Archive for July, 2007

Speaking at the Indianapolis .NET Developer’s Association

Posted on July 31st, 2007 by aaron
Filed under community, powershell | 5 Comments

I’m speaking on August 9th at the Indianapolis .NET Developer’s Association meeting on Windows PowerShell. If you’re in the neighborhood, come on by! The talk will be geared towards developers, not admins, but hopefully it will help us (devs) think more about them (admins) when we’re designing and implementing our applications. That, and there’s [...]

TIP: Create a “new mail” shortcut for Outlook

Posted on July 31st, 2007 by aaron
Filed under tips and tricks, windows | 1 Comment

If you work at a company that’s as email-centric as mine, you’ll find yourself opening the “new mail” window in Outlook quite a bit. Although hopefully not too much – better to be responding to email than initiating new threads, though even that can get out of hand. The fewer people that generate email [...]

Export Blogger Blogs to BlogML with PowerShell

Posted on July 21st, 2007 by aaron
Filed under blogging, powershell | 17 Comments

I’m in the process of moving my blog from Blogger to WordPress, and I’m finding out just how important a project like BlogML really is. Most blog engines will integrate with a select few other engines to allow importing/exporting. What we really need is something just like BlogML – a standard format describing [...]

Indy Code Camp

Posted on July 16th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under code camp, community | 12 Comments

I’ve got what’s probably a crazy idea. I know that a few mid-westerners read this blog–and I mean a literal “few” (3). What if we put on an Indy Code Camp? I’m not talking about the marketing/PR “code camp” they tried to do recently (*scoff*) but an honest-to-goodness code camp.
I think it’s nuts. I [...]

A humble WCF feature request (or four)

Posted on July 16th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under rest, wcf | 4 Comments

Since Steve Maine’s excellent and informative blog appears to be down tonight, I’m posting my request here for all to see.  I’d like to see two things for WCF in .NET 3.5.
First is response message encoding specified per service operation.  If we’re really creating a RESTful service, then it makes sense to be able to [...]

Mac: Parallels or Fusion?

Posted on July 9th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under mac | Comments Off

I recently purchased a MacBook Pro. So far, I’m really enjoying my experience. The first computer I used was a Mac – my dad bought a Mac Plus when it first came out (and has never used a windows machine since), and I have fond memories of the two of us sitting at [...]

Creating Comet applications with ASP.NET

Posted on July 8th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under asp.net | 32 Comments

Sometimes it’s useful to hijack a particular technology to do something it was never intended to do. Comet does exactly that, and it’s not for the faint of heart. In a nutshell, “Comet-style” applications use features of the HTTP request-response communication model to morph it into a streaming context whereby the server can [...]

First impressions of the new Microsoft product packaging

Posted on July 6th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under microsoft | Comments Off

Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 have been released for a while now, but I finally got around to purchasing a retail version so I can use them at home (in addition to my MSDN/volume license versions at work). The packaging looks very sleek and “mac-like”. Nevermind that trying to stack them [...]