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• Heading to TechEd

  Posted: 08 May 2009 at 11:59 by Darren Stokes

  I’ll be heading to TechEd North America this weekend.  This year it is in Los Angeles.  It has been quite a while since I’ve been there so I’m really looking forward to it.  Hopefully the flu scare and the economy (and associated budget cuts) won’t cut down attendance too drastically.

• Houston ALT.NET Coding Dojo on TDD - May 7, 2009

  Posted: 28 Apr 2009 at 15:54 by Darren Stokes

  J.P. Hamilton has organized a Coding Dojo that will cover TDD.  It will be held at the Microsoft offices in Houston at 6pm on May 7th.  Space is limited to 40 participants so sign up early if you want to attend.

• Announcing Reference Assistant 1.0

  Posted: 27 Apr 2009 at 17:16 by Darren Stokes

  The product I have been working on, Reference Assistant, was released a few weeks ago.  Reference Assistant is an extension for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 (and soon 2010).  In short, the goal of the product is cut down the time spent debugging runtime errors due to missing dependencies or errors in configuration. Here [...]

• Watch out for those WaitOne() overloads (when you need backwards compatibility)

  Posted: 31 Mar 2009 at 01:25 by Darren Stokes

  Recently I was writing some new functionality that ran work on background threads.  The functionality isn’t that important but one of the classes I was using to get the correct behavior was AutoResetEvent.  Specifically the AutoResetEvent.WaitOne() method. Since I really don’t use this class very often, I relied on intellisense to give the list of method [...]

• Houston ALT.NET Conference coming in April

  Posted: 02 Feb 2009 at 13:36 by Darren Stokes

  Ben Scheirman has announced that he is putting together a Houston ALT.NET Conference and it will be held at the Microsoft Offices the weekend of April 3-5, 2009.  It will follow the Open Spaces format and it should be good based on my prior history with these sorts of events. The event will be free to [...]

• Impressions of Win7 Beta Upgrade from Vista Ultimate SP1

  Posted: 12 Jan 2009 at 16:45 by Darren Stokes

  Over this past weekend, I upgraded a laptop from Vista Ultimate SP1 to the new Windows 7 Beta (both 64-bit).  I decided to throw caution to the wind and forget the whole VM thing.  The upgrade lasted just under 7 hours but, before you think that might be a long time, the same laptop when [...]

• I Finally Joined Twitter

  Posted: 08 Jan 2009 at 20:31 by Darren Stokes

  After spending time listening to the Virtual ALT.NET Meeting last night, I decided that I needed to go ahead and join Twitter because I was clearly missing out on some interesting community discussion. James Avery had already told me that he found it a great resource, but sometimes I guess I need to hear it from [...]

• Houston TechFest Coming 1/24/09

  Posted: 07 Jan 2009 at 18:50 by Darren Stokes

  The Houston .NET User Group is putting on the second Houston TechFest on January 24 at the University of Houston.  The conference was originally scheduled for the Saturday that Hurricane Ike hit the Houston and Galveston area so this is rescheduled date. Here are several tracks to choose from concentrating on both java and .NET. I was [...]

• Virtual ALT.NET Meeting and Houston Geek Dinner Tonight (1/7/09)

  Posted: 07 Jan 2009 at 18:33 by Darren Stokes

  Chad Myers announced that there is VAN (Virtual ALT.NET Meeting) tonight.  It is hosted on Live Meeting. I’ve been wanting to attend one of the Houston Geek Dinners for the Houston ALT.NET group but I keep missing them.  The next geek dinner is tonight and, unfortunately, I am going to miss this one as well.  However [...]

• IconLover - my icon tool of choice

  Posted: 08 Nov 2008 at 18:56

  I am absolutely terrible at editing graphics.  There are things in life that I am good at and the task of creating graphics for my applications is simply not one of them.  I’ve been in a continual search for an image editing program that makes the task easy for me.  Most of the time, I [...]

• D2Sig in Houston

  Posted: 08 Nov 2008 at 16:47

  This past Thursday, I attended the first meeting of the D2Sig in Houston.  The D2 stands for "Developer 2 Designer" and the group will be focused on the XAML technologies of WPF and Silverlight as well as any area where developers and designers might need to work more closely than they hav

• ToolStripComboBox Drop Down Sizing

  Posted: 02 Aug 2008 at 22:41 by Darren Stokes

  This last night I worked on a bug where I had a ToolStripComboBox in a Visual Studio custom tool window that holds a list of files but would cut off the filenames in the dropdown list if the paths became too long. Easy enough to fix, or so I thought. After trying out about all of [...]

• I have a confession: I sort of like Vista

  Posted: 25 Jul 2008 at 13:36 by Darren Stokes

  Apparently Microsoft has revived the marketing tactics of Folder’s Instant Coffee from back in the 80’s. According to this article on cnet news, folks from the MS marketing team have been rounding up Vista skeptics under the guise that they will be shown a new OS code named Mojave. All o

• Server Room Craziness

  Posted: 24 Jun 2008 at 15:42 by Darren Stokes

  A funny post over at The Daily WTF reminded me of a situation I witnessed many years ago at a small client I was working for. Like the situation described in the post, the client needed to move the door to the server room. I can’t even remember why but they were moving the door from [...]

• I Need to Try Firefox

  Posted: 25 May 2008 at 18:08 by Darren Stokes

  I was looking over the traffic profile for the last week on this site and was surprised at the share of traffic that Firefox had. Firefox - 55.4% Mozilla Compatible Agent - 10.99% IE (what I have been using) - 8.7% Safari - 7.18% Opera - 3.18% Mozilla - 3.16% Everything else was bots and various rss

• Do you really need to know C? I think so.

  Posted: 22 May 2008 at 16:09 by Darren Stokes

  I’ve been following the podcasts that Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have been doing for StackOverflow. The podcasts are not really technical in nature, in fact they really do not have anything to do with what will ultimately be the purpose of the site they are building. They are more documentin

• Updated ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview Released

  Posted: 11 Apr 2008 at 02:52 by Darren Stokes

  Scott Guthrie announced the availability of a new preview of the ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality. The idea behind this functionality is that you can generate a fully functional application based upon a LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities model. This reminds me a lot of the Naked Objects Framework fro

• Unity Application Block 1.0 has been released

  Posted: 05 Apr 2008 at 18:29 by Darren Stokes

  The Unity Application Block version 1.0 has been released and is available on CodePlex here. A good overview of the configuration of Unity was written by Matthew Podwysocki. The xml configuration is a little unique compared to other DI containers. I plan on adding support for the xml configuration t

• Heading to VSLive

  Posted: 21 Mar 2008 at 12:45 by Darren Stokes

  Next week, I’ll be heading to VSLive. The pre-conference workshops actually begin Sunday, March 30, but I will be arriving a few days early for a short vacation with the family for Spring Break. If you are going to be there and want to meet up, reply to this post or send me an email. Also, if

• Mono 2.0 (.Net 2.0 compatible) is coming soon

  Posted: 13 Mar 2008 at 13:58 by Darren Stokes

  According to Redmond Developer News, the beta of Mono 2.0 will be available for download Friday March 14. Mono is an open source implementation of the .Net CLR and libraries and runs on many platforms, including OSX, Windows, and Linux. I am a little mystified as to why a developer would target Mono