Scott Hanselman

UPDATE: This event is now over and the complete transcript of the Diabetic Day's Twittering's are now available.

Twitter is a new thing on the 'net lately. You can send text messages of up to 140 characters into the cloud, and folks who are your "friends" or "followers" (read: digital stalkers) can receive those updates. You can send your updates to twitter via their Web Interface, via their Mobile Browser interface at http://m.twitter.com, but the really compelling way is via their 5-digit SMS code "40404." Here's a Twitter SMS Cheatsheet. For example, to "subscribe" to me, you'd SMS/text "follow shanselman" to code 40404. To stop, you'd SMS/text "leave shanselman."

Personally I find it a little silly to need to be THAT connected to folks, but I've found twitter to be useful in temporary situations, like conferences when you WANT to let folks know what's going on and what you're doing. It was very useful at Mix to meet up with folks I wanted to talk to, so from a just-in-time networking point of view, it was brilliant. I didn't update after Mix, though, until RailsConf2007.

I've been trying to raise money for Diabetes Research as I'm a Type I diabetic. Driving home today, I had an even better idea on how I could use Twitter.

Tomorrow, Thursday, May 18th, I'm going to "twitter" my Diabetes for one day. By this, I mean, every time I take a manual shot, update my pump, prick my finger, have a high blood sugar, have a low blood sugar, eat, calibrate my continuous meter, or do ANYTHING related to diabetes, I'll send an update to Twitter.

My hope is that this will give folks who don't think about diabetes a little insight into how often I, and 20 million others, either do, or should, be thinking about their diabetes. I'd also like you to imagine if a small child had this disease, and how a parent of a small child deals with it.

Please spread the word by , and I encourage you and yours to subscribe to my Twitter account just for 1 day. If you don't want to make an account, just visit http://www.twitter.com/shanselman throughout Tomorrow and watch the updates. I hope it'll give you some insight into diabetes, and maybe open some eyes.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I really have to give my boss credit for being a forward-thinker and an out-of-the-box type. These are clichéd terms, sure, but they fit. The day after the merger and where am I going to be tomorrow? I'll be at RailsConf2007, of course.

We are not religious zealots here at Corillian CheckFree, so we're always looking at other ways to do things. Even as a .NET/Java shop, we'll have four people at the conference, all with open minds, ready to learn. There's lots of folks at Corillian who dabble in Rails, and CheckFree has a Rails Study Group.

Here's where I'll be during the conference, courtesy of myconfplan. Fortunately for me, John Lam has loaned me a 17" MacBookPro with daily bits of his DLRConsole demo, including Ruby support in Silverlight (and .NET) with the DLR. It's all running in Safari, and it's yummy. This is one of the Mac's used at Mix in the Keynote.

Aside: I'm going back and forth about getting the Ultimate Atwood Developer Machine (I got the wife's OK), and getting a fully loaded MacBook Pro. The hardware is sexy as hell, unlike any Windows laptop I've ever seen (and I have a Lenovo t60p, to be clear) and apparently it's a heck of a Vista machine. Dare I even think like this? Having John's machine to borrow has already got be hooked on two-finger scrolling...

If you want to hook up at the conference and get a demo of Ruby on the DLR, you can email me or setup a request through the RailsConf 2007 Conference Meetup website. Tim Sneath will also be around to chat and demo.

The (totally speculative) prospect of the cleanness of the Rails developer experience married with an order of magnitude (or three) speed up, with the .NET GC, Rails (potentially) under IIS7 and SQL2k5 is just dizzying.

Even if you don't believe anything I say and you're a hardcore Rubyist who has no interest in Ruby on .NET, I'm interested in talking about Silverlight-specific gems that could make Silverlight fit into the Ruby lifestyle, with Ruby as code-behind.

Tagged: RailsConf2007

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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This just went out.  Today CheckFree completed acquiring Corillian. It started in February, and the acquisition phase is complete. Now the real work starts.

In the press release, this sentence struck me:

The combined organization will have the potential to provide a market-leading, fully integrated, secure and scalable online banking, electronic billing and payment platform. Together, CheckFree and Corillian’s platforms serve 21 of the top 25 financial institutions, more than 40 million online banking consumers, more than 31 million electronic billing and payment consumers, and more than 250,000 small businesses.

