First meeting with MS evangelist

Today we had our first face to face with Microsoft at work. Both sales and evangelists for our companies vertical were present.

Previously we had very lightly tapped one of them for assistance on some tablet pc applications we were working on.

We had brought a mixed crowd to the table today, but every one had a strategic and productive mindset. However this did result in a fair bit of time level setting around the tenants of what is .Net.

Strategically the session was focused on interoperability.

I know we would have liked a lot more detail around team system, and the sap/ms partnership, but we can cut some slack around products that aren't on the market yet.

Will definitely be back in touch with them as we move forward with various initiatives.

iPod Shuffle

Yes, its true, I added a 1GB shuffle to the lineup of iPods my wife and I have.

Todate our iPod collection now includes the shuffle, a 4Gb mini, and a 40Gb 3rd gen. Each hit a pretty specific niche in our lives, but there's some redundancy.

The mini is primarily my wifes, but she hasn't been using it much - distractions and the fact that she actually wants the shuffle. She uses the iPod for audio books, a little at the gym and at the barn. She finds the mini slightly to big for her.

I will give her the shuffle, but I admit I really like it.

I don't think I'd like the shuffle very much for music, stemming from not organizing my music collection very much, I haven't done much with playlists. Because of the amount of music I have the 40Gb is better for me for music (on the plane, or in the car). But audiobooks are perfect on the shuffle.

Microsoft Finger Print reader

A short time back I promised a quick review of some new toys I purchased. Ok so it might have been a long time back on some of them. I confess. I'm going to try to correct this delay, starting right here, todya!

I purchased the Microsoft Finger print reader based on a few reviews, including comments from Michael Swanson.

In short its a fantastic gadget! I readily recommend to anyone to get it. I bought one for my Dad even!

The device is well built, reliable, and very easy to use. Its even pretty reasonably priced in my opinion.

I can't wait for it to be built into laptops or mice.

Onfolio

I've been using Onfolio to manage my blog readings for a few months now. I really like it.
I've tried a bunch of tools in this space previously and I really landed on Onfolio, I've tried everything from RSS Popper, Sage, NewsGator, andBloglines.

The interface is slick, quick to pick up. Great way to keep track of what you've read, what you haven't, and mark things for follow up or to read later. On top of it, I can add things to a collection for future searching, or automated posting to this blog.

But horror of horrors yesterday my beta edition expired! And they now want $$ for me to keep using it.

The choice was clear: cough up the $30 the personal edition of this great product. When I went to confirm my purchase however, their web application threw a small hissy fit which left me with a nice error. Unsure of wether my order went through or not, I headed to their "contact-us" page and sent them a service request.

About 4 hours later I got a phone call from a nice guy named Matt at Onfolio. He put through my order manually, and upgraded my purchase to the professional edition because I had the issue, and had been a beta user.

Overall great product, and so far the service was very good.

Scott Hanselman's Weblog : Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tools List

Link to article...

The Daily Grind 621

From: Larkware News

Life is slowly returning to normal. I should be caught up on e-mail in about ten years or so.

Software

Visual Studio 2005 Control Visualizer  and Visual Studio 2005 Cache Visualizer - A couple of handy debugging tools from Brett Johnson.
FeedTagger - Web-based news aggregator with tagging, now in beta.
The Normalized IIS Log File Project - GotDotNet project to move IIS log files to SQL Server and then to develop reports based on those files.
tajun'ka - Free blog client written in C#
Guidance Automation Toolkit - Technology Preview of a new offering from the Patterns & Practices folks to help architects automate code reuse within their organizations. Requires VS2005 beta 2 and the Guidance Automation Extensions.

Information

Dive Into Greasemonkey - A guide to programming with the Firefox Greasemonkey extension

Sponsor

.netCHARTINGThis edition of The Daily Grind is sponsored by .netCHARTING,
who offers a fully functional free developer version of their
high end .NET charting control for testing and development.

Click here to download (WinForms and WebForms, no timeout)

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Rory Blyth - Neopoleon.com

Rory Blyth - Neopoleon.com

great discussion. I'm Pro-Why. No need to explain my stance based on the discussion.

This explains alot

DNA, XP, SOA, ESB, ETC Are Dead; FAD is the Future

This makes sense of the many resumes I've examined in recent years. I was always shocked that so many candidates were unaware of application design. They didn't know design patterns, modeling, or really anything else for that matter. Turns out I was wrong - they wer using FAD.

Wedding Pictures - pared down set

Have to clean this up some more, but I pushed up the picaso generated web page of a good selection of wedding photo's. http://www.jessandrob.com/wedding/wedding/

If you want any in higher quality, please let me know.

I suppose I should start using Flickr as well...

things that give me nighmares.....

Standards Schmandards