Josh Holmes, Microsoft Architect Evangelist, and Brian Prince, MVP Architect, shaved their heads at the end of the CodeMash Conference in front of the attendees.  Both Josh and Brian were organizers of the CodeMash Conference and they vowed if there were over 500 blog posts tagged by Technorati with the word "CodeMash" they would shave their heads.  Actually that was Josh's deal with the attendees.  Brian later through his hat in the ring and said his shaving point was 600 blog entries. It got to the end of the conference and Technorati was down.  We were trying to search but the site...

 Saturday AtomicInternet (Brad Lloyd) hosted a PC LAN party in his basement in Farmington Hills, MI.  Since I was in Livonia after attending the CodeMash conference I was able to make the four mile trip from the hotel to his home. Saturday morning I caught up on work email and then about 2:00 headed over.  When I got there, Chris Lacross, a good friend from Ann Arbor who used to play with us when I lived in Ann Arbor, had gotten the computers we were going to play setup.  It just so happened I got there just in time :)  Ron was...

If you attended my sessions and are looking for the demos along with the powerpoint slides you'll find them here: http://keithelder.net/Presentations/DevelopingSmartClientAppsForEnterprise/default.aspx If you are one of the attendees that is new to .Net then download Visual Studio Express which is a free download that will allow you to open the solutions to run the demos.  Everything else you need to get up and running is listed in the presentations page. Technorati tags: CodeMash

I travel a lot and have to make sure I get up on time or otherwise I miss flights, speaking engagements and more, work.  Josh posted he was looking for a new travel alarm clock so I thought I would throw my $.02 in the ring.  All of us have different likes and dislikes.  Our sleeping habits are as varied as the number of alarm clocks out there.  Some of us can get up with a simple beep beep beep and others need a little more jarring.  Others need a nuclear weapon to go off to get up.  ...

I wanted to post a few interesting thoughts real quick on what I noticed about the CodeMash conference that made it different for me.  When you go to a conference a lot of the time you know who is going to be there.  If it is a PHP conference, for the most part those that are heavily into PHP are going to be there.  The same can be said for Java conferences, Microsoft conferences and so on.   People From Different Walks Of Life When I was putting together my Who's Who post for CodeMash it hit me why it was...

I got the rest of the pictures updated on the who's who at CodeMash post.  Even if you saw it previously, you probably will want to check it out again as it changed considerably.   Technorati tags: CodeMash

I haven't blogged about this yet but I acquired a Zune back in December.  The reason I haven't blogged about it is I haven't traveled anywhere with it  yet.  As a matter of fact I got the Zune while I was on a trip in Michigan and since I run Windows Server 2003 on my laptop I couldn't even play with it.  When I got home it wasn't supported on Windows Vista either but not to long after that there was an update and it works now.  Once I got it setup on my Vista machine and over the initial shock...

I'm sitting in the Asp.Net tips and tricks sessions given by Scott Guthrie at the CodeMash conference.  Below are some of the items Scott covered. Visual Studio Tips and Tricks First up is the web site project model and the web application project model.  Essentially there are two types of web solutions.  One is a web site project which is the default in Visual Studio 2005.  It essentially allows you to store your web site in a folder0. For most content driven sites this is fine but this isn't what we were use to in VS2003.  The other solution type...

Scott Guthrie opened up CodeMash day 2 today with the keynote this morning and covered LINQ (Language Integrated Query).   I first saw LINQ over a year ago and it is just as exciting today to see it again as it was then.   I'm sitting at a table with some of my fellow team members and other conference attendees.  Most of them haven't seen a LINQ demo and it was interesting to watch their reactions to LINQ for the first time.  As Scott showed different examples you could tell he had their attention as their heads turned around to each other nodding with approval.  Since we...

Wow, what a day at CodeMash.  It has been busy.  I did two presentations today and I am worn out.  I've got to see a lot of people that I haven't seen in years and got to meet people that I knew of through the blogosphere that I finally got to meet.  Here are some of the people I've bumped into at CodeMash in no particular order.  I'll probably update this post as I take pictures of more people so keep checking back. CodeMash Organizers Ok, I said these were going to be in no order, but I thought it really wouldn't be fair without...

CodeMash kicked off this morning with Neal Ford doing his keynote on Domain-Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm.  Neal presented some very interesting explanations of DSL types such as Waffle house having their own domain specific language when ordering hash browns:  covered, smothered, chunked, etc.  The idea behind domain specific language is we as humans describe complex abstractions in domain specific languages.   Yet a lot of developers don't translate their domain specific language to the problem they are trying to solve.  Neal gave several examples of this in Java and C# where he created a Car...

I had sort of an epiphany tonight while I was watching an interview of Scott Guthrie on Channel 9.  Scott is "the" guy when it comes to all of the tools Microsoft produces for developers such as the CLR, IIS, Visual Studio, LINQ, WPF, ASP.Net etc.  There were a couple of things that jumped out at me during the interview that made me start to put together a puzzle that I think is right around the corner which could overtake the buzz of the iPhone.  Stay with me on this one as I explain my thought process.  In the end I'll get to...

