Drew Robbins, known to many as the creator of TechEdBloggers and PDCBloggers has always had one of the most beautiful blog sites at www.drewby.net with a lot of information on his wife’s native county, Japan where he has travelled often. Drew has been blogging a lot longer than most of us. He has just created a second blog home for himself at http://geekswithblogs.net/drewby/ where I believe he will be focusing his more technical posts.
Why I fill out surveys
I worked in media marketing research for many years. What that means is that I worked for some major magazines (and a big ad agency) in the advertising departments. I was part of the team (and sometimes the sole member of the team) that provided research data to the sales force which they used to market the magazine to potential advertisers. So because my job depended on survey results for many many years, I am willing to take the time out of my day to help those that follow in that same occupation. My husband always rolls his eyes when he sees me wasting my precious time doing this, but this is the reason.
Awesome looking webcast series to bring VB6ers into the .NET fold
Are you or do you know a VB6 programmer who is still worried about the leap, learning curve, etc. to .NET? To me the most daunting thing was not wanting to just do things the VB6 way when I moved to .NET. I didn’t want to be just another mort. Well this looks like a REALLY promising series of webcasts that takes VB6 devs by the hand and shows them the real meat of .NET. Quoting Duncan MacKenzie
A series of 15 webcasts & lab exercises for the VB6 programmer… (see the full list here)
MSDN Webcast: Program Execution in the 21st Century – Level 200
2/3/2004 1:00 PM – 2/3/2004 2:30 PM Live Meeting Webcast
This is the first webcast in the 15 part series “Modern Software Development in .NET Using Visual Basic”.Developers shouldn’t miss this opportunity to examine the following topics with renowned author Joe Hummel, PhD: Virtual machines, sandboxes, garbage collection; Class libraries; Execution in .NET: CLR, FCL, JIT compilation, GAC; Quick discussion of application designs: monolithic vs. component-based
Presenter: Joe Hummel, PhD. DevelopMentor instructor and course author, DevelopMentor
I will be making sure that not only everyone in my user group knows about this, but I will use my INETA connection to get this out to all user group leaders around the world.
Typed Datasets and Molasses
I have used typed datasets in a few cases where I have to build a dataset from xml data or something along those lines. Most of the things I didn’t like about them expressed nicely by Shawn Wildermuth, (THE ADO Guy) and Rick Strahl here and here, I just dealt with because I wasn’t using them extensively throughout my apps, but just to solve a few specific problems. However, I now have an issue with datasets that I don’t want to put up with – instantiating a new object based on a typed dataset. WTF – it takes for freakin’ ever!
OK I feel better now.
Spalding Gray
This is an awful story – I adore Spalding Gray.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/01/15/missing.actor/index.html
It is only speculation at this point.
This is not unusual for highly creative people – many very very famous, of course Virginia Woolf comes quickly to mind. I have a friend who had been autistic as a child, grew out of it (or just adapted to the outside world), was a very energetic woman, talented artist, creative on many fronts (thanks surely to whatever crossed wires had attributed also to her autism) but also suffered severe, inexplicable depression and eventually committed suicide. It was a heartbreaking loss of a person who brought so much joy to so many people.
Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie
The Disappearing Form Designer
Every once in a while, while working on a windows app in VS.NET2003, I lose the design view of a particular form. The solution Explorer only displays it as a class and there is no way to access the design view of the form. The components all still exist in the code. It’s a little bit of a heart stopper. But then removing and then readding the project from the solution brings back the form. ‘Sup with that?
-22 F
That’s the temp when I walked the dog this morning. No wind and very sunny so it did not seem unbearable. Yesterday was -18 when we went out in the a.m. Needless to say, these are short walks!
Scoble – community blogs or indie blogs??
Recently, Robert Scoble has shared his thoughts on community blogs and his preference for independent blogs.
Robert posted his OPML this morning and I went and took a looksee.
Couldn’t help but notice that although I have moved my blog (yes though I am still cross-posting SOME of my content) he is not subscribed to my indie blog, but whatever happens to come through to the main feed of the group blog. (It’s true, I do, indeed, expect him to be subscribed to my blog!)
I am still tormented about the idea discontinuing the cross-posting.
More on the Tablet Team’s InkLog application
I had the good fortune of chatting with Arin Goldberg today, the ISV Architect from the Tablet PC Group and the guy who designed the Tablet SDK and wrote many of the samples. He had fun telling me that he’s the guy who wrote the InkLog application that I wrote about in my blog and his interpretation that I was saying how horrible I thought it was! Egads. Now Arin, I didn’t say it was horrible, I just thought “very cool, now add in some legible hand writing and some links and the program is golden“. And I was VERY inspired by it. I spent days thinking about what I might want to see in an ink blog and how it might be implemented. And finally started messing around with it with BLInk!
Well, now that I felt like a total heel :-), Arin told me something about the inner workings of the application that basically astounded me. It’s a web application. Get it? Inking on a web page! Hello. Now that is VERY cool. How did he do it? A cute little trick called embedding a windows inking control into a webform. (Yes I am referring to the commont technique used with ActiveX controls and Windows Forms User Controls) Not that I’m gonna try this at home (not this afternoon at least). However, Lonestar (next version of the TabletPC OS which is a FREE upgrade coming out later this year) apparently addresses this and we’ll all have some more tools for doing something (maybe not full interaction yet, but closer than we are now) along those same lines with the new sdk. I look forward to checking out Lonestar and seeing more for myself.