Random Thoughts of Jorriss

Besides hearing the Cubs beat the Brewers 12 - 4, I've been tuning into some webcasts/video.  Here are some of the highlights:

Bill Gates: Some 'holy grails' to be found within decade.  Interesting.  But it sounded a little like his Visual Studio 2005 keynote at VSLive in San Fran.

Speaking of VSLive, Amanda Silver of the VB.Net Team gave a session on Avanced Language Features in VB Whidbey.  Whidbey gives VB.Net loads of goodness like generics, operator overloading, XML Comments and partial types.  During the demo, Amanda's environment crashed and the demo build was buggy.  You can tell she was nervous and the technical problems didn't help.  But she kept on and the information was presented effectively.  Well done. Just a tip Amanda.  Keep the filler words (um, er) to a minimum.

Here's a fascinating one, the real costs of going offshore.  I'm not really a proponent of offshoring but I do understand the reasoning.  What will I do when presented with a 70% savings?  Dunno.

Rocky Lhotka will be giving a MSDN Webcast on Design and Architecture for .NET Applications on April 13 @ 2:00 PM Eastern.  I love Rocky's work and am looking forward to see what he's got to say.

And of course .Net Rocks still rocks.

Some good stuff from Robert Green's Blog.  The Visual Studio Technology Preview is available now to MSDN subscribers.  I'm downloading it right now.  Also Wrox has risen from the dead.  Although I don't like the Wrox titles as much as the APress ones, it's good to see that we'll get some more titles out there.

This is the funniest thing I've seen all day.  Duane Dicks has created an anolog clock in SQL.  Gotta love those SQL Server gurus.

Take a trip through OS GUI history with Tim Tabor's Guidebook: Graphical User Interface Gallery.

I've been a big fan of the show "The Apprentice".  Here is the geek version!

I got back into Miami yesterday afternoon from lovely Phoenix.  While there I saw my Cubs win three of four games.  Not bad.  Overall, the Cubs look great this year.  We also saw Scott McClain, an off-season pick-up, hit three home runs in three consecutive games. One was a game winner.  Watching McClain play was the highlight of the trip.

I'm glad to be back in Miami and to get back to work.  Which reminds me, I need to do that!

Lately, I've been toying with DotNetNuke.  DotNetNuke is an open source portal application based on IBuySpy.  From the little that I have seen it's very impressive.  I'll post more of my thoughts on DotNetNuke as I continue to investigate it.  In the meantime, here are some Nuke resources:

www.dotnetnuke.com
www.dnn.com.au
www.dotnetnukehelp.com
www.dnnskins.com
cafednn.yodamon.com
www.dnnfaq.com
DotNetNuke Forum on ASP.Net

Generics Design Guidelines courtesy of Krzysztof Cwalina.

Tomorrow, I'll be leaving Miami for Arizona for Chicago Cubs spring training!  My Dad and I will embark on a five day journey that will encompass at least five ballgames.  This is the first time that either myself or my Dad have been to any Cubs spring training games.  Man am I excited.  Especially since Gonzo, Lee and Patterson all went yard yesterday.  Hopefully, I'll blog the experience so stay tuned.

Alright, this is just cool.  It's a code highlighter.  It parses your code and creates HTML markup.  It works for C#, J#, VB.Net and TSQL.

Mark Cuban has a blog.  Let the flame wars begin!

When the Windows source code was leaked loads of people were bashing MS for the amount of profanity in their code.  Most of those bashers were linux fiends.  All I've got to say is that they should view their own code.

Now this is funny.  Turn your PocketPC into an iPod.

Here is an add-in for Outlook that helps you to "Getting Things Done".

Chris Sells tells us to Avoid the GAC.

Database deployments are hard. Chris Kinsman describes his method of deploying databases.  As for us at RSI we take production copies of the DB and apply the deltas.  It's a bit cumbersome but once you've deployed to dev, test, and stage we feel pretty confident that the deploy will work.

What is SharePoint?  Asks Maxim Karpov.  Update - I orginally credited Marcie Robillard for this article.  Sorry Maxim!

Here are some debugger troubleshooting tips from Mark Parks from the C# Team.

A new version of Genghis has been released.  Genghis extends .Net to make coding tasks easier.  Check it out.

Whidbey will include a Class Designer tool called Whitehorse (pics!).  Just another reason Whidbey will rock the world!

For those of us who have used and might need it, here is the FAQ for System.Web.Mail.

I want to do this with my web applications: Testing ASP.Net Applications with NUnitASP and NUnit.

For those who have had the pain of writing regular expressions Roy Osherove points to RegExLib.com a site dedicated to regular expressions.  He also has built an app to test regular expressions.

Ingo Rammer lets us know of free Visio UML Stencils.  I know, I know, "Visio already has UML stencils."  Ya, but these aren't too smart for their own good.

Clemens Vasters writes a open letter to an open source devloper.  And gets Slashdotted.  Loads of good points here.

Geoff Snowman of MS writes about test-driven approach.  I'm intrigued by this approach especially when middle-tier objects are involved.  Maybe we can implement this approach at RSI.