I got my Tech·Ed DVDs today. It includes seven discs:
Plus it has the keynotes and all of the manuals for the Hands On Labs.
I’ve got a lot of learning to do…
Have you seen the new app that casey (or “the lower cased one”, as OS likes to call him) wrote? Remember the old wooden labyrinth game? The one where you had to twist the knobs to tilt the deck so the little silver ball would roll through the maze without falling in the holes?
He wrote that for the TabletPC (in C# with managed Direct3D). But it’s not just a game controlled by mouse or keyboard (although you can use the mouse). The meat of the story is that the “board” is controlled by camera tracking, so if you have a camera connected to your Tablet, you can play the game by actually, physically tilting your Tablet. Just like the real game…
I saw the app while it was in development, but haven’t seen the finished product yet. Maybe sometime this week? Or this weekend?
I think it’s pretty cool — he even got Scobleized. If I had a TabletPC and a camera, I’d probably be playing it all the time. I haven’t seen my “real” labyrinth game in several years, so I’ve had withdrawls, you know.
Maybe for version 2.0 he’ll add the ability to control it with some sort of knobs?
casey also presented on Tablet and speech technologies at our June WI .NET Users Group meeting. He’s posted slides and code for those who are interested. The code for the Labyrinth game will be available soon.
I found this on Coding Horror today while browsing. Thankfully, MS has a wizard to recommend relevant counters, because “using perfmon is like trying to sip from a fire hose“. There’s a “helpful” image in the post showing a graph of the MS recommended counters. That makes it so much easier…
Well, after being down for about a week, comments are now re-enabled on my blog.
I posted to the CS Forums about this issue to try to get some help, but no one ever responded. So I decided to ask someone I know that works for Telligent — Dan Bartels. I sent Dan a short e-mail, pointing to my forum question, and he responded right away (within ~30 minutes).
He made a simple suggestion to temporarily switch to the default blog skin and see if comments would work. The comments did work! My problem stemmed from the fact that I was using a customized version of a skin that came in the 1.0x CS distribution. Based on his suggestion, when I got home I poked around for about 10 minutes and got it working. In case anyone else has a similar problem, here is my simple solution.
In the /Themes/Blogs/_Your_Theme_/Skin-EntryPostCommentContainer.ascx, add this line:
<Blog:EntryComments runat = “Server” ID =”comments” />
For example, my file now looks like this:
<%@ Control Language=”C#” %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix=”Blog” Namespace=”CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls” Assembly=”CommunityServer.Blogs” %>
<%@ Import Namespace=”CommunityServer.Components” %><Blog:EntryView runat = “Server” ID = “Entry” />
<Blog:EntryComments runat = “Server” ID =”comments” />
<Blog:CommentForm runat = “Server” ID =”form” />
You could also just copy this file from /Themes/Blogs/default/, but you would lose any other changes you may have done to the file.
Thanks for the tip, Dan!!
Has anyone bought and read Head First Design Patterns (or as Gerry calls it, “The Hot Blonde Patterns Book”)? I’ve been slacking off on learning more about patterns, and have recently rekindled my interest. I have Refactoring to Patterns at home, and have started to read that one, but a few people have mentioned this one to me as well.
The problem is, though, that I have focus problems when … Ooh! Look at that bird! Oh, sorry. I have a hard time reading. I understand it just fine, but I often lose interest quickly (unless I’m getting paid for it). This book (image borrowed from Amazon), though, looks like it might actually be able to hold my interest. I read a sample chapter (linked from this page) — the whole chapter — so there might be hope.
I just need someone to verify this and to vouch for its content. Aside from being easy to read, is there enough information in the book to make it worth while? Any takers? Thanks.
Update: I should have mentioned that I have the GoF book, but for me it seems more like a reference than a tutorial.
Wow. So a lot of stuff has happened since last night.
For starters, when I was checking my blogs this morning, I saw that Scott Isaacs from Microsoft (a different Scott Isaacs) has mentioned me in his blog. I’m honored. (I wonder what the odds of him being at Tech·Ed are?) Apparently he does some of the same geeky things that I do: Googling yourself. I would say “MSNing yourself” but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. It’s funny that, while he outranks me in the Google results, I rank higher than him in the MSN results — and he works for MSN! 🙂
Anyway, thanks, Scott. I appreciate the link!
So, back to Tech·Ed…
I was told that Gerry and I needed to find the “developer party” and make sure we went to it. Ummm, OK. We had a couple leads of who to ask, but no one seemed to know what we were talking about. I ran into Jason Beres yesterday and was asking him about it and other things. He didn’t have any idea either (so he said). So, we had pretty much given up on that.
Later in the day, someone mentioned to us that there was some midwest region “something or other” happening that night and we should go. We just needed to find the organizer to let him know. Well, we couldn’t really find him either. As it turns out, though, we happened to bump into him right before the bus left to take the group over there, and he told us to come along.
We ended up going to some Nascar thing at Universal City Walk. They had a buffet, drinks and all of the arcade games were open and unlimited. It was pretty sweet.
So anyway, as we’re in the bus on the way over there, I happened to notice that Rob Howard was on the bus. So was James Avery. As it turns out the event was actually a Central region event, not just the Midwest.
I thought that was pretty cool. When we got to the Nascar place, we grabbed some food and ended up sitting at the same table as Rob Howard. I know he’s just a person, but I thought it was nice to be able to hang out with him and the others. I didn’t know until last night that Rob drives a Porsche and it costs him a few hundred bucks everytime he wants to change the oil. Poor guy.
