OCZ Vertex 2 SSD
Sunday, December 5, 2010
“All developers should have an SSD.” Have you heard someone say that before? I hear it about once a week. I hear the great amazing things about Solid State Drives (SSD - there’s no moving parts so the “drive” part of it is historical or maybe I’m wrong and it stands for “device” now). I finally fell prey to the ribbing about still using spinning rust in my laptop. After doing some research I eschewed the advice of experts and went with the OCZ Vertex 2 128GB SSD.…
Chirp the Twitter Conference - a Retrospective
Saturday, April 17, 2010
The Twitter Chirp conference just ended. If any of you have been following it online you may have heard the news that they’ve detailed @Anywhere, provided a glimpse of their business model, and announced personal streams that will be available soon. I’m writing this to talk about some of the behind the scenes stuff that you couldn’t get from Justin.TV. Although this was a developer conference, it seemed there was really only two types of people I met there: business development people trying to sell me something, or little kids that are looking for jobs.…
Expression Blend 3 SketchFlow is for Prototypes
Monday, September 14, 2009
With the recent release of Silverlight 3 we also got a new version of Expression Blend. This new version, Expression Blend 3, includes an exciting new feature called “SketchFlow”. Introduction There are three main aspects involved in SketchFlow: Sketch Styles, SketchFlow Map, and the SketchFlow Project. In this blog entry I’ll look at each of these aspects and how they can help us build a prototype of an application. First, however, let’s look at a brief overview of when this is useful…
Outlook 2010 with Exchange 2010 - Cool Feature
Sunday, July 26, 2009
There’s a cool new feature that I stumbled across today in Outlook 2010. I was writing a reply to an E-mail in a Microsoft Internal Discussion List. One of the people on the To line has an out of office setup so this appeared at the top: That’s pretty cool. Rather than send the E-mail, wait for the auto-reply to come in, Outlook 2010 will just let me know right up front that this person is out of the office!…
You Cannot MouseLeftButtonDown if you have no Mouse
Thursday, February 26, 2009
I’m in the middle of a fairly large scale code review and I wanted to stop and alert everyone to a common mistake I am seeing in a lot of code that I read. You should use the Click event in about 99.99% of the cases that most people are using the MouseLeftButtonDown event. The reason for this is that if you have no mouse, there is no left button, and if there is no left mouse button it cannot go down.…
Installing Windows from a Flash Drive
Sunday, January 4, 2009
I did not come up with these instructions. I found them on the web, but because I’ll never be able to find them again when I need them, I thought I’d post the instructions here for my own reference. From the command line run these commands: diskpart list disk select disk x clean create partition primary select partition 1 active format fs=fat32 assign exit ~~xcopy D:*.* /s/e/f E:\ ~~ robocopy D:\ E:\ /MIR There are a few assumptions made in this.…
What I cannot create, I do not understand
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Jeff Atwood blogged about a problem he is having with HTML sanitization on [StackOverflow](http://stackoverflow.com/ . The argument that Dare Obasanjo and Jon Galloway were trying to make to Jeff is that it doesn’t make sense to re-invent the wheel. People have solved this problem before and their code is available for re-use. Jeff’s argument is that he’s a professional developer and he should be able to solve this problem. He punctuates his argument with a quote from Richard Feynman, “what I cannot create, I do not understand.…
Hyper-V Integration Components � Oops
Saturday, October 11, 2008
We are going to rack this up to experience. I was trying to figure out today if I have the Hyper-V Integration Components beta installed, the ones that came with Windows Server 2008 RTM, or if I’d upgraded to the RTM version of these components. Well dummy me, I double clicked on the entry in Add/Remove programs and what I got was the system removed the components lick-it-y split and told me to reboot.…
Server Unleashed Gets Upgraded with Hyper-V
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
I’ve been so busy lately trying to get the SQL Server Energy site out in about 15 languages that I forgot to post that last night I updated the Server Unleashed site with the new Hyper-V goodies. Of course it doesn’t talk about my favorite new product, Windows Hyper-V Server , but it’s a pretty good site, and one that has withstood the test of time so far. The code base I thought is pretty over-engineered.…
First Full SilverSpine Implementation
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Today we soft launched the first site that is using the full implementation of SilverSpine. The SQL Server Energy site has gone live. Over the next couple of weeks we will be launching this same site in 15 languages all using the same exact codebase, but the content back (the SilverSpine) will have translated code. This is truly an exciting time. The site will look similar if you have Silverlight 2 (beta 2) installed or if you don’t have Silverlight at all.…