Scott Hanselman

I'm blessed (or cursed) with a lot of email asking questions. Sometimes about Diabetes, usually something about computers (.NET, ASP.NET, Web Services, Development, XML, utils, whatever). It's always nice to get such email, and I do read every email I get. However, I do have a (more than) full time job, a new baby (12 weeks on Tuesday), book edits, articles, blogs, speaking, blah blah blah.

That said, I do appreciate it when folks take time to send email. I love blogging and I love the connection/community aspects of it. Please don't take it personally (some do) when I don't have time to help with binding to the DataGrid, how to poke around inside XmlDocument, or dual boot your system.

When a question is truly interesting, truly difficult, and it's clear that the author has tried the obvious stuff (Googled at least ONCE, please) then I'm happy to take a look.

The best questions, for me, are the ones that turn into a blog post. If you read my blog, you know what my style is and what kinds of questions/problems I run into. If you've got one like that, then I may get to you.

I haven't gotten to the point that Scott Mitchell has with regards to answering mail, but I may get there soon if the dozen or so questions a day continue.

Here's an interesting (if only to me) question that just came up from a non-technical reader. Seriously, I apparently have a non-zero number of non-technical readers that aren't related to me. Not sure how that happened or what they are getting from my content. :)

How can I add my Xbox Live Gamer Card (or other generated Gamercard) on my desktop? I answer this question only because it's fun. If the asker had Google'd once, they've have likely found the answer on their own.

• Right-click on your desktop and click Properties.
• Go to the Desktop tab, then click on Customize Desktop.
• Go to the Web tab, then click on New...
• Enter http://gamercard.xbox.com/MYCARD.card in the location field, where MYCARD is your gamertag.

So, good questions:

• Hard
• Interesting
• Aren't Googlable
• Haven't been answered before
• Involve Design, Architecture, Coding in .NET, WS/XML, or on Windows in general

Thanks!

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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It just keeps getting better. Now there's a compatible UPnP server for Mac OSX that is tailored for the Xbox360.

Note the screenshot of my Living Room TV to the right showing my three systems:

• The main Windows XP Pro system running Windows Media Connect
• The Windows Media Center PC
• Now, my (free) Mac Mini running Connect360

Sure it shows your Pictures from iPhoto and music from iTunes, I'd expect nothing less. But it also supports Shoutcast Streaming Radio via iTunes which is slick.

Now there's just no reason for a Mac household not to get an Xbox360. The company also has a number of other nice looking products for the PSP and iPod, including a Windows-based managment tool for PSP Media.

The only complain I have now with the Media blade on the Xbox360 is that it assumes that your family has only one machine. I realize that is the 80% 95% case, but the interface currently "associates" the XBox with a specific machine, so I have to go over to the System blade to desociate a remote PC and connect to the Mac. My wife will never go for this, so I'll just keep the main PC associated all the time and she'll never know there's other PCs. However, because of this little snafu I'd have to say that WAF is low for this interface in a multi-PC house.

I wonder if there's an "aggregating UPnP server/router" that would collect all three of these sources and present a single unified union of the available media.

Sigh, now I need to de-dupe my 6500 MP3s. The ID3 tags are out of control and I've got dupes all over. At least the MP3s from the CDs I had ripped by RipDigital are pristine. I freaking love those guys.

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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Dare isn't feeling the new Google Toolbar "T4" Beta. I'm loving it. It's brilliant that they're actually building community around a toolbar. Very cool. Their API, while Google-like in its obscurity (it's functional, and pragmatic, but pedantic) isn't hard to write to. It's all XML and URLs. 

However, on the whole, the new Toolbar is a winner, and it's even more useful than before. I can't wait for a FireFox version.

Their Button API, called the Simple API, is basically a button manifest. So, since I started blogging really so I could Google my historical-self, I made a ComputerZen button for the Google Toolbar. It took about 10 minutes.

If you've got the new Google Toolbar, you can now:

Add the ComputerZen Button with one click! 

You'll not only get to my site in a single slick, you also get a specific search for my site, and a populated dropdown of ComputerZen's Feed. Shiny.

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'm happily browsing the web from my Xbox360 this evening thanks to Anthony Park's clever MCE Browser.

It requires that you have Windows XP Media Center Edition and, in my case, that your Xbox be able to connect as an extender.

Currently you can only navigate by tab/shift-tab-ing your way from link to link using the channel-up and channel-down buttons. I'll need to remap my Harmony 880 remote.

You can't use a keyboard (yet) but he's planning on it for the next version. For now, you can visit your favorites. But, the fact that I can view cnn.com and my other main news sites is pretty cool. It's nice to browse the 'net on a 37" LCD in my living room. This, along with Newsgator MCE Edition gets me a lot of what I'd want from my Xbox360. 

There's lots more fun at MoreMCE to try with the Xbox360's extender.

Now, I'd like to figure out how to get Writely and Numsum to work in MCEBrowser, and then I'd have poorman's Word and Excel.

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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Grant and Jamie continue to innovate the TestDriven.NET/NCoverExplorer package.

New features include color customization, coverage tolerances, removing of assemblies from the results and a revamp of the statistics page.

SharpDevelop2 (starting with revision 1057) now supports code coverage in the IDE and VSTS has nice integrated coverage (VSTS Quality Tools Blog).

I'm glad that Code Coverage may finally reach the masses. Go get/download/update/upgrade your TestDriven.NET.

UPDATE:  Jamie says be sure to update your copy of NCover while you're at it. He says:

There are some very important fixes in the latest NCover v1.5.3 release.

In the previous version a spawned process would cause a hang. The common case seemed to be when an XmlSerializor object was instantiated (I think causing 'csc.exe' to spawn). Another fix was for a bug that caused yield statements to throw an InvalidProgramException. You can find the gory details here and download here.

UPDATE #2: Just so there's no confusion:

If you want to use this tool, you have two choices:

• If you CANNOT install .NET 2.0 then:
• Install NCover 1.3.3
• Install Test Driven.NET
• This will work with Visual Studio 2003
• If you CAN install .NET 2.0 (even if you're not developing on it) then:
• Install NCover 1.5.3+
• Install Test Driven.NET
• This will work with Visual Studio 2002, 2003, and 2005

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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