This is just soooooooooooooo cool.  Not just the whole solar sail thing.. that’s incredibly cool in itself, something that seemed like science fiction only not that long ago.  But if that wasn’t cool enough, how”s this: the spacecraft is to be launched form a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea, using a converted intercontinental […]

  I got to admit, when I read code if it’s not in Courier New, it seems to take longer to register as code.  I need my Courier New.  But that doens’t mean I’m happy with it.  I dislike it’s lower case L , l and it’s 1.  It’s 1 should be like Arial’s, and […]

  The  former creature house that was absrobed by Microsoft is now into it’s first Beta, and you can try it out till October 1st.  (note: download requires passport login) Oh, did I mention the Beta is Free     BTW: Does anyone remember “PhotoDraw” and “Liquid Motion” ?  I wonder how long they’ll keep […]

  Outstanding !!    I’m not sure if I have this correct, but it sounds like with the Free version of Visual Studio (aka Visual Studio Express),  you can use the Free version of SQL 2005 (aka SQL Express), and have nice cool SQL server reporting goodness !!!    

so there’s statistics, statistics and …..    I;m not sure how much I beleive these two articles I saw today, but they sure are both impressive statistics.  The XML one does look pretty beleivable as it shows java *was* better than .NET 1.1, but now .NET 2.0 rulez .   Comparing XML performance http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/java/compare/xmlperf/default.aspx   […]

  When working with generics, there will be times you want to “clear” a variable reference, eg set it to null.  In Vb.NET you can simply assign the value of Nothing, eg:   Dim x as T   x = Nothing   This works perfectly for all types of T, be it a Structure, a […]

  In case you haven’t seen this,  at TechED this year some of the RD’s are putting together GrokTalks which are 10 minute “micro-presentations”.    It should be interesting.      And the best news is the videos will be available on the web too

Roy Osherove quotes a recent conversation he had :   “Before we get started, do you know what ‘Legacy Code’ means? It’s code that works”.        

yesterday I posted a bit of code that was checkign to see if a string was whitespace only.  Let’s assume the assumption I made was correct, that checkign the middle of the string then spreading out in each direction is the best way of doing that.    So the code I worte yesterday had some […]

Last week Geoff and I were chatting and Geoff threw this bit of code past me: If (someString & “”).Trim().Length > 0 Then And so the discussion began There’s lots of interesting quirks about dealing with Strings, not just from a VB perspective. I think I’ll have to consider writing up a lot of information […]