Monday, January 05, 2009
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The MSDN Developer Conference is coming to Washington DC January 16th.
The event is $99 and you get primo content from the PDC on Azure Services Platform, Windows 7, Silverlight, Surface, Parallel Programming, Live Mesh and more!
Some great speakers are lined up: Vishwas Lele, Andrew Duthie, Pete Brown and yours truly.
Here is the official agenda:
Hope to see you there!
Technorati Tags:
MDC,
WashingtonDC,
WPF
Sunday, January 04, 2009
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Friday, January 02, 2009
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I just received an email regarding a two day conference on Gamer Technology Law.
For our fourth annual conference on Gamer Technology Law, program co-chairs Seth J. Steinberg, Esq., former General Counsel and Director of Business Affairs for LucasArts, and Russell G. Weiss, Esq., head of the Video Game Practice at Morrison & Foerster LLP, lead a stellar faculty of industry experts in a comprehensive examination of the legal and business aspects of financing, developing, marketing and publishing video games today.
Highlighting this conference will be a special address on the State of the Industry by Kenneth Doroshow, Esq., General Counsel of the Entertainment Software Association.
Sign up today, to hear from this outstanding group of industry leaders on March 9th and 10th, in Beverly Hills.
Video games are a big business and, accordingly, there's a lot of legality involved.
Looking at the topics list provides an interesting angle on an interesting and ever growing business.
Have you been eager to play with Windows Azure for a while now, but weren't sure exactly where to start?
Fortunately, there's this page on MSDN: Getting Started with Microsoft Cloud Computing Tools.
The page has links to the team blog, useful bookmarks, and a list of software to download and install.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes at ZDNet has run a series of tests on a beta build of Windows 7.
Keep in mind that pre-release software is usually more about stability than performance.
But, so far, the results are very encouraging with Windows 7 coming in first when compared to Vista and XP.
Once Windows 7 undergoes performance tweaking, who knows how much better the results will be.
Technorati Tags:
Windows 7,
ZDNet
LINQ is a great technology and has made me rethink the way I process data in code.
Although similar in many ways to SQL, LINQ's designers changed a few things in translation.
These changes, no matter how justified, still cause a little confusion.
Thankfully, Paul Litwin created this table comparing SQL keywords to LINQ keywords in C# and VB.
| C# LINQ | VB LINQ | ANSI SQL |
| from | From | FROM |
| select | Select | SELECT |
| where | Where | WHERE |
| orderby | Order By | ORDER BY |
| join | Join | JOIN |
| group | Group By | GROUP BY |
| Distinct() | Distinct | DISTINCT |
| into | Into | INTO |
| let | Let | AS |
| Count(), Sum(),… | Aggregate | COUNT, SUM,… with no group |
| Skip() | Skip | n/a |
| SkipWhile() | Skip While | n/a |
| Take() | Take | n/a |
| TakeWhile() | Take While | n/a |
Thursday, January 01, 2009
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2008 was a big year for me personally and professionally.
The biggest event of the year was the wedding: months of planning craziness and one day of fun.
In the middle of the wedding frenzy, we found this amazing house in need of some TLC for a bargain price.
It took several months of hard work, but we made this new house a home pretty quickly.
On the professional front, I was re-awarded the Microsoft Tablet PC MVP Award in April, appeared as a guest on geekSpeak, and got the ball on rolling on a Silverlight SIG at CapArea.NET.
I've also continued to work as a Membership Mentor for INETA in Maryland, DC and Delaware.
For 2009, I've got some big ideas and plans.
Stay tuned, as I'll be announcing them shortly.
Technorati Tags:
2008,
Happy New Year
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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In this screencast demonstration, Mark Berry shows how to layout a WPF application, covering all the layout panels that ship with WPF comparing and contrasting them.
A lot of this applies to Silverlight as well.
Video Downloads:
WMV | WMV (Zip) | Zune | iPod | PSP | MPEG-4 | 3GP
Audio Downloads:
AAC | WMA | MPEG-4 | MPEG-3 | MPEG-2
Sample Code:
C#
Yes, the entire Star Wars Holiday Special is available online, from Princess Leia singing to the first appearance of Boba Fett, it's all here in its surreal 70s glory.
As an added bonus, it's downloadable so it can be saved for posterity and you won't have to sneak around like Weird Al did in the video to White & Nerdy.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
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The number 2600 holds a special meaning to geeks.
It's a number that has a long and rich history.
I couldn't let the moment I hit 2600 posts on this blog go unmarked or uncommented.
So, grab a bowl of cereal, curl up with a good book and play a retro game system to mark the occasion.