It's going to be interesting as our little 300 person company becomes part of a 3000+ person company, but the potential for good that we can do is so much greater as one entity. We'll be learning about the new organization and how we fit into it in the coming months. I visited the campus in Atlanta, Georgia and got to hang out with a number of the key players working on the integration and I can attest to the coolness of their corporate culture. We'll see what tomorrow will bring. Wish me luck.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Hopefully if you've been coding .NET for a while, someone has shown you Reflector, Lutz Roeder's .NET Object Browser and you have basked in its glory.

Surprisingly (to me at least) not everyone knows about Reflector's plugin model. There is a vibrant and active community of plugin writers out there, and you won't realize the full power of Reflector until you download some of these are start messing around. Seriously, if you thought that Reflector was useful today, just wait until you've tried some of these add-ins.

PowerShell Language Add-In

The one I've been messing with for the last few weeks is the PowerShell Language Add-in. Reflector can "decompile" (not the correct word) the IL within an assembly and show you the "intent" of that IL in any number of languages like C#, VB, Delphi, etc. Daniel "kzu" Cazzulino has created a PowerShell Language Add-in that, for the most part, shows you what the code would look like in PowerShell.

Now of course, it's important to note a few things. PowerShell is not (yet) a language that you can use to author .NET assemblies with. It is, however, an incredibly powerful scripting and automation environment. Sometimes the Powershell language (it is a language, by the way, with a formal grammar - here's a link (PDF)) can be a little confusing to learn, so the PowerShell Language Add-in is a really cool way to learn more about PowerShell within an environment you're already comfortable in.

Reflector Add-Ins

Here's a reformatted snapshot of what's currently available.

CodeMetrics: Analyses .NET assemblies and shows design quality metrics. Download	Review: Allows editing and managing annotations during code reviews. Download	Diff: This add-in shows differences between two versions of the same assembly. Download
FileDisassembler: This add-in can be used to dump the disassembler output to files for any Reflector supported language.	SQL2005Browser: This add-in allows to browse .NET assemblies stored in SQL Server 2005 databases.	FileGenerator: This add-in can be used to dump the disassembler output to files for any Reflector supported language.
Deblector: This add-in allows to debug processes from within Reflector.	Doubler: A code generator for unit tests, stubs and wrappers.	Graph: This add-in draws assembly dependency graphs and IL graphs. Please read the install instructions here.
DependencyStructureMatrix: Allows you to create and browser dependency structure matrices.	CodeSearch: This add-in allows searching for strings and regular expressions in disassembled code. Download	SequenceViz: This add-in draws sequence diagrams.
PowerShellLanguage: Renders output as Windows PowerShell script.	DelphiLanguage: The Delphi view that is used inside .NET Reflector provided as a language add-in.	CppCliLanguage: This add-in extends Reflector with a C++/CLI language rendering module.
Hawkeye: A tool that allows you to debug the UI tree of Windows Forms applications.	ClassView: Shows class definitions as plain text with color coding.	CodeModelViewer: This add-in shows the underlying code model objects for selected items.
Diff: This add-in shows differences between two versions of the same assembly. Download	ComLoader: Lists COM components for browsing and converts them into managed interop assemblies. Download	TestDriven.net: This Visual Studio add-in can navigate to any code element inside Reflector with a single click.
BizTalkDisassembler: Allows you to list all BizTalk artifacts contained in an assembly and extract them. Download	ComLoader: Lists COM components for browsing and converts them into managed interop assemblies. Download	AutoDiagrammer: This add-in draws class diagrams.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Last week during lunch one day, Carl and  I recorded an episode of "DotNetRocks TV." This is  Episode 66 of DNRTV. 

We started with the idea that we'd do a show on debugging ASP.NET, but once we got into System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine, I realized that I first needed to cover the relationship between Diagnostics.Trace and Page.Trace, as well as the relationships between debug statements and trace statements inside and outside of ASP.NET. The whole show was spontaneous, no script, no plan, but it turned out pretty darn good for a single take, if I may say so.

Be aware if you download the ZIP that it's about 200megs. The show is in two parts, so there's an advertisement in the middle of the show...after that advert, Part 2 will automatically start. I encourage you to check it out the ad, first because it's telerik and they sincerely rock, and second because our sponsors pay for the massive bandwidth bills for the direct downloads. 

If you like DNRTV, and want to subscribe to the DNRTV Feed, consider using the RSS Downloader features of µTorrent ("microtorrent").

I hope you enjoy the show.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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