I’ve received 67 comments so far and I have to say, I’m a little disappointed. The majority of comments say, essentially, “I really want it but I can’t afford it.” Come on, people! This isn’t a raffle; you need to give us a reason to choose you over someone else. A few have resorted to threats (“Choose me or else I’ll use Java/Linux”), promises (“Choose me and I promise to learn how to use it”), or pity (“Choose me or my children will starve.”) I was hoping to hear, “I work for this charity/non-profit” (I did get a couple of those) and/or, “I could really use these specific features of VSTS...”
There have been a few standouts: Aidan is working on an innovative Web project that deserves some attention. And I enjoyed Adam Wright’s poem. No promises, guys, but you made a favorable impression.
FYI, if you want the software because you’re a starving student or running a startup, Microsoft offers significant discounts to both academic institutions and software companies. If you don’t score a free copy from an MVP, you should check those out.
Microsoft has generously given me (and, presumably, other MVPs) a few licenses to Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription “to share with other individuals of [my] choosing in the community.” Now, I’m under no delusion that this is sheer altruism on Microsoft’s part; I’m sure they want to drive adoption of VSTS (and I want more readers!) Regardless of the motives involved, however, I have cool software to give away, and that’s where you come in.
In the comments to this post, tell me in 100 words or less why you should receive one of these licenses. I’ll keep the comments open until January 31, at which time a panel of judges (to be determined) will select a winner.
So, make us laugh, make us cry, give us goosebumps. Convince us that you deserve a free copy of this $10,000 software package (and in case you don’t win, start sucking up to other developer MVPs you know!)
Balasuggests that I add a “Funny Story of the Week” category in order to boost readership. I don’t know if I can come up with a funny story every week, but I have created a Humor category; here’s this week’s entry:
Not long ago, we had a “Bring Your Child to Work” day at my office, and we had a barbecue for the kids. I was eating at a table with some boys, so we started telling kids’ jokes. At one point I asked, “What's round and white and lifts weights?” (Correct answer: Extra-strength aspirin.) One of the boys looked at me and answered, “You!”
There’s nothing like traveling with a bunch of skinny Asians to make one feel fat (take a look at this photo while singing, “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)”). Looking at our photos from China, I decided it’s time to do something about my expanding girth.
I’m rather a picky eater, so the thought of changing my diet to lose weight does not appeal to me at all. In an ideal world, I would eat whatever I feel like and simply exercise enough to burn all the calories, but that’s not going to happen, either. I needed to figure out how many calories I actually use, then consume slightly less than that in order to lose this excess baggage.
Enter Diet Diary from CalorieKing.com. Tell it your age, sex, height, weight and activity level, and it will tell you roughly how many calories you should consume to maintain your weight, or in my case, to lose one to two pounds a week. Then use its extensive foods database to record what you eat and track your progress.
I’ve been using the software since December 5 (nearly four weeks) and so far I’ve lost about 4½ pounds, so it seems to be working. Now I just need to exercise more than once a week, and my waist will be smaller than my chest in no time. Watch out, skinny Asians!
Scott Hanselman swears byMaxiVista (they even have his face on their home page!), a utility that allows you to use a networked PC (typically a laptop) as a second monitor. But what if you want to actually work on both PCs? I suppose you could Remote Desktop from your primary PC to the second, then use MaxiVista to drag the RD session over to the second PC’s monitor (think about that for a second!) Here’s a better solution...
By way of Ofer Achler, I have discovered Synergy, an open-source utility that lets you share your keyboard and mouse with a networked machine. Simply move your mouse pointer off the edge of one screen, and it instantly appears on the other; keyboard and mouse events are sent to that device. It even merges the clipboards of all connected PCs (or Macs; Synergy is cross-platform), so you may copy and paste among them.
Very cool free utility; highly recommended. Now, if they’d just put my face on their home page...
My new boss likes to remind me that I’m an experienced presenter, but I have a lot to learn about being a trainer.
After one such humbling conversation, I fired off an e-mail to Kathy Sierra asking if she offers or could recommend training for trainers. To my surprise and delight, she replied promptly with a number of helpful suggestions. A few days later, she fleshed out those suggestions and posted them as a blog entry.
The day that entry appeared, I was on the final day of my first C# class, which I had condensed from five days to four, thinking that much of the material would be familiar to the students. But they had surprised me with many questions and lots of discussion, about which I had mixed feelings: it was great that they were so engaged, but here it was noon on the last day and I still had four units of fairly deep material to cover: advanced scope, delegates and events, attributes, et al (we had been covering two or three units a day).
