Have you ever accidentally double clicked on the task manager and lost all means of closing it? I did this the other day and could not for the life of me figure out what had happened to it and where the control bar went and what to do to make it go away! Somehow, I managed to double click on it again in my frustration and realized what was going on.

As far as I can tell, it is impossible to close the task manager once you have done this. But really all you need to do is double click on it again and the control bar comes back and all is normal again.

I can’t understand why this would be a “feature”. It’s awfully confusing.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Probably all that I need that is not in current shipping subscriptions is Visual Studio6 and the MSDN Library for VB6… A project for another day.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

lots of buzz about the MS Live announcement. When .NET came out the message was all about web apps and web services. THen for the last few years it has been all about smart client. Now with AJAX and ATLAS on the horizon, web apps are getting richer and competing with Smart Clients again. Now there is windows live and office live – but somehow the repetetive them that kept jumping out at me when reading the press release was “advertising”.

“Windows Live will primarily be delivered free to users and supported by advertising, “

Office Live Basics helps a small business establish an online Internet presence including a domain name, a Web site with 30 MB of storage and five Web e-mail accounts at no charge through an advertising-supported model.

Advertiser Opportunities The addition of Office Live and Windows Live services enables advertisers to reach an even larger, more engaged audience. Today Ozzie outlined Microsoft’s vision for an advertising network powered by MSN adCenter, where advertisers will have access to tools that provide them with control, insight and intelligence to create more meaningful connections with customers. The advertising network will be open to partners over time so advertisers can connect with a broader audience through traditional media as well as new scenarios such as Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and mobile communications products.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

There is only one computer left in my quiver that does not have some flavor of VS2005 on it. The one I call my “daily driver” that I sit in front of about 15 hours a day doing most of my work. That will soon change.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Okay so nobody from Microsoft made the list, but EBay, IBM, HP and Oracle are represented. Though of course these are business women, not I.T.

Champlain College offers the first college level e-gaming program and it is headed up by two women…[read more …]

[A DevLife post]

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

(This was written on Sunday) After a long bumpy night we have finally arrived at Sun City. Kate is a good airplane sleeper. I woke up at 4 and couldn’t get back to sleep then did then was startled by some big turbulence at 6. Kate slept through it all! Both of our flights on Lufthansa coming to South Africa were on Business Class – which was unexpected and very nice of the organizers. I have never flown business class before. It was very nice, including being able to go in the lounges at the airport.

Unfortunately, Kate’s luggage didn’t make it to Johannesburg but should be here tomorrow. The drive from “Joburg” to here was beautiful. Some of it reminded me of New Mexico – the red sandy hills, the scrub but other than that it is just unique. Some reality checks were noticing the very very think cattle grazing on whatever they can find. They are free range – like wandering in the highway free range! We also drove by a number of compounds with a variety of small metal and other types of shacks. This is where people live. I have never seen that before. I had a very bad position for taking photographs but the image will remain.

I am now in the speaker lounge and it’s fun to meet a whole new crew of people.

Posted from BLInk!

I did the first of my 3.5 (I have two demos during the futures panel in addition to my talks) today. It was the above titled talk. As our talks are limited to 45 minutes (with an additional 15 for questions) this was a real whirlwind presentation. There is so much to share and I had to do so very efficiently using techniques like showing code, but maybe not always running it (“trust me, it works”) or when for some reason, deploying a sql server project did not pop my new sproc into SQL Server, umm, just move on (“trust me it works”). I always have fun talking about one of my fave .NET topics – and had my need to show off even more of SQLDependency sated by an additional 1/2 hour with some of the attendees out in the hall afterwards. This was a bit different than my regular ado.net talk as I focused on the SQL Server Integration and added in demos on the new XML type in SQL Server and it’s partner, System.Data.SqlXML and also demonstrated creating a database project in .NET and moving some of the intense but hard-to-code-in-TSQL processing to the server side.

Though I planned to work on tomorrow’s demos talk (Indigo intro) and futures panel demos (Indigo and ATLAS) and call it an early night, I have been struggling with the fact that no USB pointing devices are being recognized on my laptop. Fortunately (like, thank the demo gods…) my USB drive for VPC is working and thumbdrive also – so I willl just have to continue struggling with the touchpad. That makes moving the pointer slow going. For my tablet friends, yeah yeah, just use the pen, but picking up the pen, pointing, then putting it down and typing etc is not something I do smoothly either.

Tomorrow’s schedule: Tech Check at 7:30 am, futures panel from 10:30 – 1:00, Indigo (err WCF) talk at 2:30. The talk is a “get your head wrapped around Indigo” and I look forward to helping to bring more future Indigo/WCF users to their “oooooooh, I get it!” momentl.

Posted from BLInk!

I had a really bad problem with USB today that I want to blog about (with my resolution) before it spins out of my head.

I am using a USB wireless mouse. It started acting flakey today — doing things like not reacting to mouse clicks and then lagging a lot when I was moving it around the screen. I rebooted a few times but it didn’t help. I then went to a hardwired mouse that worked properly for a few minutes than was flaky in a different way. For example, I move the mouse down on the screen then suddenly it would be at the top of the screen.

For the short term it meant that I had to do my first TechEd presentation with a touch pad which was bad news for me.

So I have spent the last few hours fiddling around with this. I thought perhaps it was my USB port, but was happy to see that my thumb drive and external drive (which I am 100% dependent on for my Indigo talk) was working. My powerpoint clicker, another USB pointing device was also failing. The failure was a) a windows message saying that the USB device failed and b) they stopped working all together!

Nothing made sense so no point in going through all of the things I tried…but what I ended up doing that worked was after noticing that in Device Manager, I had the extended USB hub manager and 4 other usb hub managers with usb devices, I disabled all but one of the 4 hub managers.

The LaCie drive was still working, but when I put the thumbdrive in the 2nd usb port, it didn’t work. Well, flaky – windows explorer said there is a D: but I couldn’t read it.

Then I reenabled the 2nd of those 4 usb managers with no effect. But when I reenabled the third, my thumbdrive worked and after I stopped and removed it and plugged in the mouse, that too worked.

Hours of needless aggravation and I still want to prep for tomorrows talks! But I know from experience that staying up all hours is a very bad thing for conference prep. I will be much better off going to bed, getting a decent night’s sleep and then hammering in the morning.

(written 12:30 am Tuesday morning but posted later)

One of the best parts of being here is that I have finally gotten to meet Thea Burger who I met via blogging and had a lot to do with my being here as well as the others who took up her “bring Julie to South Africa” meme – Ernst Kuschke, Hilton Giesenow and Armand du Plessis. Kate took a pic of Hilton and I today and I will definitely be getting one of Thea, Ernst and Armand before the end of TechEd.

I can’t believe I only arrived yesterday. I feel like I have been here a long time! (that’s good, though now I think I’ll go phone home…)

(written Tuesday 11:50pm – posted later)\

Posted from BLInk!