Scott Hanselman

Wow. From...

 to  

...in seven and a half months. Madness I say.

This little man is heck on wheels. The first day I met him...

...he was eyes wide open. He spent a few months on and off tummy time...

...and rolled over shortly thereafter. Crawling came four months later...

...but the shock to me was that he was sitting up one Tuesday, crawling that Thursday and now has taken to standing on things. We found him trying to climb out of his crib. Mo caught him trying to eat the toilet plunger (Full story on Mo's Blog). He really wants to walk, but just doesn't know how. So, standing will do for now.

He's a joy each day and I'm blessed beyond comprehension to know this guy.

Lessons learned at Seven Months

• Anything two feet off the floor or below will be put in the mouth. This includes peas from last week found in a corner as well as bugs and dust. At least the latter two are protein.
• Baby's are as surprised as I am when they poop without warning. Has there been an earthquake? 
• Other people's babys are cute, but they are scary, fragile, and often smell bad. YOUR baby, on the other hand, smells like roses all the time and can be thrown around like a sack of potatoes to peals of laughter and giggles.
• When your baby isn't quite a crawler but definitely not a toddler, he's a wobbler.
• Nothings better in this world than the look of recognition your baby gets on his face when you come home from work and he gets that look that says "Hey! It's that guy again, he's back! Woohoo! He's hilarious!"
• Water and the laws of physics in general may not be consistent, so we'll need to test them over and over and over again. Will the spoon fall this time? Wow, it did. I wonder now?
• There's only 365 days in this first year. Squeeze every one of them.

Baby Posts

• The Big News
• Z Quincy
• Fatherhood
• Z Rolls
• Babies Sleeping Through the Night
• Zero to Three Month Baby Ultimate Tools List 
• Z is Six Months Old

And now back to the technology...

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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Roy Osherove is having a beauty contest...a Windows Desktop Contest.

You send in a screenshot of your windows Desktop - the coolest three at the end of the contest get some cool prizes.

• 1st prize: MSDN Premium Subscription and fame forever.
• 2nd Prize: To be announced
• 3rd Prize: To be announced

The contest ends August 31st 2006. The Judges are Roy, myself, Carl Franklin and Mike Gunderloy. Just the chance to win an MSDN Premium subscription is reason enough to submit your shot now! Get over there and crush his servers with the weight of your awesome desktop.

Here's my home desktop. It's not nearly as cluttered at home as at work. Here's my work desktop:

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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My twenty-fifth Podcast is up. This episode is a discussion of a few of my favorite blogs. I had a HUGE list and ended up having to really chop it down in order to make it fit within our (my) time limit. Remember, Hanselminute tries not to waste your time!

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

This show was FULL of links, so here they are again. They are also always on the show site. Do also remember the archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature.

Links from the Show

Sam Gentile (g08)		Jeff Atwood (goj)		Hanzi Smatter (gou)
Dare Obasanjo (g09)		Mike Gunderloy (gok)		M.C. Hammer (gov)
Greg Hughes (goa)		Phil Haack (gol)		Kevin Smith (gow)
casey chesnut (gob)		Chris Sells (gom)		Overheard in the Office (goy)
Polymorphic Podcast (god)		Fritz Onion (gon)		Make Blog (goz)
Scott Guthrie (goe)		ASP.NET Blogs (goo)		Developing for Developers (gp2)
Presentation Zen (gof)		Channel 9 Videos (gop)		Joel Spolsky (gp3)
Raymond Chen (gog)		Michael Kaplan (gor)		Junfeng Zhang (gp4)
Debugging Tess (goh)		Wesner Moise (gos)		Powershell Blog (gp5)
Roy Osherove (goi)		The Daily WTF (got)		BCL Team Blog

NEW COUPON CODE EXCLUSIVELY FOR HANSELMINUTES LISTENERS: The folks at XCeed are giving Hanselminutes listeners that is Coupon Code "hm-20-20." It'll work on their online shop or over the phone. This is an amazing deal, and I encourage you to check our their stuff. The coupon is good for 20% off any component or suite, with or without subscription, for 1 developer all the way up to a site license.

Our sponsors are XCeed, CodeSmith Tools, PeterBlum and the .NET Dev Journal. There's a $100 off CodeSmith coupon for Hanselminutes listeners - it's coupon code HM100. Spread the word, now's the time to buy.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

• The basic MP3 feed is here, and the iPod friendly one is here. There's a number of other ways you can get it (streaming, straight download, etc) that are all up on the site just below the fold. I use iTunes, myself, to listen to most podcasts, but I also use FeedDemon and it's built in support.
  • Some other clients are Doppler (also suppose Windows CE), FireAnt, Nimiq, and PrimeTime Podcast.
• Note that for now, because of bandwidth constraints, the feeds always have just the current show. If you want to get an old show (and because many Podcasting Clients aren't smart enough to not download the file more than once) you can always find them at http://www.hanselminutes.com.
• I have, and will, also include the enclosures to this feed you're reading, so if you're already subscribed to ComputerZen and you're not interested in cluttering your life with another feed, you have the choice to get the 'cast as well.
• If there's a topic you'd like to hear, perhaps one that is better spoken than presented on a blog, or a great tool you can't live without, contact me and I'll get it in the queue!

