Where’s my cow poke, cowboy hat and cowboy boots?  I need to wrestle them up because I’m going to Oklahoma City!  While in town I’ll be speaking at two different .Net meetings on Monday June 1st.  Due to a crazy flight schedule and two speaking engagements, one Monday at lunch and another that night, I’ll be arriving on Sunday evening if anyone wants to get together at Bricktown for some dinner.  You can find me easily on Twitter to find out where I’m at and what’s going on while I’m traveling:  http://twitter.com/keithelder This will be my...

I was sitting at the computer late on Sunday trying to catch up on work from being gone all weekend when an email came into my inbox. It was marked “URGENT” and was giving off a vibe of panic.  Myself and several other INETA speakers from the South were asked to step in for a fellow INETA speaker who had to cancel an engagement.  Baton Rouge is only a 2.5 hour drive away from me so I stepped in.  Maybe someone will step in when I am in need one day. At any rate, I will be speaking in...

http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-31-being-dynamic-about-ironpython-with-harry-pierson-ndash-part-1/  http://deepfriedbytes.com/podcast/episode-32-being-dynamic-about-ironpython-with-harry-pierson-ndash-part-2/   In this episode we sat down with Harry Pierson, Program Manager on the Visual Studio languages team.  Harry loves IronPython and dynamic languages as is a wealth of information.  We get the scoop on tons of IronPython stuff including a discussion on how Microsoft handles an open source project like IronPython.  We even threw in a rusty washers segment.  Two shows you certainly don’t want to  miss!

If I am sitting at my computer I have music playing.  I used to not be so bad about having to have music playing.   But lately I can’t stand the silence, I have to have some type of noise (I know many developers share the same sentiment).  Since I need music to work and my wife needs silence to work, I kept having to swap from speakers to headphones.  This was a problem, until Windows 7. The standard household ritual goes something like this: ME Singing: “…. you give love…. a BAD NAME…” Wife:  “…stop singing I’m...

It is May and that means Crawfish are in season down South.  It is one of these things we just do down here and if you’ve never had crawfish before I hope you’ll get a chance to experience it one day.  This past weekend I cooked a sack of crawfish along with an assortment of vegetables in the mix and they turned out fantastic.  Well, I thought they were fantastic but some of my friends thought they were on the tad spicy side.  Oh well, you can’t please everyone right?   Too me the vegetables are...

There are very few pieces of software that I hate to install.  QuickTime from Apple is at the top of the list.  I can’t honestly think of a single good thing to say about QuickTime.  But no matter how much I dislike having yet another tray icon and getting annoyed by software updates I had to install QuickTime.  At least until Windows 7!  The camera I purchased back last year only made movies in .MOV format and for me it was a major drawback of the camera.  So much so I rarely found myself using it and...

I thought I had everything tested after my recently Windows 7 RC upgrade this weekend and was ready for work this morning.  One thing I didn’t actually test was getting my work development VM on the Internet or VPN.  Turns out I had a problem with the network drivers in VMWare. Here’s the lovely error I got when I tried to enable the network card on the VM. "The virtual network drivers on the host are incompatible with the installed VMWare application. Expected version 5. Please reinstall the product. Virtual device Ethernet0 will start disconnected."...

Glad you asked.  I finally got around to installing Windows 7 RC this morning.  The only hardware related problem I had during my upgrade was my Microsoft VX-6000 LifeCam.  When I ran the compatibility check during the upgrade Window 7 told me to uninstall the software for the LifeCam.  I stopped the upgrade and uninstalled the LifeCam software and then restarted the upgrade.  After the upgrade I was wondering how much of a pain it was going to be to get the camera working again.  The first thing I did was open Devices and Printers.  Notice the new...

I recently built a new machine and when I built it I installed Windows Vista x64.  Windows 7 RC came out this past week and I wanted to install the RC release on my new machine but like everyone else I didn’t want to take the risk installing it only to have a hardware configuration problem.  Not only that but I’d have to reload the whole machine when Windows 7 RTM (release to manufacturer) came out.  But there is hope!  For starters a new tool was released called the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor that checks to see if...

At work we include XSD schemas in our Framework to allow developers to configure their web.config or app.config files and get Intellisense.   This helps to make sure they don’t make mistakes when they are configuring logging or other options for the framework (the same way the .Net Framework provides Intellisense for config files).  The problem is developers had to go to the XML menu of Visual Studio and add the schema by hand each time.  In other words, kind of a pain.  If you’ve never done this before it looks something like this: ...