Patrick Steele noted on his blog there was a Google Group created for the up and coming conference in Sandusky, Oh called CodeMash.  As noted it is a place for finding opportunities for carpooling, ride sharing etc.  The conversation has already started. If you are attending, join in! Technorati tags: CodeMash

A lot of applications generate emails to alert users or send out notifications.  If you do WinForm programming the need to generate email from your application is something you will probably come across at one point or another.  There are essentially two ways I use to generate emails from WinForms or Smart Clients.  One is using the Outlook Interop and the other is simply starting a process using the System.Diagnostics.Process class.  Each has their own merits.  Depending on why you are generating an email from your application will ultimately determine which method you should use.  For starters, let's take the easy road and start with the Process class. Using...

In a previous posts I showed how to secure your web services with a username and a password.  One of the readers added a comment and mentioned using an extension to provide authentication so I thought I would expand on how that is done.  If you haven't read the previous posts do that first, then pickup with this.  And before we get started, thanks for the idea Kevin! Have you ever wanted to intercept a web service method because you wanted to maybe log it or even as we are about to do authenticate a user?  Did you know...

Today at Macworld Apple announced what has been discussed and speculated to death on every blog and major publication, their iPhone.  Ok, so let's talk about who is going to buy one.  Honestly I'll probably buy one for Ellen.  She has been wanting a new phone since her Motorola phone is showing wear and she still uses the iBook I bought her several years ago.  We also have Cingular and we are due an upgrade (although I don't know what the upgrade price will be).  I am not happy about the lack of 3G.  How can you release a new...

The other day I posted an article about how the Xbox 360 was one upgrade away from taking over my living room.  It looks like I get my wish!  At CES an announcement was made which will provide Xbox owners the ability to watch live TV and record live TV.  Obviously someone else agreed with my post at Microsoft and they threw this together real quick.  I'm kidding of course, but this is extremely cool.  Instead of me telling you all about it just go watch the video on http://on10.net. Key points: Available holiday 07 Added a new...

I started using FeedBurner.Com to power the RSS feeds for my blog and I am quite happy in doing so.  I like the stats they provide and the guidance they provide on various tweaks to the feed without having to re-code anything.  One of the items I added to the RSS feed and to the site is FeedFlare.  FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each entry which allows people to distribute the entry to other sites or to inform other users of an entry. Step 1:  Configure your FeedBurner account for your blog This may seem pretty obvious, but at the risk...

I've only had my Xbox 360 for a few weeks and since I got it I've been spending quite a bit of time with it.  In my usual geek curiosity fashion I've been going through every single screen, menu and configuration option.  I've played games on Xbox Live, downloaded new arcade games for free from Xbox Live, and even rented a movie (Mission Impossible III) by downloading it with some Microsoft points from the Xbox Marketplace.  I even connected it to my Media Center running Vista and streamed live TV and watch some recorded shows.  It then started to hit me.  The Xbox is an upgrade...

I was going through my news feeds this morning and stumbled across this article about securing web services.  The article is short and doesn't give any examples of one of the methods I use a lot.  I thought I would elaborate on one of the topics it touches on which is securing a web service with a Username and a Password.  While there are other ways to secure web services I find this particular method works really well when dealing with internal systems that may not speak .Net.  It is also simple to implement on both sides.  These systems could be in...

In many circles today I would be considered what the community refers to as a blogger.  Seven years ago though, we didn't really have a name for it except an online journal maybe.  For those of us that had our own personal web site we just called it "cool" and thought of it as another feather in our never ending geek hats.  Back in the day (late 1999 and early 2000) those of us fortunate enough to have the know how to program and do system administration were posting news to our personal web sites hoping someone would stop by and ultimately leave us a comment...

Your results:You are Iron Man Iron Man 95% Spider-Man 90% The Flash 85% Superman 75% Catwoman 75% Green Lantern 70% Supergirl 45% Wonder Woman 35% Robin 30% Hulk 30% Batman 20% Inventor. Businessman. Genius. Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test   What's funny about the results above...

Since I recently migrated all of my blogs to SubText, I wanted to make sure that anyone visiting the old links on my Wordpress blog were automatically redirected to the new location of all the past articles.  I have been blogging "on record" since April of 2000.  By "on record" I mean that I still have the posts going back that far within this blog.  That's almost seven years!  Obviously there is a lot of content and things are linked from all over the Internet.  Trying to minimize the move damage here is what I did to redirect the old blog URLs to the...

Friday before Christmas Ellen and I drove up to Corinth to my Mom's house.  Corinth isn't all that big, about a 1/4 of the size of the town we live in now, so it is sorta like going back in time if you know what I mean.  Life slows down tremendously when I go back home.  The nephews and nieces are about the only thing that keep things interesting.  I do enjoy going back to the area where I grew up.  I know all the back roads and every mile or so reminds me of another story.  Either about friends or college mostly. ...

Awhile back I mentioned playing around with SubText and DasBlog, two open source blogging engines written in .Net.  After several weeks of further investigation I decided to migrate to SubText.  The decision was pretty easy in the end since SubText works with .Net 2.0 and appears to be somewhat architected the way I tend to do stuff.  That coupled with the pretty active email list made the choice easier. There are some features that it doesn't have that I wish it did.  For the features it doesn't have I hope to be able to contribute them to the project. Before today I had two...