Robert Scoble pointed out the TabletPC Tour that is bringing a hands on tablet pc experience to 7 cities around the country in late February and early March. It’s not a developer event as it is targetted at IT Decision makers — i.e. come see why you need your company to use tablet pc’s. Anyway, still a good way to get a hands on educational experience with Tablets if you are interested or trying to get your client or boss to get interested so you can start having fun writing ink-enabled applications!!
Monthly Archives: January 2004
SecretGeek is pretty damned funny
SecretGeek, aka Leon Bambrick. This is the guy who brought us the famous VB Refactoring menu in Whidbey (I’m pointing to my post on this because we already crashed him once with so many) . Have you read his blog lately? Are you even subscribed?
Free as in Free Coffee
from Microsoft-Watch
Brian Loesgen – Mr. INETA President – he’s everywhere
I’m happy I’ll get to see Brian in Boston as he will be speaking at the EdgeEast conference also on BizTalk Server 2004.
But today I had a special treat when my two new copies of ASPNetPro arrived and there he was talking about INETA.
Whidbey’s FtpWebRequest Class – hooray
I struggled with webclient for a while trying to ftp and naturally, I blogged about it.
Enter System.NET.FtpWebRequest as well as my favorite sentence in its’ remarks: “You can also use the WebClient class to upload and download information from an FTP server.”
Though I still have to play with it to believe it!
Michael Lane Thomas also gets into the FtpWebRequest class in his excellent article in Code Magazine. If you don’t recognize the name, it’s probably because you know him as “The .NET Cowboy”.
See the MoveOn.Org that won’t be aired on CBS
This ad itself is killer.
Focus of my BCL talk
I think that the focus of my BCL talk (here and here) has finally congealed. My talk is supposed to be about level 200 +. My target audience corporate developers (not plumber types) who may already be using .NET or might not even be there yet. So the focus of my talk is going to be that Microsoft has figured out what things people are struggling to do. A lot of these things are those that the average developer would never attempt or may just not be familiar with. However, the tasks that are being accomplished should absolutely be part of every developers “quiver” (as we say in the ski-bum world). A perfect example of this is the DoubleBuffered property of the windows.forms.control (and it’s counterpart the new System.Drawing.BufferedGraphics). It helps reduce flickering by parlaying the graphics data to a buffer and then when it is all together, flipping it back to the display. Skilled developers with graphic intensive applications have realized a need for this and gone to the effort of orchestrating code to make this happen. The average developer might just accept a little flickering in their form and be done with it. But a simple property like this will now help that average developer put a little more polish in their application. And therefore I feel like it is my mission (in this talk) to help ensure that the average developer does not miss out on the fact that these very simple solutions now exist to help them be above average.
50,000 year old mammoth skull found!
This is REALLY COOL!!!
(caveat – if it’s not a hoax or something…I’m so gullible!)
more Backup Strategies for Independents – experience talks
I have found this incredibly informative thread on Dell of all places (thank you google) that talks about a variety of backup solutions revolvoing around an external hard drive and various software (eg. Retrospects Dantz is bundled with Maxtor One-Touch, vs. Ghost vs. some others).
I am closing in on a solution which will involve occasional complete images via ghost and then frequent incremental backups. I have a 160 gig hard drive with 3 partitions.
The various Maxtor options look great for a single hardware solution – encased USB2 or Firewire hard drive. And they these drives got a “storage product of the year“ award from an industry magazine.
Gha – why do I have to learn all this stuff? Oh yeah, cause I’m a geek and it’s fun!
How to read The Daily Grind
The Daily Grind. Admit it. You (developers) all read it and this is how you read it. First you do a quick scan to see if your name is in there – if you actually wrote something (comment/software/utility) worthy of being listed in one of the most valuable online developer resources. Then and only then do you go back to the top, read Mike’s quip on whatever is going on in his life that day, then start ticking through the great links (and keen observations) he has listed.
I am clearly procrastinating at the moment. Rich went skiing (boo hoo hoo) and I said “You go on and have a nice time, honey. I am working on my presentation today!” New snow, no crowds a little bit of sunshine and blue sky peeking through and temperate weather. This is why I have a season pass and live 7 miles from Mad River Glen. Whine whine whine.