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January 30, 2004

Moneyball

I finished listening to Moneyball a few days ago. It was a pretty good book. Pretty interesting how the A's have been able to field a competitive team with such little cash and how what you think is important in baseball really doesn't have that big of an effect on the game. Overall, not great but it wasn't to long and was a neat combination of the scientific method, objectivity vs. subjectivity, statistics, and baseball.

On a side note, it would be interesting to run some sabermetric like statistics on all the data gathered from SWOOSH.

Posted by mikel at 10:03 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2004

.NET Compact Framework talk

Here's where you can download a zip file with the presentation and Google web service example from tonight's StudentDev talk on the .NET compact framework.

Posted by mikel at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)

Starting a small ISV

More good advice from Eric Sink.

My latest Business of Software column is now available on the MSDN website.

[Eric.Weblog()]

Posted by mikel at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)

1 GB SD card

Very cool, but kind of expensive with a suggested retail of $499.

http://www.sandisk.com/corporate_press.html [Sean Campbell & Scott Swigart's Radio Weblog]

Posted by mikel at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)

January 28, 2004

.NET cf blogs

A couple of MS employees who work on the compact framework now have blogs and Jonathan Wells is giving away a .NET cf library poster.

http://blogs.msdn.com/kevinli/Rss.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/onoj/Rss.aspx

One of the first things that I wanted to do when I joined the .NET Compact Framework Team was to create a .NET Compact Framework Class Library poster. This has been on my task list for well over a year now. Well I'm pleased to report that I marked this task as complete today.

To celebrate I'm going to send a poster to each of the first 365 (that's around how many days I've been sitting on this project) people that express an interest. If you would like a glossy new .NET Compact Framework poster hanging on your wall then drop me an email (let's keep the blog-waves clear) at dotnetcf@microsoft.com. Let me know what you are doing with the .NET Compact Framework at the same time if you like.

I will also throw in a .NET Compact Framework Starter Kit CD. This CD is simply the .NET Compact Framework portion of the MSDN Mobile and Embedded Application Developer Center on a compact disc; ie it doesn't contain anything that you can't access already on the World Wide Web (WWW). It would make a great coaster though. Or perhaps if you collect enough of them you could combine them together into some type of art piece on your wall - for shizzle ;-).

But wait there's more...

No, actually there's no more. Just a poster and a CD.

[Jono's Blog]

Posted by mikel at 09:36 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2004

StudentDev .NET compact framework and web services talk

I'll be speaking at the first StudentDev meeting of the semester. I'll talk about the basics of developing for the compact framework, specifically covering some web services.

We will have our first meeting of the semester this Thursday night at 7:00 in BRNG 2280. Here's the agenda for this week:

.NETcf and Web Services presentation
Imagine Cup
Microsoft OneNote demo
New MS stuff (SPOT, C# v2.0, etc.)
We will have drinks available for everyone as well as free T-Shirts.

Hope to see you there!

P.S. This event has also been posted on the website http://studentdev.cs.purdue.edu. The site may be down at some point in the very near future as we move to the ITaP domain.

Posted by mikel at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

Purdue vs. Michigan State

Mom and Dad came down to celebrate their anniversary on Sunday to watch the Purdue vs. Michigan State basketball game. It was an exciting game and Purdue won in overtime. Can't beat that. South Street Smokehouse was closed, so we headed to Outback for dinner before the storm came in.

Posted by mikel at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2004

.NET windows forms printing

Looks to be a good resource for printing windows forms. Should be helpful for SWOOSH.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwinforms/html/printwinforms.asp

Posted by mikel at 12:33 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2004

WritePad Translator is a winner

Last week I wrote up a quick little extension to a simple text editor for the weekly StudentDev Challenge. Alex Thaman let me know yesterday that WritePad translator was the winner! The prize is a copy of Microsoft Street and Trips 2004. I wasn't to excited until I found out that it includes a version for the Pocket PC. That should come in handy.

WritePad Translator uses a web service from Borland to translate the text into various languages. My favorites are Eleet, ValSpeak, and Chef (i.e. the Swedish Chef from the Muppets).

I posted the code on the student dev site, if anyone wants to check it out.

Posted by mikel at 10:44 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2004

New stuff I learned today

Trying to get work done on SWOOSH today, but I keep learning new things :)

Some VS .NET shortcuts I just found and I'm sure I'll use all the time.

Comment Selection - Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C
Uncomment Selection - Ctrl+K, Ctrl+U

Another one that I use all the time in the Ctrl+K family is

Format Selection - Ctrl+K, Ctrl+F

Genghis has a browse for folder dialog. I created one for the compact framework awhile back. Then ported it up to the full framework. I'll have to check it out to see which one is better :)

Also learning a lot about printing thanks to Chris Sells' book. Maybe if I stop learning today I'll actually get around to implementing it.