During the lunch break, I read Kathy’s post and was struck in particular by these points:
If you're short on time, always cut the lecture, not the exercises! (Unfortunately, this is the opposite of what most trainers do.)
It is almost always far more important that your learners nail fewer subjects than be “exposed” to a wider range of subjects...If your students leave feeling like they truly learned — like they seriously kick ass because they can actually do something useful and interesting — they'll forgive you (and usually thank you) for not “covering all the material.”
Don't let the class fizzle out at the end. Try to end on a high...Ask yourself, “what were my students feeling when they left?” Too often, the answer to that is, “overwhelmed, and stupid for not keeping up.” And usually, the fault is in a course that tried to do too much.
After lunch, I called an audible and announced, “There’s no way we can cover all of the remaining material this afternoon, so here’s what we’re not going to get to.” I spent about half an hour explaining the various terms and describing some practical applications. Then I said, “If you wish, you can read this material on your own and contact me if you have any questions. Now, let’s write an app...” I wrote a spec for a simple flashcard program on the whiteboard, and we spent the rest of the afternoon creating it.
The class definitely ended on a high. The students were thrilled that they had been able to create a working application, and the class evaluations were great: not one of them complained that we didn’t cover all the material.
Due to my increased .NET evangelism, I was reappointed an MVP.
On May 1, I changed jobs. Same employer, but I’m now the Internal Training Manager. I don’t actually manage anyone; I educate employees and contractors (and occasionally customers) on Corillian’s Voyager platform and products.
Did a couple of nice bike rides this Summer: Cycle Oregon: The Weekend in June (I wasn’t feeling well, so I only rode Day 1), and the Vine Ride in August. Managed to not expose myself to any strangers this year.
When I started this blog three years ago, I was working on my first significant ASP.NET project and I wanted a place to record and share all the new stuff I was learning. Since then, the whole world (including hundreds of Microsoft employees) has started .NET blogs, and I've changed jobs so that I no longer write code every day.
I considered shutting the place down, or simply letting it languish as Google-fodder. But three factors have inspired me to resume blogging:
According to FeedBurner, at least 150 people subscribe to this feed, so I guess I’m not just talking to myself;
The site is a great way to build and maintain my personal brand. I’m the #1 “Phil Weber” on the major search engines, and I’d like to stay that way; and,
I actually have some things to say!
So, today is the first day of the rest of my blog. The focus will change somewhat — I’m now a trainer, so I’ll write about the lessons I’m learning in that new role — but I still have several .NET articles bouncing around my head, so watch for them. To those of you who haven’t pruned me from your blogroll, thanks for your loyalty. Tell a friend!
Take a look at the dialog to the right: See how the tabs across the top and the command buttons on the bottom are not rendered with the selected theme? Have you ever seen this before?
This past weekend, I uninstalled several unused applications from my desktop PC (an HP Pavilion running Windows Media Center Edition 2005 SP2), including HP ImageZone, HP Tunes, and several utilities included with my HP LaserJet 1320 printer. Shortly thereafter, I noticed that dropdown lists in IE6 were not themed; they looked like they had been transplanted from Windows 2000. I ran System File Checker and it seems to have fixed the dropdowns, but all system dialogs exhibit the behavior shown above, regardless of which theme I select. (Oddly, Task Manager’s tabbed dialog is correctly themed. It’s almost like a manifest file for explorer.exe has been deleted?)
I have since Googled extensively and even attempted a System Restore to a point before I uninstalled the software, but nothing will bring back my dialog themes. If you know how to fix this, please share!
Update: It seemed to me that IE, Explorer, etc. were not using the correct version of the Windows Common Controls library (ComCtl32.dll), so I Googled for "explorer.exe.manifest", which eventually led me to this article, which includes examples of manifests to tell an application to use version 6.0 of ComCtl32.dll. And sure enough, when I created manifests for IE, Explorer, and RunDll32.exe, my themed dialogs were back! I'm not sure what happened to cause these applications to stop using version 6, but I can live with this solution.
So, I'm sitting in Oakland airport this evening waiting to board my flight to Portland, when over the loudspeaker I hear, "Passenger Robert Scoble, please report to Gate 8." So I wander over to Gate 8, and sure enough, The Evangelist himself!
Now, I'm not just some anonymous fan: I've known Robert since before he was famous; I worked for several years with him and Maryam (when her last name had more than two syllables) at Fawcette Technical Publications. So we spent a few minutes catching up on what we’ve each been up to, exchanged business cards, and Scoble gave me a coveted Channel 9 Guy. Then my flight was boarding, and my brush with greatness was over as quickly as it had begun.
But let me tell you this, Dear Reader: In spite of all his cachet and notoriety, Robert still flies coach.
