Uncategorized

Because of (a movie on) Microsofts cool new projects SeaDragon{.} and PhotoSynth{.} (which doesn’t seem to run from behind the firewall over here), I found the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference website{.}. There are some pretty impressive talks to be found there. And some are plain hilarious. There’s one I enjoyed a lot: Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ talk “After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead{.}“. In this talk he compares the internet hype to the 1849 Gold Rush, but goes even further by using more analogies to explain the current state of the internet.

This is my first post using Windows Live Writer Beta 2. I must say, it looks nicer than the first beta (having a Windows Vista-proof UI), but that’s not all… Some of the features that were added are pretty darn cool (auto-ping on post, table editing) or just plain good (use the same window for multiple posts, finally!). I am missing the spelling checker though… My first feeling: this is a pretty big step ahead for Windows Live Writer.

I signed up at technorati recently. Technorati uses ping to get the info from blogs. And BloggingAbout.NET (Community Server) supports that. Or it should… Some posts just don’t show up over there! I’ve searched a little, and saw other people were having trouble with this too. I’ll see if I can find anything and if I do, I’ll forward it to our community administrator.

The past weeks have been busy for me, but especially in the evenings, with the musical I played in and all that… During the day, I had some spare time every now and again, and I wasted most of that on my Xbox 360. … loving it 😉 … XBox Live is getting more and more functionality. On top of that, more and more people are connecting… I’m curious which bloggers/blog-readers game online with their Xbox 360 and which games are played.

I used to think we (people working in software development) were far behind when it came to testing. Due to a few experiences over hte last few weeks this has changed… In waterfall projects, testing is at the end of the process, causing it to be the first thing to go when time gets short. In agile methods, test is evenly divided throughout the process. This combined with the popularity of agile methods make that test is getting more and more mature in software development.

The Visual Studio servicing page is updated: VS 2005 SP1 will ship Q3 of this year. This date seems to have has slipped before, but at least it gives us an estimated time of shipping. Taken from that page: “The types of fixes you can expect to find in this service pack are: The Hotfixes and General Distribution Release Updates (GDRs) released between RTM and the end of the Service Pack customer beta period.

Jan Schreuder blogged about it earlier, and the buzz around Sandcastle is growing… Brenton House posted about Sandcastle last friday, stating that it might have been the day Sandcastle would be released. Unfortunately it wasn’t, so the waiting does not stop yet. It even looks like we might be waiting a little longer: “In addition we plan to include Sandcastle in our August CTP release of Visual Studio SDK.” (taken from a thread on the MSDN Forums)

Since we upgraded to Community Server, visitors are now able to rate posts. This way you can let the bloggers here at bloggingabout.net know what you think about the things they post. Give it a go! Find a post you would like to rate, open the comments of that post and then click ‘Rate’.

View the interview Channel 9 had with Microsoft’s CEO: Steve Ballmer. The interview in short: _Why does Microsoft care about developers? 01:11 Why does Microsoft have an evangelism team? 01:48 What is your call to action for developers right now? 02:44 Microsoft is a leader in transparency and blogging. Why did you allow blogging? 03:38 Time for some tough questions. On the blogs there are those that say that Microsoft doesn’t innovate, can you give us some examples of where Microsoft is innovating?

This Microsoft sites makes it possible to enable ClearType fonts in Windwos XP from a web interface (using Internet Explorer). Neat! There’s a powertoy available also… ClearType is a special way of displaying fonts that makes fonts stand out more on LCD screens. It’s almost as if you’re looking at a piece of paper with the words printed on it. Click here for more information on ClearType.