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next 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.

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The secret's out. A 'special edition' (updated second edition) of Professional ASP.NET 2.0 is coming out in September.

It's a freaking beast. If you didn't get the book when it came out last year, now's the time to pre-order this one...

What's the difference between the first one and the Special Edition? About 300 pages of new content. It's about 1650 pages now, enough to beat someone up, if you use the Hardcover. And the Hardcover is only $37.79 to preorder the last time I checked at Amazon. Although, you could hurt someone with the Wrox Box.

Bill Evjen lead the charge on much of this new content, with Devin and I adding missing and/or new content in dozens of places throughout the book. There's an excerpt of the new section on the FileUpload Server Control up at Wrox.com.

Here's a brief list of what's updated and new in this new edition.

FOUR completely new chapters:

• Introduction to the Provider Model
• Extending the Provider Model
• Localization
• Instrumentation

TWO new appendixes:

• Migrating ASP.NET 1.x Projects
• Using Atlas

...and dozens of additions throughout all the existing chapters, including:

• Class Designers and Open Test Bench
• Build providers
• A More Complex Callback Example
• Uploading multiple files from the same page
• As an example, in Chapter 11, DataBinding in ASP.NET 2.0 these changes:
• Added SqlDataSource Configuration Wizard to add optimistic concurrency
• Added SqlDataSource Events, Using the SqlDataSource with Oracle, AccessDataSource Control
• Added GridView events that fire when the data binding occurs
• Added Using the TemplateField Column in the GridView Control
• Added Using the TemplateField's EditItemTemplate
• Added Expressions and Expression Builder
• Using Oracle as Your Database with ASP.NET 2.0
• Added Generating Custom XML from SQL 2005

That's the list up through about the first 1/2 of the book...there's a pile more...

And there's an added DVD which is the Visual Studio 2005 Professional 180 day trial, and there's an added CD which contains more than 1000 pages of selected chapters from other Wrox .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, VB 2005, C# 2005, and SQL Server books.

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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When I was at TechEd I visited the Beantown.net INETA User Group and gave a (fairly ad-hoc) talk on Developer Productivity Tools. Jim Minatel loaned me his microphone and a copy of Camtasia and we recorded the talk. Thanks Jim!

It was a great crowd, a lot of fun. We had a number of "off the cuff" discussions about random stuff so I hope it doesn't take away from the gist of the talk.

The complete presentation was around 1 hour 45 minutes, so for online, Jim has split it into 4 segments. This week's segment is #2 and is available now and is about 20 minutes long. If you watch it in your browser, I recommend you double click on Windows Media Player to make the video go full screen. You can also download the full video.

It covers:

• 00:00 Title
• 00:15 Scott's introduction (repeated from the first video segment)
• 00:40 XmlSerializer
• 8:40 Interlude: SlickRun and Google
• 9:10 Back to XmlSerializer
• 10:40 SlickRun
• 12:20 Explorer2 and Launching apps with Google Desktop Search
• 13:20 Far - A Windows application like DOS Norton Commander
• 14:35 Why Scott has so much stuff on his desktop
• 16:40 Junctions and reparse points
• 19:30 Closing credits

The remaining two segments for following weeks will cover roughly:

• Week 3: Windows PowerShell - 33 minutes
• Week 4: Active Words, Code Rush, SOAP Scope, XML doc viewer - 23 minutes

Here's a few notes about the video quality from Jim:

1. Why can't I fast forward or skip ahead through the video while it's streaming? Answer: We're running these off of a standard IIS server, not a Windows Media Server. IIS supports streaming, but not indexed playback during streaming to allow skipping ahead. If you want to do that, just download the whole video and all of the forwarding and timeline controls will be available in Windows Media Player.

2. Why isn't the video quality better? Is Camtasia to blame? No, Camtasia rocks. The raw videos I'm getting in Camtasia format are 100% clear, as if you were looking right at the presenter's monitor. The problem I've discovered is with the Windows Media Encoder. It just isn't well suited to on-screen presentation videos like this. The blurring and color blotching seems worst in Scott Hanselman's videos and I think I know why. When I watch the raw presentation, he's flying back and forth between open windows, background tools that pop up, and his desktop. It's just faster switching between very varied images than the encoder can seem to keep up with. I've twidled all the settings and got the best I can for now without doubling or tripling the file sizes. The other option would be to post an alternate version in Camtasia format and a link to download their playback codec [Scott: or a large FLV]. Because WMV is universal for my .NET developer audience, that has to be my common choice though.

There's also some other good screencasts up at Wrox. The growing list of videos is available at wrox.com. The first few videos in the series are:

• Wally McClure: Building Real World Apps with Atlas — presented at Atlanta Code Camp, May 2006
• Jean-Luc David: Extending Visual Studio 2005 Team System — presented at Atlanta Code Camp, May 2006
• Jim Wooley: VB 9.0/C# 3 and the Search for the Missing LINQ — presented at Atlanta Code Camp, May 2006
• Scott Hanselman: Developer Tools Part 1 — presented at Beantown.NET, June 2006

I hope you enjoy them.

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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