Scott Hanselman

It's wireless, it's crazy.  There's a crapload of wireless access points (APs) at every conference, and I think the number is getting bigger every year.  I've brought two laptops, my work laptop as well as my Toshiba TabletPC m205.  The Toshiba comes with a FANTASTIC program called ConfigFree.  You kind of have to see it to believe it.  It's an application built with Flash, so it's very fluid.  It's also an irregular region and it's transparent.  The dots represent APs and the farther out they are, the weaker their signal.  The AP that I'm currently associated with has a line drawn to it.  They float around as the strengths change. 

At the hotel when I hold the laptop near the window on the 31st floor I see SEVEN wireless networks and 3 of them are unsecured.  Needless to say, I'm enjoying the free Internet from the office building across the way.  I may just print them out a surprise message on their unsecured network printer for someone to see on Monday morning.

I'm also running the RC1 of Windows SP2.  I'm very much digging SP2.  The new wireless dialogs are singularly worth the upgrade.

Neil Turner has a great writeup on the changes in SP2 - and they are all good, IMHO.  I'm looking forward to taking a CD to my relatives houses and finally getting them hooked up with a decent firewall. 

One concern: everyone needs to buy AntiVirus software.  You know you have cousins who don't have any.  What do you use?  I use eTrust from CA.  I hear that AVG has a nice AVG Free Edition.

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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Holy crap.  I was just named Developer Community Regional Director of the Year.  Paul Sheriff was named Business-Focused RD of the Year. 

Very unexpected, and VERY exciting.  Thanks very much to the greatest DE in the country, Jim Blizzard!  I'm proud to call Jim my friend and I share this award with him.  But only 51%/49% ;)

Additionally, Jim is a recent convert to the HSoP™ Method of digital photography.  Let's give him a hand, and spread the HSoP™ Method.

As a small point of history, here's the FIRST HSoP photo, taken in July of 2001, just a few months before Mo and I were married.

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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Am I bribing you?  Possibly.  Everyone who comes to my Code Generation BOF tonight at 7pm in Room 15A will receive a FREE license for CodeSmith Professional.  That's a $80 value.  What's the difference between CodeSmith Pro and the Free edition? The CodeSmith Studio integrated IDE.

If you've been thinking about starting in Code Generation, why not start today?  Nothing like free software to jump start your TechEd experience.

BOF09 Code Generation: So What?
20 years later and we're still writing the code ourselves. What can we do to generate code? How can technologies like XSD, CodeDom, XSLT, CodeSmith and others save us time as developers?
23-May 7:00PM Room 15A

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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Can someone explain to me the big deal about ReSharper?  Sure, I tried Refactory and I dug it.  I know they disappeared and screwed some folks over, but it was a nice solid offering.  Now everyone is talking about ReSharper, and forgive me, but I'm just not feeling it. 

• It feels VERY unpolished, and there's just no excuse for lack of polish these days.
• It looks lousy at ANY "unusual" font size (Lucida Console 14pt Bold)
• It's context menus are far to deep to be useful.
• It doesn't support a very wide range of refactorings, and it doesn't appear to glean a lot from the context of the current cursor position.

Frankly, it looks like a Java program (wonder why? ;) ) and just doesn't fit in Visual Studio.NET.

On the other hand, CodeRush is continuing to blow me away. 

• It's polished
• It's radically customizable (almost to a fault)
• It's easily extensible by a code plugin model OR standard Regular Expressions
• It's graphics are JAW DROPPING.  You literally have to see it to believe it.
• The Linked Identifiers are crazy useful.

It takes a little while to get use to, and I need to make a cheat sheet to keep track of the shortcuts, but I'm digging it EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Sorry to sound like such a P.I.M.P. for these guys, but seriously, it's pure sex.  The UI stuff is hotter than Whidbey.  If you see me at TechEd, holler at me and I'll give you a demo.

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 sitting here in the WS Interop Day tinkering with this dasBlog MonthView I was doing.  I've added a view that displays your blog (item titles) in a calendar for a year. 

Do check it out.  I'll give it to Omar this week and we'll get it into the source tree ASAP if folks dig it.

Updates since yesterday ;) :

• If an entry doesn't have a Title, then I'll strip all HTML tags and take the first 50 characters of the content and add an ellipsis.  Many of my old Radio Userland posts from 2002 that I imported into dasBlog have this problem.
• Should work but not tested: This page adds no new Resource strings and uses Invariant dates in the QueryString so the Calendar(s) should render in multiple languages (and possibly other calendar systems, such as Thai Bhuddist, as I make no assumptions as to how many months are in a year, etc.) Perhaps some attention to VaryByHeaders="Accept-Language" may be needed.
• This is a ridiculously expensive page, second only to Search, so it includes Poorman's caching for 15 minutes.  <%@ OutputCache Duration="900" VaryByParam="*" %>  Certainly change this value to taste.  Arguably it should STAY cached until the cache is explicitly invalidated.  I think there's some stuff in dasBlog to do that, I just didn't going looking for it. 
• I output the time the page was rendered at the TOP of the page (rather than the standard dasBlog rendered footer) just cause it's nice to know when these things get built.
• Clicking on the Weblog Calendar view takes you to MonthView.aspx without any QueryString parameters.  This shows you the entries for the current month.  From here you can go forward and backward with the Next/Prev buttons.  This will be MonthView.aspx?month=YYYY-MM.
• Clicking on a Year number at the top of the page will take you to a page with all the months filled out.  This is MonthView?year=YYYY.

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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