I have done this a few times now, and each time it is so far from the last time that I forget exactly how to do it...  so I am linking this article here for reference (for me):

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa984464(VS.71).aspx

Shoddy.

I'm probably 5 years late to the party, but I just "discovered" the Code Definition Window.  This is a window that when you select a method in your code, it displays the contents or "definition" of that method.  I've been a perpetual "Right click, Go to definition" guy for years so that I can see the contents of methods.  This window will be an incredible time saver, it makes me wonder how many more similar windows there are in .net...  ignorance was not bliss in this case.

Shoddy.

A little over a year ago our family decided it was best for us if we move, so we decided we'd head south away from the cold to Florida.  We listed our home on the market in April and so began the roller coaster of emotions, our adventure as my bride called it.

We came towards the end of our 120 day real estate contract with no sale (1 rejected offer) and only a few days left, so we decided if it didn't sell we'd stay and take if off the market.  We began looking at paint colors and new ceiling fans, and then one nite with 2 days left on the contract our agent called with a decent offer, we negotiated it for about half an hour and had a contract signed within a few hours.  This was back in August of 2006, we closed on it within 30 days.  Immediately have signing the contract we made another trip (driving of course since my bride prefers not to fly) to Ocala, Florida (our chosen destination in Florida), and once again we didn't find a home there.

We packed everything up on a truck and with the help of 3 of my friends moved it all to a 10x30 storage facility, well all except that which didn't fit which then was split up between my inlaws place in Illinois and my inlaws cabin on Lake Koshkonong in Wisconsin, our temporary residence while we figured out where to move.  We ended up staying there for 6 months, and even looked for a home in the madison area for 6-10 weeks (why not move from cold to colder right?).  Finally in February after a couple more trips to Ocala, we found the home that was just perfect for our family, it was a brand new home on a half acre lot that backs up to some green space and has trails that people ride 4 wheelers on in the back (did I mention we have two 4 wheelers :)?)

We decided that we'd rent a penske truck (after getting ambiguous moving quotes) and take whatever fits down in that and leave whatever didn't.  Unfortunately what didn't fit was much more than we were figuring on so we rented a 2nd truck and then pulled both of our vehicles behind the trucks.  A great friend of mine took the week off and helped us drive down and move from the trucks into the house.  We drove straight through and our ~18 hour typical driving straight through drive was only 29 hours eeks!  The trucks aren't known for their break through speed, in fact going up the mountains in Tenessee with the pedal to the floor netted me a whopping 35mph.

As for work, right now my current employer has kept me on as their newest Florida employee working remotely.

Very soon I should be involved in some systems integration projects and now I'm working on documenting some DTS's that are in our sql 2000 database that we are looking to upgrade to SQL 2005 using SSIS.  I will be attending VS Live! next month here in Orlando and I'm pretty pumped up about that.

So for now, Ocala has another Shoddy .net developer :)

I installed SP1 yesterday and the biggest difference that I notice is when stepping through code.  Our proejct is a very large VB.Net project and it would typically take about 5 seconds per line of code when stepping through in the debugger, after the service pack it is more like 2 lines per second!  A huge improvement, I'd say kudos to Microsoft for fixing this, but that would be more like the Dilbert cartoon of the boss suggesting they have a contest to see who finds the most bugs in their product that they are still writing and the winner would get a minivan.

Wally's next comment was "I'm going to code myself a mini-van". 

Install this pack!

Rant warning!

So I've been a long time hotmail user; even when Yahoo was probably better for a period of time I just stuck with hotmail.  Nothing super special about it, but it is easy to use and I've been happy with them....UNTIL TODAY!!!

For a while they've been trying to get me to switch to their hotmail beta product; which I did sign up for when I was first offered it.  I tried it out but found it to be extremely annoyingly slow and I couldn't figure out how to change the default sort of my emails which I have by date DESC and I've gotten quite used to over the years... so I switched back.

Yesterday I was told "we've listened...try it again".  So I did...  today I got frustated with it for similar reasons so I once again took their survey and switched back.  I was never really bothered in the past by their advertisements; I mean hey it has to be paid for somehow right?  Well today AFTER my survey saying their ads distracted me... within a few hours suddenly the Ads on my hotmail got 5 times bigger!  They are HUGE.  I guess they are trying to show me for complaining about ads. 

HOTMAIL, YOU SUCK!!!!

</rant>

The Christmas shopping season is well under way.  It actually kicked off semi-early this year with a lot of online etailers vying for our money.  For the retail sector this is roughly 50 - 70% of the annual sales and they are all trying to draw attention to themselves.  The official madness kicked off when the Sony PS3 came out (in shortage of course) and everyone buying one was buying it to flip and make a profit on eBay; and who can blame them?  People were paying over 4 times retail to be the first on the block to own one.  Then the Nintendo Wii came out and similar madness was in effect with people thinking if they got one, they'd get rick on them too. 

Well I have to say this years sales has brought out the absolute WORST in people.  All for money!  What have we become that we would lie, cheat, steal, kill for money?  Now I know that these things have been going on for a long time, however, never in this many people.  Reportings of managers, employees flat out lying to people, shoving pushing and online dishonesty.  I bought a Nintendo Wii from Radioshack.com (This is hopefully going to be a nice Christmas present for my kids), and a day or so later (after it was sold out everywhere), I got a radioshack email informing me that it was a mistake it was on their website and my order had been cancelled!  No offer really admitting anything wrong, no coupon to seek forgiveness with, just a cancelled order and no Wii.

