I want to thank everyone for coming out to the .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow in Grand Rapids. I had a great time and hope to come back to Grand Rapids more often.

We had about 40-45 participants and all seemed to enjoy themselves and were really engaging. If I had a typical Grand Rapids group – I’m definitely going to have to speak there more often. I was a little disappointed at the student attendance as we only had about half a dozen or so and getting students to attend was one of the reasons that we held it at the GVSUAuditorium (Nice facility).

Many thanks go to GVSU – for hosting the event, Eric Maino for organizing and running the event and West Michigan .NET Users Group and the Grand Valley State .NET Users Group for helping with marketing.

As promised – below is the link to the code samples that I wrote or showed during the show. The Scan and Amazon only works on a Symbol device with a barcode scanner and the Symbol .NET SMDK installed.

Monday, December 06, 2004 4:20:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Gabriel Torok from Preemptive Solutions talks about the Dotfuscator on Channel 9.

Even though I use the Dotfuscator – I learned some things watching the demo.

Saturday, November 20, 2004 5:02:34 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

.NET To Go Mobility Roadshow on Thursday, December 2, 2004 at the DeVos Center-Loosemore Auditorium.

The .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow will provide you with the answers to your mobile development questions. Digging into the details, using more code and fewer slides, these technical sessions will show you how to develop and implement mobile solutions using the .NET Compact Framework and languages you are already familiar with. To register for this FREE event or to learn more, go to www.msmobilitytour.com.

Registration is required to make sure that you can get in. You can register at the MS Events page.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004 6:38:17 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

I just found the Process Explorer via Jonathon Hardwick. This is the TaskMan on steroids that we’ve needed for a while.

This is a very cool utility. There are a couple of features that I want to point out.

The most obvious one to me is that it allows me to drill down into processes and see what’s inside of a given process, like svchost – which I always seem to have 2 or more of running at any given time.

Second, as the picture above shows, it allows for highlighting of difference processes and the really great part is that it allows me to configure those highlights.

Third, it gives me locations on the disk of each of the exe/dlls that are running.

Fourth, it gives me whatever descriptive information that it can as far as company name, description of the exe and so on.

There are a lot more good features about it. However, I’m going to leave discovering them as an exercise to the user.

Monday, November 15, 2004 12:37:32 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Someone forwarded me this resume (CV depending on where you are in the world). I get a number of these, but this took some real creativity so I thought I'd post it here.

Here's the English version:
http://213.186.36.10/~al/alstudio/cv/en.htm

He did it in his native French as well:

http://213.186.36.10/~al/alstudio/cv/fr.htm

Here's the full list - including the standard word formatted CV.
http://213.186.36.10/~al/alstudio/cv/en.htm

Anyways - kudos for creativity and I hope that this helps him find a job.

Thursday, November 11, 2004 3:28:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

GANG (Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group) is helping to host the .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow on Wed., Oct 20, 2004 at the Microsoft Offices in Southfield.

The .NET To Go Mobility Roadshow will provide you with the answers to your mobile development questions. Digging into the details, using more code and fewer slides, these technical sessions will show you how to develop and implement mobile solutions using the .NET Compact Framework and languages you are already familiar with. To register for this FREE event or to learn more, go to www.msmobilitytour.com.

Registration is required to make sure that you can get in. You can register at the MS Events page - http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032259728&Culture=en-US.

Thursday, October 14, 2004 12:59:22 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Bill Wagner (Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group President, Regional Director and author of the C# Core Language Little Black Book and Effective C#) is going to be doing a webcast on how to install and configure Data Driven Web Applications.

If you've faced the frustration deploying a data-driven Web application to a server, or tried moving applications from one server to another, you need to attend this webcast. Learn how to create installations for your Web application as easily as a desktop application. By attending this webcast you will learn:

• Why your Web application needs an installer
• What problems you will face deploying manually
• How to create multiple Web sites and virtual directories in the same installation
• How to connect to and configure SQL Server databases
• How to manage security for your application
• How to edit web.config to customize your installation

Join Wise Solutions and Bill Wagner of SRT Solutions as we cover the process of creating an easy installation for a complex Web application.

Thursday, September 30 @ 8:30 a.m. EST

For Registration go to http://www.wise.com/wfwi_webcasts.asp.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004 2:21:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Patrick Steele (http://weblogs.asp.net/psteele/archive/2004/09/16/230473.aspx?Pending=true) and Scoble have been talking about using descriptive titles on your blog posts to make it easier to scan and triage what posts you read. That’s actually a great point. I know that I scan 150+ blogs and Patrick is in the same ballpark. That’s an average of 80-120 posts a day and some days are more intense than that. The good news is that NewsGator (http://www.NewsGator.com), SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/) and RSS Bandit (http://www.rssbandit.org/) all make scanning new posts.

Patrick went on to post about the number of pictures that are on blogs and how frustrating that is when you are offline. One the one hand, I agree with that. It’s really frustrating that when you are offline and the major portion of a given blog with an interesting headline is a picture. On the other hand, I really like the pictures that are on some of the blogs that I read. Some examples of this are:
http://bucsfishingreport.com/pMachine/weblog.php

http://weblogs.asp.net/jrule/Rss.aspx

I’m not saying that the pictures make the post but it does help the item. Some other blogs just add pictures for the fun of it and they don’t really add anything to the post.

There are few things that I’d like to suggest about pictures.

First, be judicial in your use of pictures. That is, make sure that they add something to the post.

Second, in the short term, make sure that you provide alternative text for all of the pictures on your blog.

Third, I’d love it if one on the readers (or all of them for that matter) would have an option to download pictures and the like with the posts.

Friday, September 17, 2004 1:47:23 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1]