Head over to http://www.powertogether.com and watch 3 web casts and you get a copy of of Vista for Business and Office 2007.

I found out the other day that I will be speaking at CodeMash in Ohio during the warm month of January.  What am I speaking on?  I'll give you one guess.  You guessed it, Smart Clients, ClickOnce, Web Services, SOA, etc.  It is a small world sometimes too.  The email about me speaking came from Jason Gilmore who I met while at Microsoft this past September during an ASP.Net Summit.  Jason and I talked about Media Center and tons of other stuff.  Who knew!  He was also on the bus when we got struck by some crazy chic.   The resort the conference is...

Last year when Ellen and I moved into our new home we were excited to cook our first Thanksgiving meal in our new home. That was the general feeling until we spent ALL day in the kitchen preparing the meal. While the meal was excellent, it wasn't worth a whole day of effort and roughly $300.00 of groceries. I vowed next year I wasn't going to spend my day off cooking. There had to be a better way. I am a smart guy, couldn't I figure something out? Turns out there are lots of ways to have a really nice...

In Part 3 of this series we learned the x64 ISO of Vista originally uploaded to MSDN was corrupted As a result of this I installed the 32bit version of Vista on my AMD machine.   Once the DVD nightmare was over,the installation of Vista went really smooth and offers some new features that are welcomed.  During the install I was happy to be able to load drivers for RAID controllers via USB drives.  The installation is completely visual this time around (no more dos looking boot screens) and even things like formatting and partitioning are done with a mouse.  One...

Sorry for the delay in this thread of posts about installing Windows Vista but I ran into a very nasty virus that kept me away from the computer for several days.  In Part 2 the last problem I had encountered was the installation not being able to find the install.wim file.  After checking and re-checking my hash, I knew for a fact I had a good download so it had to be the burn of the DVD that was causing my problems. After searching the Internet I found others that had the same problem.  Most were trying to install Vista in Virtual...

Right before lunch I decided to give generating a Vista key one more try and sure enough I finally got it to generate.  I finished up some code I was working on and then went to lunch to grab a sandwich real quick hoping I could get through most of the install during lunch. For those curious, I am installing Vista on my AMD 64 machine.  The only difference from what is listed on my other blog is I have 2GBs of memory now instead of 1GB.  After hunting around for a few minutes I found the Promise Fasttrak 378...

Windows Vista posted to MSDN downloads yesterday so I started the download overnight.  When I came into the office this morning I found the Windows Vista x64 3.7GB DVD download had finished.   Since I had been backing things up on my machine the past several days I was ready to install.  Unfortunately I was stopped cold in my tracks, along with a lot of other MSDN developers because the key generator is broke on MSDN.  For those that don't know how MSDN works with subscriptions it works like this.  A subscriber can download for the most part anything Microsoft publishes, operating systems,...

For those that have MSDN accounts Microsoft has posted the Vista download a tad bit early.  Both the 32bit and 64bit versions are available.  The Beta and RC releases are officially gone.  The new era of Vista is officially rung in, Merry Christmas.  Sign in and get your download on (but do so after I finish mine :) ).  Currently I am downloading at a measly 17KB / sec.

The registration for CodeMash is now officially opened.  What better thing could you possibly have to do in the dead in winter than head to an extremely cool resort to hear about .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python and more technologies?  Nothing, just as I thought!  For those that haven't heard about CodeMash, it  will give you a indepth look at all kinds of technologies.  Book your room(s) today at the Kalahari Lodge.  Jim Holmes took some pictures of the lodge, the place is VERY cool.  Check them out.   See you there!

At least once a week I leave the comfort of my home office to venture out for lunch. Normally Will messages me about 10:45 AM asking where we are going to eat that day. Today Bob (Will's co-worker that eats with us) wanted to go to one of my favorite places to eat which is an old movie theater in Purvis, MS they re-opened as a buffet style restaurant called the Movie Star Restaurant . And man is the food good! Just good country cooking and for $8.00 which includes sweet tea, you can't beat it. This is one of...

It seems Apple has started to reach out more to its developers by putting together what they are calling "Leopard Tech Talks". A lot of you may be surprised by me posting something about Apple since I write .Net code during work hours but I am a customer of theirs (1 iPod, 2 Notebooks, 1 Airport). However, I still play with an enormous amount of technologies from all walks of life (Microsoft, Apple, Open Source, Linux, etc). I'm a geek, live with it. :) I started writing this post to say, cool, Apple is finally reaching out to the developer...

Sometimes you are forced into buying technology products when you don't want to but it makes sense at the time. Friday was one of those. It was Ellen's mother 70th birthday and we of course needed to take pictures. My cell phone has a 1.3 mp camera but let's face it, that just isn't good enough. Our current Canon Powershot S230 camera's battery is on the fritz. So much so that with a full charge it will only take one picture! Since you can't readily pickup Canon batteries at a nearby store here, we were going to be left with...

This past weekend was pretty packed with stuff on the todo list. Friday was Ellen's mother, Sue, birthday. Ellen had planned a surprise party for her since it was her 70th birthday. It started on Friday with us going to her house and opening gifts. Then we took her to the Walnut Creek Grill in downtown Hattiesburg. Leaving the resturant I had to kiss the chef, the food was really good.       After having a really good meal we left and drove Ellen's mom back home. Right as we got to her house I said, "Well I hope you had...

At some point in your career as a software engineer you are going to run across the need to build your forms dynamically.  Whether you read information from a database, dataset, or xml file.  Recently I was working on a new feature for our internal Smart Client application whereby we can add new fields into the database for our application and have the new field show up in the appropriate screen and auto validate itself.  The feature itself when complete is going to be very cool and allow us to add new form fields at will without having to get a database engineer...

"After blogging for about 5-6 years this is my first food post and it just so happens it is one that I need everyone's help with. Some back story first. Last night I went shopping at the grocery store to restock on basic food groups: Cokes, Meat, Cheese, Bread, Chips. While cruising down the chip aisle I stopped in the Zapp's potato chip section as I normally do. For those of you that aren't in the know, Zapp's makes the best flavors of chips. Since they are made Louisiana and I live one hour from said state, you can find...