Well, after the food I started walking around and meeting some of the other people and I started to notice some of the other people that were there. I saw Betsy Akoi, Angela Baxley (who works with Scott Guthrie at MS), Doug Seven (of dotnetjunkies), Jeff Julian, and others. By this time I was realizing that this wasn’t just a midwest, or even a central region party. This was a little bigger than that.
I also saw Jason Beres there.
Actually he saw me first. He came up to me and, with a big smile on his face, said, “I see you made it.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t realize I was making it until I got here.”
Then he smiled again and said, “Oh, yeah, you made it.”
I wasn’t sure to be pissed that he didn’t just tell me when I asked him earlier, or if I should feel honored that I ended up there in the first place.
I decided to go with the honored feeling.
So after lots of food, soda, water, video games, talking with Betsy Akoi about GDN Workspaces, talking with Angela Baxley about Visual Web Developer and about the low number of females in technology, Rob Howard about his Porsche and the time the fire alarms went off at his apartment (he ran out of the building with a computers under each arm — a true geek), and a host of other user group leaders, we finally caught the last bus back. We ended up getting to bed about 1 or 1:30.
But it was definitely worth it.
So, I wanted to install VS 2005 Beta 2 so that I can play with it before (and at) Tech·Ed. Well rather than install it rught my laptop (in case of any potential conflict or crash or whatever) I decided to install it in a virtual machine. On my work laptop I installed VMWare Workstation and on my own laptop I installed Microsoft Virtual PC.
Both were incredibly slow. I mean painful. Granted each machine has only 512MB of RAM, but I can’t believe how slow it was. S. L. O. W.
Fortunately (in a sick sense), I had a problem with my work laptop and it will need to be re-imaged. So I removed VMWare and installed Beta 2 right on the base OS.
I got it all (VS, SQL, MSDN, Visio, VSS, etc.) installed just before I left the office today. I’m hoping to get in a couple hours of “play time” before the sessions start. If anyone else is using Beta 2 already, I’d appreciate any tips or warnings you might have.
Also, if you’re going to Tech·Ed, let me know. I’m staying at Westgate Lakes Resort & Spa.
Sometimes when developing web applications it is useful to have them live at the root of the web space instead of a virtual directory (which is the default for Visual Studio). This is not always the case these days, but when I was still doing a lot of classic ASP development, I would often need this. Since XP Pro only allows one web site (as opposed to Windows 2000/2003 Server, which allows multiples), I spent a lot of time loading IIS, going to the properties page, and changing the “Home Directory” for the web site.
Maybe it’s because my computer was crappy, or maybe there was too much other stuff in memory, or maybe it’s always this way, but IIS was slow to load, plus that seemed like a lot of clicks for something so simple. So, a long time ago I wrote a simple utility in VB6 (to help me deal with this. Then as I was learning .NET, I re-wrote it as a WinForms app (including the designer generated code, it’s all of 157 lines of VB.NET). In a nutshell, it lets you choose a new folder to be the webroot on your local machine. Additionally, it keeps a history of directories used (in a text file) so that you can easily switch back to another in the future.
For me, the main benefits were that it loads much quicker than the IIS console, and that there are not as many clicks needed, especially if you’re just switching back to a previously used web root. But it’s far from perfect, so here are a couple ideas for possible future improvement (if I ever work on it again):
So anyway, take it for what it’s worth. Use it if you want. As always, use it at your own risk. Here is the ZIP download. Aside from this post, there are no docs of any kind — you’re on your own. If anyone is interested in source, I can supply that as well, or you can just use Reflector. It’s pretty basic, but if you want to make any improvements (my ideas or your own), I’d like to see the result.
I rarely use this anymore, but it came to mind again recently, so I thought I’d post it in case it might be of use to someone else.
So I finally bought a Design Patterns book, Refactoring to Patterns, by Joshua Kerievsky. I haven’t cracked it open yet, but it was recommended by a few people, including The Agile Developer and Gerry. This will be my first official foray into Design Patterns — hopefully I can keep my interest up long enough to learn something from this book. 🙂
Also, a few of us are going to see Star Wars, Episode III, Revenge of the Sith next Thursday night (the night it opens). That should be a lot of fun. I’m not really a huge sci-fi fan, and I’m far from a Star Wars expert, but I’ve always liked the movies, and have seen all of the others at least once or twice each.
So it should be a really fun night. Just me, a few friends, and a few hundred other geeks…
This isn’t new. I found it linked from Scott Hanselman’s blog. Even though I didn’t discover it, it’s still pretty cool if you ever plan to post code to your blog, or include it in any other HTML document. Check out CopySourceAsHTML. It is a VS.NET add-in that copied selected text and formats it in HTML to look as it does in VS. Here is a sample.
12 Class HelloClass
13 ‘ Private Variables
14 Private _Who As String
15
16 ‘ Public Variables
17 Public Property Who() As String
18 Get
19 Return _Who
20 End Get
21 Set(ByVal Value As String)
22 _Who = Value
23 End Set
24 End Property
25
26 ‘ Public Methods
27 Public Function SayHello() As String
28 Return SayHello(Me.Who)
29 End Function
30
31 Public Function SayHello(ByVal Name As String) As String
32 Return String.Format(“Hello, {0}”, Name)
33 End Function
34 End Class
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