November 2005 - Posts
Are you one of the poor schmoes who has to fill out time tracking reports every week? Do you work on dozens of different tasks every day and continuously forget to write down what you are working on every time you make a change? How would you like a product to help you fill out your status reports without you having to remember to write things down as you go along?
Check out this tool: www.timesnapper.com
At the Visual Studio 2005 launch event, Jim Wooley and I were discussing the Time Snapper - a tool which will take screenshots of your desktop periodically through the day and then show them to you so you can remember what you were working on and when. It's a completely free tool and it seems to fit in perfectly with the way I used to fill out my status reports. I'd frequently forget to use any tool to mark when I was changing tasks and I'd end up reviewing my VSS check-ins, e-mails and IM conversations to piece together my day. Looking at screenshots of what I was actually working on would actually be so much more helpful!
Of course, now I work in an environment where it's not required that I track my time. However, I think I'm going to use the tool to track my productivity. I bet I'll find that I spend too much time in e-mail and IM conversations...
-- Matt Ranlett
So the company I work for sells CDs and DVDs in stores, mostly in malls. I work at the corporate headquarters, which is in the same building as the warehouse. My major function here is to support the IT that keeps the warehouse humming. Earlier today I wandered back through the shelves toward the warehouse manager to chat about something when I came across a pallet of Xbox 360s! Right here in my building!
It turns out that we've already sold 70 of them in stores around the country, but we're doing the best business online. One of the sub-companies owned by my company is selling the next-gen consoles on Ebay for $800 a pop and up! Can you imagine 100% markup on physical, non-perishable goods? That's astonishing these days!
-- Matt Ranlett
I spent most of my time in the Community booths with Jim Wooley and Douglas McDowell, smack in the middle of the vendors and too close to the coffee for my health. I must have downed five cups o' joe while I talked to a huge percentage of the 2100 people in attendance. I had a great time talking to some really interesting people - look for some great stuff to come out of the new DotNetNuke user group in town. I gave the leader Josh some of my module ideas, so I hope he'll do all the hard work for me. I think traffic on the DevCow website will spike from the volume of people checking out the calendar.
Everyone I talked to had nothing but great things to say about the content they were hearing and about the free shirts and software they were getting from Microsoft. The vendors around me had some great giveaways and everyone who got their card stamped by 10 vendors (for the mere price of future spam) got to be entered in a drawing where the grand prize was an Xbox (not a 360). Dan told me they badly mis-pronounced his name when they called it out (they said something like 'Tony')...
-- Matt Ranlett
If you like PodCasts and if you like BizTalk check out the new BizTalk PodCasts.
http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/evaluation/podcasts.mspx
—Brendon Schwartz
Las Monday was the C# User Group. 32 people showed up to hear Dan Attis present CodeRush and Mitch Harpur present Custom Remoting Contexts. Both did a great job and were very informative. One of these days, Dan will get through all the features of CodeRush in a 30 minute demo! Mitch always does a great job and has some awesome technical content in his presentations.
Last Friday I got together with some friends and we watched Zathura - the new movie from the same folks who did Jumanji. The movie was a lot of fun to watch - possibly more so than Jumanji itself. Very neat effects. Not a whole lot of plot here, but the movie was highly entertaining.
Last Sunday a friend of mine in the UK, Phill Bowden, helped deliver his first-born son - Augustine Aldhelm Hiroshi. Congratulations Phill!
-- Matt Ranlett
Sony had been planning a PlayStation 3 focused central online service to compete with XBox Live, but news as of late last week is that this has been dropped. That's too bad for prospective PlayStation 3 owners. In my opinion, XBox Live is the best thing about the Xbox, adding so much value to each and every Live enabled game that I no longer consider buying ANY game if it's not Live enabled. No matter how great a game is on it's own or with a friend sitting next to you, nothing beats the advantage a game offers when you can log on and play instantly against any of thousands of thinking competitors at any time of day or night. I hear that with the coming version of the Xbox, Xbox 360, every game is going to feature Live gameplay. I don't know if that's a rumor or not, but it's very exciting to consider as it shows that developers are recongnizing not only a trend among game purchases, but the possibility of selling future addons for existing games. Personally, if my favorite game offered a $5 expansion pack, I'd probably purchase it without thinking. This could enlarge revenue pipelines for game developers and deliver significant value to casual gamers like myself.
I can't wait to get my hands on an Xbox 360 and some of the great titles they've got coming out!
-- Matt Ranlett
Chris Wallace and I were talking about ASP.Net development and HTML standards compliance. Guess what? We think we found a problem (very minor, but still) in the new VS2k5 IDE. Chris posted a great writeup on his blog. Stay tuned to his blog for a fix.
-- Matt Ranlett
Did you do something like I just did? I'd just gotten VS2005 installed on my work machine and I wanted to set it up as a web developer environment, but I'd accidentally chosen general. Looking for how to change this? Check this link for details on how to fix this mistake: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f1z20s6z(en-US,VS.80).aspx Notice that this also allows you to export your settings so the development manager can create the environment for the entire team base on one machine's settings. Great for standardization in a multi-developer environment.
-- Matt Ranlett