Scott Hanselman

I just got a chuckle out of this. When you install the glorious SlickRun, after installation when it says "Will you reward the developer with a moment of your time?" and click Yes, you're taking to a simple registration screen. Apparently I've pimped SlickRun so much that I'm an option under "Where did you hear about this product." That's so cool. I love this tool.

So, if you're running SlickRun, it's time for you to download the SlickRun 3.9 Beta! After you install, give him this kind gentleman your first name and tell him where you heard about SlickRun! :)

Another SlickRun tip, as you've probably added MagicWords of your own. There's a number of "QRS" files that you can download, there's just a little hidden below the fold on the Bayden site. Scroll down a bit on this page and download pre-built MagicWords for reference, news, shopping and some windows applets. On the "Other Utilities" page there are some nice command line utils that make nice SlickRun MagicWords as well like "DumpTrash," the garish but functional "SlickCal," WebCreds that lets you log on to WebSites from the command line, and "ShowOrRun" that conditionally runs or activates an application. 

Now, if only SlickRun looked more like the Mac's QuickSilver...that'd be a damned sexy app. Maybe I'll write it in Avalon...

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 sure this has probably already been said, but I wanted to "put it on paper" as it were. I was showing a fellow at work a few things with Mono, and decided that the quickie demo I did was interesting enough that I should do it again. If you're not familiar with Mono, it's an alternative open source implementation of the CLI spec.

It's a compiler implementation and a library implementation and they can be use separately. What that means is that you can compile with Mono, run against their libraries, or you can compile on MSFT and run against their libraries...but where it really gets interesting is if you compile on Microsoft and run against the Mono libraries, or vice versa. This screencast demos a few of these scenarios.

In this demo I create an application from the command line, compile it with Mono and .NET, use Reflector on both and compare the resulting IL of both. Then I run them both and use Process Explorer to see what's going on at runtime.

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 was checking out the external hard drives, glanced down and noticed an XM Satellite Ratio priced at $14.99. Yes, that's US$14.99. Holy crap. I usually see XM Radios for $99 or so. This one usually goes for $50, but currently has a coupon that gets it to $30. However, for whatever pricing mistake or reason it was $15. I figure soon they'll be free. 

As I figure it, just the cables that came with it are worth $15, so I had to gset it. There's other, coolio receivers, but remember, this was an impulse purchase paid for with allowance.

Let me tell you, XM is great. I activated the service which is $12.95 a month but you can pay for the year and save 8% and there's a sliding scale from there. One month is less than the price of a new CD or 13 songs on iTunes. If I drive to Seattle once a month for three hours each way it's paid for itself in my opinion. If you get another one for your spouse it's only $6.99 extra.

There's 150 channels and the music channels are commercial free. There's the occasional commercial on the talk stations. There's also 3 stations dedicated to stand-up comedy that I'm loving.

The radio also has a nice feature where you can mark a song that's cursrently playing and later if that same song (up to 20 saved songs) is playing on any of the other channels, you'll be notified.

This particular model has a number of ways you can integrate the system with your existing stereo. It's got a built-in FM broadcaster that actually works better than you'd think it would. It can plug in directly if you've got a line-in, it can plug-in with a wired FM modulator, but I chose to use the cassette adapter (see picture above). I think I did a pretty good job of installing it. Note the three cords, antenna, power, and audio all going in-and-out of the receiver and into the tape deck. There's a magnetic external antenna that you put on the roof of the car. I fed it through a number of rubber gaskets and into the driver-side door and under the seat.

If you have a subscription then you automatically get access to the online streams. This is cool because I can listen on the way to work, then keep listening to the same show when I get to my desk.

One thing that sucks is that there's a channel completely dedicated to Frank Sinatra, but they've just dropped Ngoma, the African channel, in order to add a bunch of French Pop to satisfy their contractual obligations to some Canadian deal. Interestingly, Ngoma is still available online. Other than this lack of World music, XM Radio is pretty amazing.

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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Here's some interesting news from ScottGu and team. I was wondering what the lifecycle for ASP "Classic" was. I looked on the Microsoft Lifecycle page and didn't see it. I was fortunate enough to talk to ScottGu as well as Rich Ersek and was told:

Classic ASP is actually very much alive.  It will ship again with Windows Vista and Windows Longhorn Server – so will be supported at least 10 years from that ship date. - ScottGu

and

Asp.DLL is part of VISTA so the runtime will continue to be supported based on the Vista support lifecycle.

All classic ASP development tools (i.e., Visual Interdev) are now in their extended support period and we will not be updating tools for classic ASP.   

To get the best tooling/platform option ASP.NET is the way to go. - RichE

Certainly we can all agree that ASP.NET is the present and the future, but it's very comforting to know that Classic ASP is a part of Vista and the Vista Lifecycle. The tools are in extended support but the 'runtime' is still alive and kicking.

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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There's a nice video up on Channel 9 with Scoble interviewing the Coding4Fun managers. Dan Fendandez and Brian Keller are up there showing off all our articles. My GPS and Security Fob mod/projects are up demoed.

The Logitech io2 Pen article should be up soon, and I just finished a ClickOnce application that will connect to Webcams (like the new one in the baby's room) with some CodeProject.com code, along with the blessing of the author, to handle motion detection. His motion detection stuff is really slick, with pluggable detectors. He also, in a clever hack, abstracts away his Video sources by using events to throw each frame of the video. The motion detector receives and processes these frames. It's very clever, and hopefully I'll have a website link by then from him. I'll see if I can get that article done before the baby comes.

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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