!), so I found this story pretty alarming. There is a worry about when you stay at a hotel that the hotel card keys (that look like credit cards) are actually holding information that you provided to stay at the hotel. There are cards that are holding: * Your name * Your address (if you gave it) * Room number * The start date and end date of your stay at the hotel * and YOUR credit card number that you gave the hotel There have also been reports of hotel employees taking ......
This
article just appeared that looks at XBRL in more detail. XBRL is the proposed XML language for Financial Reporting.
These are some of the posters that were given out at Longhorn - myself I only got the WinFX one. Oh well.
WinFX Namespace Poster
Longhorn Architecture Poster
Nice to see that
Code Magazine (.NET focused) has now started putting their articles online.
I have tickets tomorrow to see the final episode of the Matrix (Matrix Revolutions) at 3.45 CST! I promise no spoilers on my blog! Though I will give it a rating. I heard that they all finally find that they should have been using .NET since it has a built-in garbage collector and once they switched over - all the bad guys were removed from the program. It sounds kinda anti-climatic myself ......
OK ... I haven't installed Longhorn yet .... I can't decide on how to do it. I have an important WORK laptop that could handle it, but my entire work existence is on it and I can't meddle with it. Then I have a nice desktop at home that the entire family uses and I have been warned repeatedly about installing all sorts of alpha/beta stuff on that computer as I seem to always mess up my wife's computer existence. So I want to build a new machine ... but I have to do it piecemeal - meaning case and ......
Here is a Longhorn Build 4051 Tweak Guide site for those just installing it:
I am always looking for thoughtful investment opportunities in the equities world and after PDC, I am wondering if I should invest in graphic card companies!
;)
This is not the normal way in which I think of Big Blue, but Microsoft has turned to IBM for the chips for the next version of the XBOX. The first version of the chip was done by Intel, but I guess that Microsoft has not been happy with them or something. They were tallking quite a bit with AMD about supplying the chips for XBOX2, but it seems that IBM beat them out at the last minute. I read about it here on the Reuters website, and it seems from this article that Sony PlayStation is the next target ......
Microsoft, Reuters and some other companies have been working on XBRL for financial data reporting. Right now, all companies pretty much provide their reports in free text, but by providing it in XBRL, it would be then considerably easier for financial analysts to review these documents. Presently, it is only human eyes that reads through them all - but with XBRL, we can allow applications to then do all the crunching. Microsoft is so much behind it that they are going to include XBRL output from ......
Did you miss PDC? Well, you can get at all the slides here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/agendaandsessions/sessions/default.aspx
ENJOY! (When you watch them ... breath in deep ... you can almost smell the smoke)
One of the cool new features that is going to be available in Longhorn was the thumbnail page of the document that shows up next to the scrollbar. It was captured in a photograph from Paul Thurrott's WinSuperSite. This shows the mouse arrow moving across the scroll bar and the thumbnail appearing which is based upon the page that would appear at that scrollbar position. The cool thing about the thumbnails (using Aero) would be that the actual image of page would appear INCLUDING images and even running ......
Like most I have been watching the Eolas patent situation quite closely as we use a ton of plugins at Reuters (as most do) and this would GREATLY effect our applications. Basically - a group has proven in court that they own the patent for plugging stuff into a browser. So that means that they own the patent to the technology that plugs in things like ActiveX, Java Applets, Flash, Quicktime and more. WOW you say! That's what I said. They already won a lawsuit against Microsoft (being appealed) and ......
Robert Scoble sums up Longhorn pretty dang well in
this post.