Dave Burke has moved his blog to his own website http://dbvt.com/blog/ after over a year of participating in weblogs.asp.net. I have really enjoyed Dave’s post (well, Dave’s a great and fun guy all around) so I highly recommend following him to his new dotnetnuke/nGallery/.Text combo site.

Shawn rocks. He just explained something to me in the newsgroups that I think is really cool which is an internal windows thing.

A little background. The TabletSDK has clipboard functionality. You can use it to copy ink data from one ink object to another. You can also use it for a few other formats. However, I saw in the samples that you can select multiple formats to persist to the clipboard when you copy (one of them being BMP so you can paste into PAINT, for example). I didn’t understand how, if you said okay I want these three formats, how PAINT gets the one it needs.

Pretty simple – this is what Windows is designed to do. You program an application to grok different formats and look for a default format (PASTE) or choose another format (PASTE SPECIAL).  Therefore if I know I want my end user to be able to paste into some generic windows graphic application, I need to ensure that I choose at least the BMP format when I send my ink to the clipboard. But heck, they might have another ink enabled application on their computer, so I should also make sure the special ISF (ink serialized format) is in there too. So after they copy, they would be able to paste in a variety of applications whether ink-enabled or not.

Shawn is a real expert with Tablet PC development and just wrote an article on ink enabling your web apps on the Tablet PC Dev Center.

Jeff Julian has evidence that Longhorn is the work of the Devil! The real question is how did Bill Evjen just *happen* to find it? 🙂 

Casey Chesnut just got his MCSD

so now i’m an MCSD .NET. i’ve never been certified before … and i used to make fun of people with certifications (so you can make fun of me now).

by studying for the tests, i learned a few esoteric things, but nothing that i will probably ever use in my day to day work. it did make me learn some things that i would never look at on my own, so it is good to have a better understanding of those concepts, although i will promptly clear most of that info from my short term memory.

This is exactly one of the issues I have always had when I have considered prepping for certs. I actually took and passed 3 tests this spring, but my prep time was  – 0 hours for windows forms, 1 hour for web forms and 1 day for security. If I wanted to take the webservices test, I’m pretty okay with the web services stuff, but I’ve heard that there is a LOT of remoting on there. I have never done remoting and have no need to in the future. Why on earth would I want to study and learn remoting *just* to take the test. So I basically stopped one test short getting an official cert (more than MCP).

This is really surprising. Brent Rector, who wrote the very first book on Longhorn has just joined the Longhorn team as a PM. Obviously he’s a perfect fit and what a super score for Microsoft. But I just always saw him as an indie, through and through. I guess it was the same with Chris Sells though, and we all got used to that. My really regret not yet having gotten him to Vermont.NET as an INETA speaker. Oh, and congrats to both (BR & MS)!

A few weeks back I got a chance to chat with the ever impressive Dan Appleman on one of the dotnetrocks shows. We teased him about his non-blogging. He had started a blog on APress and wrote three posts and stopped. Hmmm, I wonder if that had an effect, because he started blogging again at www.danappleman.com and he has already written a bunch of great posts. Thanks Kathleen for pointing it out.

I thought this was notable. Nice job Gavin. Hard work indeed.

Gavin follows up with some insight on why he did this and how he prepared.

Congrats to Ted Neward. His latest book has just shipped. (Isn’t it Ted that does the happy jig or something?)

If you have ever followed the Burning Man festival, you know it is a totally wild event out in the middle of the desert. Apparently Chris Sells is there getting his ya-ya’s out this week. I’m impressed!

Scott’s also speaking at Code Camp II.

I’m getting humbled by my decision to spend my birthday weekend with my *own* husband. <g>