# Wednesday, 26 May 2004

The days are counting down quickly... in just thirteen days we will be conducting the Software Exposition for the 2004 Senior Projects at OIT. There are nine projects coming to a close and all will be displayed for others to see.

If you have a chance, it would be worth stopping by to see the applications that have been built. Who knows? You might just find your Next Great Developer while you are there!

There will be free food, fun, and great bunch of people. Below are the details of where and when:

5:00pm - 6:30pm
Tuesday, June 8th

Capital Center
18640 NW Walker Rd.
(185th and Walker Road)
Beaverton, OR 97006
(503) 725-2129

Wednesday, 26 May 2004 15:29:56 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 21 May 2004

The latest revision of the NUnit Addin now plugs NUnit into Visual Studio. I can't vouch for the stability of this version... I seem to be having some problems myself, but it's looking very exciting.

A good screen shot is available here.

Download is available here.

Check it out!

Friday, 21 May 2004 21:15:09 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Thursday, 20 May 2004

Mr. Hanselman is helping to improve television for all: He will be making The Apprentice.NET real at TechEd this year! Come on folks - wouldn't you rather see Bill picking an apprentice than old Donald?

The Apprentice.NET

Boy, does that make me want to be there.

Thursday, 20 May 2004 00:00:11 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Wednesday, 19 May 2004

[Update: Betsy, Chris, Jim, Patrick, and Scott have added their voices to the post-dinner Nerd din.]

I'm tempted to use the phrase 'best Nerd Dinner Yet,' but I've said that before. Last night was the best, though. At the peak, we had 34 people in attendence. That's nearly three times the usual size. Jim Blizzard will go down in history as the father of the great Nerd Dinners.

Chris Sells led an entourage of the MSDN team down from Redmond to join us. This group included Shawn Morrissey, Betsy Aoki, Matt Powell, Duncan Mackenzie, Kent Sharkey, and of course, Chris himself. Not only did they contribute financially to the Nerd Dinner, but they offered themselves up for a panel discussion and allowed all there to provide feedback on how to improve MSDN and the developer experience in general.

The award for the 'farthest travelled' went to the surprise attendee Rory Blyth. Yes, all the way from New London, Connecticut and the .NET Rocks! show. I guess he means it when he says he misses us back here.

The 'youngest' award goes to Patrick Miller... let's just say the junior high school will be lucky to have him.

Another big surprise was seeing Scott Hanselman decked out in a suit and tie:

Who would have thought?

Obviously, there are too many people to mention them all specifically... we gathered a virtual (or is that a physical one?) blogroll of attendees and will probably make that available on Northwest Evening Blend.

Folks - you don't want to miss these events. This was some really good stuff!

Wednesday, 19 May 2004 08:20:09 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 14 May 2004

A few days ago, Scott chatted me up and asked if I'd tried Skype yet. I was familiar with the software since .NET Rocks! uses it as a way for listeners to call in. If you don't know already, it is a telephony product that works over the internet.

Well, either Scott or the general cosmos have schemed to make Skype the buzz for the week. Several people are beginning to realize the value and quality of the product (examples here, here, and here). In addition, I'm beginning to see talk in the trade rags.

The only BIG thing that I would like to see added is an alliance with Trillian (the consolidated IM client). I would love to have both of these tools wrapped up into one simple package... all of my instant messaging and the Skype telephony service in a single piece of software.

How about it?

Friday, 14 May 2004 10:15:03 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Saturday, 08 May 2004

I've been reading about pinvoke.net, by Adam Nathan quite a lot in blogs lately. As I am not doing any thing with interop at this time, I didn't feel compelled to go to the site. Well, I did now. My gosh, I'm impressed.

It's not just the content, either. The design and implementation of the site is wonderful, too. You can get to signature pages by searching, by browsing the directory, or by typing the name of the signature into a box at the top of the page.

To top it all off, Adam has created an add-in for Visual Studio that allows one to insert the correct signatures into code directly from the pinvoke.net site.

This is really good stuff!

Saturday, 08 May 2004 11:55:58 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]

Jonathan Hardwick blogs about using offline files to synchonize his laptop to his 'real' set of files.

I've been doing this since I got my laptop for school a couple of years ago. All of my school files stay on my server and I access them from the laptop and my desktop. Very little need to copy back and forth between the computers.

He mentions that one is not able to synchronize Outlook '.pst' files or Access files. I came across the solution for this some time ago, but I always forget where. Time to put it in the blog so I can find it again.

KB article #252509 shows how to use the group policy editor to fix this.

Saturday, 08 May 2004 10:06:59 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Tuesday, 27 April 2004

At nearly every Nerd Dinner, Chris Sells points out again how wonderful X1 Search is. In fact, he blogged about it last month.

Well, today I got a note from NewsGator that is offering NewsGator at no cost with the purchase of X1! And for those of us who already have NewsGator, we get 30% off of the purchase of X1 (which, not surprisingly, is about the cost of NewsGator)!

It's definitely time to check it out!

Tuesday, 27 April 2004 22:09:24 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 23 April 2004

As I mentioned here, the next Nerd Dinner will be on May 18th. Jim Blizzard just mentioned that we will have some very special, out-of-town guests at this dinner: A group from MSDN is driving all the way down from Redmond to see what we're all about!

Could this be the beginning of the Modern International Nerd Dinner Society (MINDS)?

Friday, 23 April 2004 12:56:41 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]
# Friday, 16 April 2004

[Update: Date changed due to conflict with XPDX!]

Bliz is getting a good jump on it this time with some real, advanced warning. The next Portland Nerd Dinner will be on May 18th at Washington Square Food Court again.

These things just keep getting better. If the last one (here, here, here, and here) is any indication, we may have to pay off the staff at the food court to leave the place open for another hour or so. We had such great turn out for just a couple days warning, what might happen with nearly four weeks notice?

Friday, 16 April 2004 08:08:55 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [1]
# Wednesday, 14 April 2004

I finally dug out my Win2K Server CD and installed Terminal Services so I can now run the server from my primary desktop. Very handy indeed.

In fact, I'm writing this blog in a browser window on my server, via a Remote Desktop connection from my desktop. But that's not all! I'm using Remote Desktop from my laptop to login to my desktop, also. Let's get this straight: I'm using my laptop to access the desktop with Remote Desktop and then using that machine to log into the server; also via Remote Desktop. This is just so cool!

Chris Tavares happened to mention using this same concept as an alternative to virtual PCs tonight at the PND. As soon as I get a bit of time this summer, I'm going to (re-)assemble some more machines around here to allow more of this kind of work.

I love technology!

Wednesday, 14 April 2004 23:55:30 (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)  #    Comments [0]