Well certainly that was an isolated case right?  Well no as a matter of fact it was not, I then bought a Sony PS3 from TargetDirect.com via Amazon.com... and guess what?  Yep, same thing; it was a mistake and shouldn't have been there.  You tell me, how can someone put something on their website for 2 hours taking orders, and then do it again for another 2 hours mistakenly?

Today, dubbed Black Friday for the first time I can remember has pushed people over the top to actually skip time with their families on Thanksgiving to go stand in line to purchase STUFF just to resell on eBay.  Money is more important than family.  We have truly become greedy lovers of ourselves, it is sad!

I call on the retailers to do the responsible thing (and probably draw even more people for shopping), and eliminate the need for camping out by holding drawings for the doorbuster big ticket items.  What good does it do the retailers to have 100 people sleeping overnite and deterring other would-be shoppers from their stores?  If they held a drawing and people actually thought they had a chance to get something, I'm sure it would draw a bigger crowd than they otherwise had (Heck, I'd be there!).  Now if they are smart, they'd figure out ways to sell stuff outside of the store as well. 

We had a grand day yesterday, my bride made us all a fabulous dinner (with way too much leftovers) and I enjoyed my day with the kids.  We put up our Christmas tree (only half the lites are on though) and I even snuck in a needed nap.  I wish you all a safe, joyous and wonderful Merry Christmas!

UPDATE 2:  After my 3rd call to Microsoft, the 2nd one being to some anti-piracy number and the 3rd one being to MSDN, nothing got resolved.  She said that Microsoft is working on some issue (not sure what issue, but they are working on something and I should be satisified because of that).  When I asked what I should do next, I was told to wait.  So for now, I'm screwed and can't download any add-ins.  I guess that is what I get for not being patient and waiting til others discover the pains :)

UPDATE:  I called and got a confirmation code for MS Project 2007 and that code is actually *Valid*.  I'm now on the phone with Microsoft anti-piracy trying to figure out how I get my Info Path to be valid so I can have my Office deemed "Genuine"...  so far I'm "Genuine"ly frustrated....  This also means that while installing these products and having a key problem might be a problem for more than just me, getting a bum code from Microsoft could be isolated to just me.

So yesterday I was watching DA BEARS game, and came upstairs to check email and have a look at my RSS aggregator... I noticed THIS POST from Julia, so I thought cool, I'll start the downloading and it should be done by morning so I can install. 

Then this morning I see THIS POST from Bill and see that he had some troubles with his install due to the product keys, but I noticed that he had also gotten everything resolved.  So I continued with my installations...  Sure enough when I got to activating One Note, I couldn't because of the same reason that Bill mentioned, the product key was already used.  So I picked up the phone, dialed the 800 number and gave MS the bazillion long number given on my screen to which I was given a bazillion long number in return and my products were all happy... so I thought.

I was then playing around with One Note and noticed there is a publish to PDF / XPS option but you need an addin to do it.  So I went out to the Microsoft site to get it...  well before you can get it, you need to validate that your software is "Genuine"... OK, no problem right?  After all I just downloaded this software using my MSDN subscription and MSDN keys for the first time on one machine...   Well, not exactly:

OK, so the product key Microsoft GAVE ME ON THE PHONE is no good... grrrrr.  I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem, or with this problem shortly...  but wait, there's more!

Along with this message was a message telling me Project 2003 was also counterfeited, I hadn't upgraded that yet, so I decided I might as well upgrade it (in spite of the fact that it IS valid).  Well guess what?  SAME PROBLEM, the key was already used even though I've never installed Project 2007 before, it is a shared key so I suspect this to be the problem, however what happened to getting 10 installs worth from an MSDN key?  Also, what am I supposed to do, call Microsoft to get another counterfeit key? 

I am all for Microsoft getting paid for their work, just as much as I expect to get paid for MY work, however, they SHOULD NOT be impeding our work and causing such grief when our software is LEGAL!!!!

GRRRRR.  To be continued....

I may be late to the party, but honestly I never tried any betas of IE7 and I don't spend too much time browsing for addins of IE6 or Firefox.  It was only a few months ago that I even tried out firefox (which I have to say has some nice features but overall I'm one of the few that likes IE better). 

So today I downloaded the new RTM version of IE7.  So far I have to say I absolutely LOVE it!  A few features that are my favorites so far:

There is a weather button addin, it displays your current temperature and conditions all the time and when you click the button it gives you a 3 day forecast popdown window, when you move your mouse away the window goes away without any clicking.  Cool!

When you close a tab group there is an option to "Open these the next time I use Internet Explorer".  This feature to me is really exciting; I can't tell you how many times I've needed to reboot my computer but not wanted to because I had some pages up in IE that I didn't necessarily want to bookmark, but did want to still get to and not forget about them!  Very nice feature... I havn't tried it out yet, so I hope it works :)

I also like the ability to click on a blank tab to "create a new tab". 

I'm sure some of these "features" have been around in other addin versions of either IE or Firefox, but for me this was all new today.  Very cool.

Shoddy