missing-export|Apr 23, 2007

Excellent Devscovery Denver

We’re all back home after having a blast at Devscovery in Denver. Thanks to everyone that attended, as always you made us work our behinds off with all the great questions and challenges. I always enjoy conferences for purely selfish reasons: I learn a ton! Everyone is working on all sorts of interesting applications and…
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Blogs|Apr 9, 2007

Announcing MyComix

For a couple of years now, I’ve been showing an ASP.NET 2.0 sample app named MyComix to conference audiences and promising that I would make it available for downloading. I finally found the time to clean up the source code, and the app is now live and available for downloading at http://mycomix.wintellect.com. MyComix is, first and foremost, a…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 5, 2007

April Fool’s for Programmers

I got a laugh out of an entry in Scott Adam’s DilbertBlog describing favorite April Fool’s jokes. It reminded me of maybe the best (and dirtiest) prank I ever heard about. It happened years ago at PC Magazine. I wasn’t there when it happened, but it was related to me by someone who was. The…
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Blogs|Apr 4, 2007

Creating Sophisticated Animations with the Microsoft AJAX Library

The AnimationExtender control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit makes it easy to add animated effects to Web pages. I especially like the fact that you can compose complex animations from simple animations and use <Parallel> and <Sequence> elements to control animation order. Much of AnimationExtender’s magic is found in a file named Animations.js, which…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 2, 2007

Goodbye Europe, Hello Vista

I arrived home from Europe Friday night in time to spend a quiet (and much needed) weekend at home. My last stop was at Developer & IT Pro Days in Ghent, Belgium. The conference was well attended and featured a keynote by David Chappell. Ghent is a beautiful little town about 30 miles northwest of…
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wintellect-blogs|Mar 31, 2007

Do You Want To Become A True Alpha Geek?

A friend of mine, Roberto Farah, has started blogging! I’m thrilled because he’s super hard-core and his blog focuses on really cool tricks and scripts with the Debugging Tools for Windows (AKA WinDBG). If you want to see how a master builds reusable scripts to peak and poke at mini dumps, definitely subscribe to Roberto’s…
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Blogs|Mar 27, 2007

Elevate a Process at the Command Line in Vista

Vista is quite nice in keeping you from running too many things at elevated rights so you don’t get into trouble. Where things breakdown are when you want to start a particular process with elevated rights from a command line. The RUNAS program does not have any switch to run a program with your user…
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Blogs|Mar 24, 2007

A Squeaky Clean ThinkPad X60 Tablet with No Craplets

Why is it that computer manufacturers totally insist on slapping thousand of memory sucking craplets on their computers? I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad X60 Tablet, and was agog at the amount of stuff in the default install. There were nearly more entries in the Programs and Features list from the factory than I have on…
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Blogs|Mar 24, 2007

Kissing the Blarney Stone

My luggage wasn’t waiting for me at Heathrow as British Airways said it would be Friday morning; it got sent to Helsinki instead. But BA flew it back from Helsinki and it finally caught up with me last night in Cork, Ireland. It was so good to change into clean clothes! This morning I visited Blarney Castle…
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wintellect-blogs|Mar 22, 2007

Why Europeans Don’t Check Luggage (Continued)

The luggage story gets sorrier and sorrier. I’m at the airport Hilton at Heathrow airport in London tonight. I flew in from Helsinki and tomorrow morning I fly on to Ireland. When I checked in at the airport in Helsinki this afternoon, my luggage was not there as promised. I got to Heathrow and went straight…
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wintellect-blogs|Mar 22, 2007

Why Europeans Don’t Check Luggage

If you fly European airlines, you may notice that most people don’t check luggage. I can tell you why. I left the States Sunday for Lisbon–the first stop on a two-week tour. My luggage didn’t make it. After two days of calling Iberia’s baggage service and sitting on hold and being told to call back…
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Blogs|Mar 18, 2007

Debug Crashes Immediately in Vista

As much as anyone, I really appreciate the effort that Microsoft put help end users to find resolutions to their crashes. However, after debugging a crashing application today, I got a little tired of looking at the spinning bar and itching for the Debug button of old. Fortunately, it’s easy to toggle off the automatic…
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