The MS newsgroups are one of the best (and most underutilized) resources for .NET developers.

MS have launched a search engine for em- I'm still a big fan of Google groups but this offeres an alternative...

I got a mention in Computer World this week!... Ya me!

*grins*... I got my Mugshot on the cover last year too

Nic and I are tied for 3 mentions a piece at the moment... Lukas is kicking our asses...

Well, I've got many hours on many forms of transport over the next couple of weeks so here's what's going on my Tablet...

Some back issues (and the April issue) of MSDN Mag in CHM format.... How cool is this! Free mags!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/backissues.aspx

Many episodes of TopGear that I have yet to see.....

MapPoint 2004 - So I don't get lost...

IDevNews is reporting in a bit of detail on what's going to be in CF 2.0

http://www.idevnews.com/IntegrationNews.asp?ID=105

• MSMQ
• New WinForms controls
• Performance (up to 300% faster against SQL CE)

Been a busy couple of days for me... was in Auckland yesterday doing some architecture consulting with a client and then another crazy day today making sure my team have enough to keep them out of mischief while I sun myself in Hawaii and Redmond (OK, maybe only Hawaii).

But here is some linkorama to keep the wolf from the door.

Service Oriented Architecture Design Tools in Whidbey

Russell Brown and Nic Wise on the moves to shedule BZP.

Brighthand has all the new mobile 'toys' coming along....

Blog meets Bit Torrent

Finally..... WTF is up with Passport at the moment....

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/mar04/03-17PMCSyncEuropePR.asp

Microsoft Corp. today announced at CeBIT 2004 that leading European entertainment companies EMI Music and Napster LLC will support Microsoft Windows Mobile (TM) -based Portable Media Centers, an exciting new category of handheld devices created for people who want to enjoy their digital movies, recorded television, photos and music on the go. Microsoft also announced at the show that hardware manufacturers Creative Technology Ltd. and iRiver International will make Portable Media Centers available in Europe by the end of this year.

What sort of cool applications are we going to see on these?

I hope some ship with Firewire so I can plug in my DV cam and do edits while travelling light.

Casey Chesnut has posted about the MSMobiles MVP league table...

Specifically he says

i'm linking this because i doubt anybody else has the balls to

Well.... I posted my thumbs down a few days ago *grins*. I'm defn. keen to have a beer with Casey @ the MVP summit if he's there though?

In yet another case of 'oh dear I forgot that word stamps every revision', the California AG has been publishing letters passed across the desk of the MPAA.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001775.shtml

In yet another case of 'oh dear I forgot that word stamps every revision', the California AG has been publishing letters passed across the desk of the MPAA.

http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/001775.shtml

Harvey Silvergate has a very well researched and very well written article outlining the real threat being posed to fundamental liberty in the US today. It is long- took me about 20 mins to read- but well worth it.

I've bitten the bullet and decided to start being better about source control in my business- we're a .NET only (pretty much) dev shop building Smart Client and Smart Device applications mainly for the electricity services industry. Up until now I've been using some rudimentary batch scripts for backup but haven't really been as diligent as I should be. With more people coming on board (more on this another post soon) I've decided to use Subversion for source management.

I had 3 basic contenders for my source management solution.

1. CVS
2. VSS
3. Subversion

I have used VSS before and it is a DAWG! Sorry Korby, but it really is. They reckon that they are going to fix it but IMHO they would be better to throw the sullied name out and start afresh... CVS comes with a bit too much historical baggage for me. So, I decided to wait for Subversion- so far it looks good- good GUI support, merge based, easy branching... that's about all I'd really ask for in source control... oh! It's free too..... as in free beer not free software i.e. it is Apache licensed not GPL licensed... *refrains from ranting on the GPL* 

I installed it this evening and here's a quick tour of what I did in case you are doing it and can learn from some of the stuff I did.

1. Downloaded
   Subversion http://subversion.tigris.org/ (the windows installer version)
   TortoiseSVN http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ (free as in 'free software')this is a nice Explorer integrated GUI
   AnkhSVN http://ankhsvn.tigris.org/(free as in beer) this is a plugin for VS.NET
2. Ran the Subversion installer
3. Decided that I wanted to use the built in Subversion server rather than installing Apache on my box. But the built in SVN server is a simple daemon... so I decided to download FireDaemon (not free but a trial version available) to run the server.
4. Created a repository.... svnadmin.exe create e:\sourcerepository
5. Got the server running against the repository by creating a FireDaemon service to run
   svnserve -d -r e:\sourcerepository
6. Found out that I needed to run the service with certain rights- namely log on as a service (duh!) so I used Local System (reconfigured my FireDaemon service)
7. Gave Local System read/write/modify permission on my repository
8. Configured the repository configuration file for security in %repository%/conf
9. Tested it using Tortoise just by going to Repo-Browser and creating a new folder in the repository.

I found that the most useful document for setting up on my Windows box was the TortiseSVN documentation- it was VERY helpful and easy to read and ran through pretty much the whole lot... I found the Subversion docs a bit too Unixie (I wouldn't know a Linux box from a bar of soap).

I'll post more as things go along....

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html

“Check this shit out (Fig. 1). That's bonafide, 100%-real data, my friends. I took it myself over the course of two weeks. And this was not a leisurely two weeks, either; I busted my ass day and night in order to provide you with nothing but the best data possible. Now, let's look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don't. I see a bunch of crap.
      Christ, this was such a waste of my time.
      Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.”

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/03/14.html#a7010

”The way to fight hate speech is by pointing it out. This is a marketplace of ideas. Sometimes the ideas are rotten. That's what a lot of countries, and people don't get. The way to get rid of bad ideas is to point them out. Not ban them.”

'nuff said!

A consortium of communications companies including Nokia, Vodafone, Microsoft and Orange, are asking that ICANN approve its application for a mobile-phone oriented top level domain.

News report here.  Slashdot rumination here.

Calder.mobile from the Guggenheim depicted above.

[via TrademarkBlog]

Make Services Idempotent
http://weblogs.asp.net/ramkoth/archive/2004/03/12/88423.aspx

Legacy Applications
http://weblogs.asp.net/ramkoth/articles/88778.aspx

MS are doing a roadshow security summit in Akl, Wel and Chc at the end of April. I'll be there wearing my presenters hat so make sure that you come up and say hi.

http://blogs.msdn.com/PAndrew/archive/2004/03/13/88762.aspx