I was so looking forward to trying Vista on my Toshiba M200.  Unfortunately, despite all attempts it wouldn’t upgrade. Problems I encountered were not enough room on my system partition.  It’s only 2GB and designed for booting/loading various OS’s. Annoying, but I was able to clear enough space on there. Next install complained about a […]

the following is the code for the custom SettingsProvider from Geoff and mine’s TechEd 2006 presentation:   Option Strict On Option Explicit On   Imports System Imports System.Configuration   ”’ <summary> ”’ simple example of a SetitngsProvider that saves each individual setting in it’s own file ”’ </summary> ”’ <remarks>to use, add a setitng to My.Settigns designer, open the properties window ”’ and set the provider to FileByFileSettingsProvider if in the same project, otherwise the full name. ”’ </remarks> Public Class FileByFileSettingsProvider    Inherits SettingsProvider   #Region “constructor and initialize”      Public Sub New()       MyBase.new()    End Sub      Public Overrides Sub Initialize(ByVal name As String, ByVal config As System.Collections.Specialized.NameValueCollection)       If name Is Nothing Then name = My.Application.Info.ProductName       m_appName = name       MyBase.Initialize(m_appName, config)    End Sub      Private m_appName As String      Public Overrides Property ApplicationName() As String       Get          Return m_appName       End Get       Set(ByVal value As String)          m_appName = value       End Set      End Property […]

This is cool!   David Tarditi and Sidd Puri are doing some really cool work over in Microsoft Research. They’ve built a development technology, Accelerator, that  “provides a high-level data-parallel programming model as a library that is available for all .Net programming languages. The library translates the data-parallel operations on-the-fly to optimized GPU pixel shader code […]

Despite catching a cold from the moment I landed in Sydney, and a terrible tips and tricks presentation, TechEd 2006 was a lot of Fun.  First let’s see how it went on the “reasons to TechEd” evaluator:   (1) the shirts :  Well all I saw was all cotton, so things are potentially looking good […]

In my earlier post, I showed how Static local variables in VB are basically local variables that get promoted to class level fields.   What I didn’t mention was the way initializers are handled on Static variables.  Take for example if I modified the code from the previous post, to include an initializer for the variable […]

I was just reading Julia Lerman’s blog about static variables in VB.  Sadly I think Julia has had it wrong, so let me try to explain.  First let’s start with some rules:   static variables can be used only inside methods. This includes Properties, Subs and Functions. the method can be instance method Or Shared […]

Download the ADO.NET Entity Framework August CTP from here:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b68f6f53-ec87-4122-b1c8-ee24a043bf72&DisplayLang=en  

Dave Lem shows his Tech Ed T-shirt flair, Geoff asks him to include reality in the sizes, but of course the big question is:  Is it all cotton or a poly blend ? Remember poly blends are an indication of something wrong in the big house 😉   Speaking of T’s, the nice people at […]

A while ago, my old friend Patrick Meader (who must never read my blog) **complained** to me that I needed to fill in my About page on this blog as it is almost impossible to tell who’s blog this is.  The title of the blog just says “@Head : Bill’s random thoughts”.      Then today, I […]

Paul “open sores” Stovell continues the TehcEd session picker war.   In a desperate attempt to get the basic functionality working, Paul “someone please help me” Stovell has called on outside help. (1) Philip Beadle describes how to get it working on the latest CTP, and warns people that the added entries don’t display. LOL. […]