Posted by mikel at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)

Tippecanoe County 4-H Computer Project at the 4-H Expo

We were out at the 4-H Expo last night. Lots of people stopped by to find out about the computer project. Hopefully we'll have even more people in year #2 of the computer project.

Posted by mikel at 08:53 AM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2004

Code Coverage & a good article on unit testing

Code coverage is something else I need to explore in my attempt to improve my software testing capabilities.

Clover is a code coverage analysis tool for Java

Here's a good article on unit testing in .NET. I especially like his analogy to an author writing a novel (automated spell checking in the word processor for the author is akin to unit tests for the developer).

With the recent release of NCover, a shared source .NET code coverage tool, the Nxxx line of .NET development tools is getting pretty impressive:

Have I missed any?

[sellsbrothers.com: Windows Developer News]

Posted by mikel at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)

Ender's Game Review

I finished reading listening to Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card last Friday. Simply put it was an excellent story. The basic premise is that earth is needing to protect itself from another invasion by the alien Buggers. To protect themselves the world is training up the best military they can and six year old Andrew "Ender" Wiggins has been identified as the next leader of this military. So he is sent off to train at battle school.

The story itself is great but there are lots of good underlying themes, knowing yourself, knowing your enemies, and making sure you know who your real enemies really are. There's lots more but you'll just need to read or listen to the book.

Posted by mikel at 08:31 AM | Comments (0)

More mars pictures

Marvin
Starbucks

Jessica found M2K4 from NASA last night. It does look really cool (flash required) but something just seems weird about a government agency having a marketing site that looks like a movie.

Posted by mikel at 07:47 AM | Comments (0)

January 13, 2004

Sam Gentile on .NET Rocks

Sam Gentile is on .NET Rocks and talks about .NET and eXtreme Programming.

A few thoughts and sound bytes as I listen to it.

Pair programming gives you "instant code reviews"

I overheard someone complaining about working in pair programming recently. He was complaining about his partner nagging him about using the down arrow instead of page down. At least as I understand it, not the type of thing your pair programming partner is supposed to help you out with. No wonder lots of people disregard pair programming. I had one course where we were required to program in pairs during labs. Could of been a neat and effective idea, except we were given little background of how it was supposed to work.

"I've had fairly good partners."

I think this is important. Pair Programming sounds like an excellent way for outstanding developers to make each other even better. It seems to me that a lot of the more "traditional" methodologies are an attempt to minimize the effect any one developer has on a project. While they prevent a horrible developer from ruining a project, they also limit an outstanding developers. I think that is the way it is with everything, it is extremely difficult to protect yourself from huge failures without limiting yourself from huge gains. I suppose those traditional methodologies will work better when you ship all your programming overseas (or just outsource in general) when you don't know the developers.

Sam talked about NUnit. I know I've mentioned it several times, but yet again need to check out NUnit for test driven development.

Mark Dunn says "I've tried C++ several times. It made me want to shave a cat." Yeah, he's from the south.

Posted by mikel at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 12, 2004

Another semester - the last one

Today is the start of my last semester. If everything goes according to plan, I'll have a Masters in Technology with a specialization in Information Technology (really my focus has been mobile software development, primarily with .NET) by May.

This semester I'm taking TECH 551 - IT Economics, I am the teaching assistant for CPT 355 - Software Development for Mobile Computers, and will be spending the rest of my time finishing up my directed project, SWOOSH. SWOOSH is software for the Pocket PC and Tablet PC to collect and analyze basketball statistics.

Posted by mikel at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)

January 08, 2004

PowerPoint on steriods

This looks awesome in the hands of professionals. But you thought PowerPoint made you stupid, just think what meetings will be like when the average PHB has this on his desktop.

Screw PowerPoint, I want Stereolize (you'll need Windows Media Player for this, but it'll be worth it).

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

Posted by mikel at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)

SharpToolbox

Looks to be a good resource for .NET development tools. via http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2004/01/new_years_devel.html http://sharptoolbox.madgeek.com/ Also, this is the first post from SharpMT. Testing it out to see if it is better than w.blogger.

Posted by mikel at 10:20 AM

January 02, 2004

Compact Framework Graphics

A helpful article for doing graphics on the .NET Compact Framework. Specifically for SWOOSH was the info on color keying.

http://www.microsoft.com/indonesia/msdn/netcfgaming.asp

Posted by mikel at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)

Windows XP search "broken"

This would explain why I could never find text in C# files. Chris Sells has a fix.

Posted by mikel at 09:22 AM | Comments (0)

January 01, 2004

Quote for the new year

"In times of change learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to work in a world that no longer exists."

http://www.mattberther.com/2003/12/000351.html

Posted by mikel at 10:51 AM | Comments (0)