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April 2008 - Posts

Wednesday, April 30, 2008 9:33 AM

TECHbash is Coming to PA

In just 10 days (May 10th, 2008), TECHbash 2008 will kick off in northeastern Pennsylvania. The show has been around since 2005 and will include several hundred developers, IT professionals, and industry experts from PA and surrounding states. Joe Stagner
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
Monday, April 28, 2008 5:04 PM

Regional Director Sidebar Gadget

Keep up on Microsoft Regional Directors' blogs with this Vista sidebar gadget . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Sponsor
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
Monday, April 28, 2008 12:24 PM

DevConnections Spring Slides and Demos

Last week I gave three presentations at the DevConnections spring show in Orlando. I received a lot of great feedback from attendees which I definitely appreciate, especially since I was feeling a little bit bad about having run out of time in my first
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
Thursday, April 17, 2008 4:22 PM

Twitter as Smoking Cessation Aid

I was talking to a couple of friends and occasional smokers today, and both were commenting about how nice it is that Seattle is almost entirely non-smoking now, so they didn't light up while in town for the MVP Summit. I've never smoked, but listening
Posted by ssmith | 4 Comments
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Thursday, April 17, 2008 1:12 PM

Triskaidecaphobia

Office 13 is going to actually be called Office 14, since there are some people who assign some negative significance to the number 13 (see Triskaidekaphobia ). Since this is clearly a significant concern in the world of computing, it seems natural to
Posted by ssmith | 3 Comments
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 7:24 PM

Microsoft Cloud Services

One of the quietly announced (at MIX - WMV here ) new things coming from Microsoft "soon" is SQL Server Data Services (SSDS). The SSDS team has a blog on MSDN. Ryan Dunn discussed it with me recently and also has been blogging about it . Last week he
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008 2:38 PM

ASP.NET AJAX Download Performance Improvement Request

I'm a big fan of ASP.NET AJAX in general, but one concern I have and something that has forced me to use other technologies is the size of the library. It's about 85kb when compressed and unfortunately that is quite large if you're trying to include it
Posted by ssmith | 9 Comments
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008 2:26 PM

Extract Control for ASP.NET in Visual Studio

I've been posting about some feature requests for ASP.NET/ Visual Studio , so here's one more in that thread. One nice feature of Blend is the ability to select a chunk of XAML and choose to "Extract User Control". The result works very nicely, creating
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
Friday, April 04, 2008 12:57 PM

2008 Goal Progress Update

If you just read my blog for technical stuff, you can skip this one. So at the start of the year I set a few personal goals . Since the best way to achieve goals, I've found, is to break them down into smaller and smaller pieces (as in "The journey of
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Friday, April 04, 2008 12:37 PM

OpenXML Standardized and Sour Grapes

Earlier this week, the OpenXML document format was standardized by the ISO/IEC, with a huge 86% of voting countries favoring the format ( news here , among other places). While this is interesting and a win for anyone using Microsoft Office document formats
Posted by ssmith | 5 Comments
Friday, April 04, 2008 10:40 AM

CruiseControl.NET Caching Old Project Locations SOLVED

As I mentioned in my previous post , we're just wrapping up a continuous integration solution for a client (and if you're not using this for your team, you should be. If you don't have time to do it, contact us to do it for you. You'll thank me later.)
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
Friday, April 04, 2008 9:48 AM

Not Working for Microsoft

I thought I should post a follow-up since I'm sure many people ready my post on Tuesday about going to work for Microsoft on some code-named project and (a) didn't remember it was April Fool's Day and (b) didn't then read the comments where I pointed
Posted by ssmith | 2 Comments
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008 1:12 PM

Refactor Request

Not sure if it's already there, but the folks at DevExpress or JetBrains (or Microsoft, but I don't want to wait for another VS) should have a refactoring for CodeRush/Refactor! or Resharper that will convert verbose properties into C# 3.5 short properties,
Posted by ssmith | 8 Comments
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Tuesday, April 01, 2008 11:21 PM

Silverlight Rehab

Check out Dan Fernandez , Adam Kinney , and others in this very funny 5 minutes video about Silverlight Rehab on On10.net. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Sponsor
Posted by ssmith | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, April 01, 2008 11:24 AM

The Evolution of Status Pattern

An interesting pattern that I see in many of the applications I've worked with is the notion of status, and how it tends to evolve over time. This is probably familiar to most of you, though perhaps you've never thought about it. Consider the following
Posted by ssmith | 1 Comments
Tuesday, April 01, 2008 9:31 AM

Joining the Collective

After many years of working with Microsoft technology as a developer, Regional Director , and MVP, I'm finally giving in and joining the team as an official blue badge wielding full time employee, starting today. This was simply an opportunity too good
Posted by ssmith | 7 Comments
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