TabletPC 2005 is really still coming out in 2004

Tablet

The poor Microsoft Tablet Team is already battling confusion over the renaming of Lonestar/Tablet PC Edition 2004 to Tablet PC Edition 2005. Okay – their explanation makes sense to me.

Even though this Tablet PC version will be coming out in mid-2004, it will probably be the basic version for a bunch of years. So if they left the name 2004, then by 2006 it’s going to sound REALLY old. So they are calling it 2005. But it is still being released in 2004.

The problem that they have created is that Microsoft just finally stamped Visual Studio .NET Whidbey with it’s official name “VS.NET 2005” Visual Studio 2005 (thanks Erik Porter for the reminder, it is hard to keep up!!) and it is coming out in 2005 and Yukon is now  “SQL Server 2005” and *it* is coming out in 2005. So, Tablet PC Edition 2005 coming out in 2004 is going to be a bit of a marketing problem.

The funny part of this for me is I had grown quite fond of all of the code names: Whidbey, Lonestar, Yukon. I miss them already.

Long-Awaited Crystal Reports .NETBook!

dotNET

This evening I received a reply to an email that I wrote 16 months ago!

In January 2003, I sent the following email to my user group:

Folks, go check out: http://www.crystalreportsbook.com

Basically the story goes that this book was written for APress and then the contract was cancelled due to a lack of .Net book sales. Too bad. Maybe O’Reilly can print it under their “Missing Manuals” category…

So, anyway, here is the link.

I suggest that the first thing to check out is the FAQ’s! Then take a look at the chapters online – for free, until a publisher is found.

I have put this link on our website as well.

Now if *I* were to write a book on Crystal Reports, it would probably look something like this:

“I love it I hate it I love it I hate it I can’t live with it I can’t live without it I love it I hate it I love it I hate it I can’t live with it I can’t live wi…”

I had cc’d the author, Brian Bischof on this email.

Tonight he emailed me back to say that the book, Crystal Reports .NET Programming, has been published and includes much of the feedback he has recieved in the past year and a half.

Brian – Congratulations and thank you for your perseverence!

I need a technical post

dotNET

I swear, I really am coding these days, but it’s nothing new. Just getting ready to crank out the puzzle pieces of a pluggable framework I devised for my client. It will handle possibly hundreds of different data entry forms for the various testing services they perform for their clients. The app leverages a boat load of .Net framework technologies and has been a blast to architect. I know that sounds so generic that I could be completely bullshitting, but most of what I have done for it is written about in a LOT of previous posts.

y’know that dream where you forgot to go to all of your classes?

Just Rambling

I know it’s a common dream for many – you walk into your class (high school? college) and there is a test and you suddenly realize that you have somehow missed all of the classes that semester and are wholly unprepared.

A few nights ago I had a new version of this dream. I had  to do two presentations at a conference. Both presentations that I had done previously. When I got to the conference, I realized that I had not spent one minute reviewing either talk since last time I had done it.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I am doing my DevDays talk again tomorrow night? heh