For those of you that aren't involved at all with open source software the Mono project is an open source effort to run .Net applications on various platforms.  About Mono If you watch Miguel from Novell speak about the Mono project the main reason they started it is to be able to open up more application to the Linux platform.  One way to do this is to write them from scratch.  The other is to use what is already out there.  Linux has browsers, music players and is good at server protocols but lacks productivity business entrenched applications (I'm not talking about openoffice,...

One of the engineers that works on the same team I work on blogged about his trials and tribulations of using Enterprise Library 3.0 with Environmental Overrides.  Last week I checked in Enterprise Library 3.0 into team foundation server and he got assigned the task of re-configuring all of our config files to use the new feature of environmental overrides.  Currently we have test, beta and prod environments for our main application so this was something we thought we could immediately benefit from.  His review it turns out is less than shiny based on how environmental overrides were done in EntLib...

I posted the other day about WPF/E being renamed to Silverlight.  As I was writing the post, I thought to myself, hey I know a guy named David Silverlight that I met at the MVP Summit this year.  We chatted over a glass of Guinness, exchanged cards, then later emails.  I thought about David immediately when I heard they renamed WPF/E.   I didn't give it any further thought though.  Nah, they wouldn't name a product after him. Turns out WPF/E was in fact named after David!  Holy cow, he had a product named after him.  David has a post on...

Mix 07 is getting ready to heat up in a few weeks and there have been rumors floating around about Mix 07.  Mainly that it is going to shock a lot of people with some of the cross platform announcements coming out of it (OS X users pay attention).  It seems today we get our first official taste in preparation for Mix 07 and that is WPF/E is now known as Silverlight.  The name doesn't make me jump up and down but like Shawn said, it beats something like "Microsoft Enterprise Web Visualization Media Platform 2007" or something like that.   ...

Actually the title of this post isn't even fair.  The reason I am posting on these two topics is I have known for a long time that I wasn't a Ruby on Rails fan.  I like the concepts and have played with Ruby a bit but I never bought into it.  It is fairly common place that everyone knows it is slow.  I even watched a video today of Miguel presenting on Mono (the open source .Net framework) and he even made fun of Ruby and its speed.  Today I ran into two very different scenarios through different means. One was a good...

Saturday was the Alabama Code Camp in Mobile, AL.  Doug and Matt, who run the Mobile .Net User Group, put on a heck of a show and raised the bar for code camps in the area.  I couldn't believe how many speakers were there.  So many in fact there was only enough room for the majority of us to do one talk.  Speakers came in from as far away as Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi.  Friday night the speakers got together at Felix's Fish Camp off exit 27 on I-10.  I had the barbeque shrimp which came complete with a bib (pictured to...

I'm a Software Engineer so it is easy for me to work from home.  Give me a high speed Internet connection, VPN into the office, forward my calls and I can work.  I've been working at home now for almost two years.  When I first started working remote from Hattiesburg I didn't know how things would work out.  But after several months I got into a really nice routine.  One of the things I noticed initially was I am WAY more productive than working in the office.  I gained anywhere from 1-2 hours of chair time each day by not having to...

I was setting up an internal blog site at my company today where developers and engineers can post blog entries.  After SubText was installed on the site I went to setup Live Writer.  This is the defacto blog editing tool I use for my blog and I was going to use it on the internal blog.  When I went to setup the Weblog in Live Writer, IIS was configured with Integrated Authentication turned on (even though SubText uses forms authentication) and I got an error when configuring the blog of 401 unauthorized.  Obviously Live Writer wasn't passing my windows credentials and this...

Alfred Green who does a Podcast show called AG Speaks interviewed me a month or so ago and he finally got the Podcast posted up to his site.  I've known Alfred for several years where we first initially met at the Washtenaw Linux Users Group in the late '90's.  The interview will probably give you more information about The Elder than you'll ever want to know.  I've always found it interesting to know how people came to do what they do and the thought process that went into it.  This interview will provide you a lot of that information.  We...