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Essential ASP.NET 2.0 - copies in hand!

Fritz Onion — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:27:00 GMT

I received a fed-ex package of 6 shiny new books today!

With a box of 18 more coming that I will bring to TechEd Barcelona next week. I'm very pleased with the size, print, and appearance of the final book - kudos to Addison Wesley. I have to say, there's nothing quite like holding the final copy of a book you worked on for so long in your hands...

A technology convergence

Fritz Onion — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:25:00 GMT

I recently had an experience that really made me appreciate the quickly evolving technologies that surround us more and more. I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR (streaming online, of course) and they had a story on a classical improvisational pianist, Gabriela Montero. I had recently subscribed to the Urge music service, where you pay a monthly fixed fee for complete (DRM-restricted) access to all of their content, and was surprised to find that the album they were discussing in the story, Bach and Beyond, was available. I was headed off to the airport for a trip, so I transferred the album to my cell phone's storage card using Windows Media Player 11 beta 2. I then listened to the entire album on my flight with noise cancelling headphones, and really enjoyed the music, especially after having heard the artist interviewed.

I have yet to purchase the album, but when I do it will be in CD form so I can rip it myself and listen to it without fighting DRM 10 years from now :)

Saved by VBRFix

Fritz Onion — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 13:07:00 GMT

So after years of using an Archos Jukebox to listen to my music collection on the go (I had actually ripped out the 20Gig drive that came with it and replaced it with a 60Gig laptop drive to fit it all), it finally died and wouldn't boot up anymore. I did manage to save the hard drive though, which is now living a productive life in Keith's laptop :)

Anyway, I decided to try out the iPod this time around, and picked up the shiny new 60Gig video version. I was pretty happy with it at first, but then I noticed that most of my tracks would end prematurely, which was obviously not acceptable. It turns out that because I had encoded all of my mp3 files using VBR (variable bit rate) to save space and retain quality, the iPod was misreading the format. It apparently looks for a "Xing" header that is no longer used to identify VBR encodings, and if it's not there, it gets the time wrong and chops off the song.

The solution is either to re-rip all of the music (ugh!) or find some program to fix up the header. I tried out VBRFix which claimed to do exactly this, and after a day of letting my computer sit and churn through all my music fixing the headers, I now have an updated collection that plays perfectly on my iPod! Kudos to Will Wap and his handy VBRFix utility - you saved me weeks of re-ripping (or more likely, writing a similar utility myself).

MVP'd again

Fritz Onion — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 10:48:00 GMT

I'm happy to announce that Microsoft has renewed my MVP status for 2006! I think it's a great incentive for Microsoft to run this program, and I'm honored to be chosen again. Maybe this year I'll finally make it to the MVP summit, which I've heard great things about.

17" of snow!

Fritz Onion — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 14:42:00 GMT

Our first major snowstorm of the season hit early this year - we have 17" of snow here in Southern Maine! I can't tell you how hard it is to get work done with a foot and a half of powder calling to you...

KPL

Fritz Onion — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 06:22:00 GMT

I've been looking for a compelling platform to teach my 10-year old daughter programming, and recently came across KPL (Kids Programming Language). It's .NET-based, and has a VB-like syntax, and looks pretty compelling so far. The real advantage that I see is that sprites are first class citizens, so performing animation is very straight-forward. It also comes with a ton of sample applications that run the gamut from a maze generator to a polar coordinate plotting program.

I'm going to port an equation plotter that she and I have written together in C# and let her take over adding new features, which shouldn't be hard with the simplified API KPL exposes.

MSDN Magazine article on ASP.NET 2.0 WebParts

Fritz Onion — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 07:57:00 GMT

Ted Pattison and I wrote a piece on the new WebPart infrastructure in ASP.NET 2.0 for September issue of MSDN magazine. It was chosen as the 'preview' piece so you can actually read it online now at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/05/09/WebParts/default.aspx - enjoy!

New webcast series starting August 4

Fritz Onion — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:05:00 GMT

I'm doing another series of webcasts for MSDN starting August 4. This will be another 15-part series (running all the way to Dec. 1!) this time covering ASP.NET 2.0. You can sign up at http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/essentialaspnet.mspx if you're interested.

Lightning strike

Fritz Onion — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 14:26:00 GMT

About a week ago, we had a tremendous thunderstorm here in Southern Maine, and a bolt of lightning hit so close to our house that the typically trailing thunder was nearly instantaneous with the strike. It turns out the lightning struck our toolshed about 20 feet from the house, making a 10 inch diameter hole right through the roof!

The bolt then proceeded to obliterate a cyclocomputer on a hanging bicycle, blasted its way through a boogie board:

and then somehow went into our underground dog fence, exploding the dog fence unit in the garage and frying the garage door openers and fuse. It also surged through the rest of the house, taking out some electronics - mostly network hubs and routers which seem particularly sensitive to voltage spikes. A word to the wise, protect any hardware you care about behind battery backup surge protectors, because everything behind those was unaffected. I can see APC is going to get some more business from me in the near future...

Anyway, thought I'd share - it was pretty intimidating to see what lightning can do up close, and we're grateful the damage was mostly incidental.

TechEd 2005

Fritz Onion — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 06:33:00 GMT

As Keith mentioned, we're having a great time at TechEd this week. We've met lots of folks coming by our booth, been to many great sessions, and had a great many face-to-face meetings with other .NET experts and influencers. I had overflow seating at my asynch processing BOF, and was pleased to find Nikhil Kothari of the ASP.NET team in the audience - we had some great discussion on async pages and tasks.

One of the pieces of swag we're giving out is a temporary tattoo with our logo, and we even managed to convince one attendee to apply it to his forehead, giving him a true 'third eye' :) Unfortunately I didn't have the camera handy at the time...

For those of you that couldn't make it to the conference, here's a shot of us in our booth: