Mostly by chance, I saw Million Dollar Baby on the same day it won Best Picture on tonight's Oscar's. I usually don't pay much attention to awards type shows but this year's crop does seem pretty good. I haven't seen Hotel Rwanda or Ray yet but I have seen Sideways, which I mostly liked, but was way out of it's league with Million Dollar Baby. Let's just say this, MDB is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time, if for no other reason than the sheer volume of emotional response it elicited. ...

I've got a pretty high pain threshold for cool-new stuff that isn't 100% ready for primetime. For example, I love my Sound Blaster Wireless setup (I bought two of 'em even!) even with all it's rough edges, connectivity issues, and crappy library management. It does what I need it to do and generally makes my life better, so I'm willing to put up with it. I was complaining to Brian about this the other day but it continues to be such in the pain in...

We're now in full fledged ship mode trying to get Beta 2 wrapped up. The part of the process we're in now (across the Division) is called "ask mode", which I've mentioned in prior posts. Basically as you move through ask mode you slowly rachet up the bar on which bug fixes you'll take. Early on there is a set of things that you'll take based on a pre-defined bar. Things like accessibility fixes, scenario blockers, performance regressions, etc. As time goes on you continue to consider those things but only if...

The fact that the US pulled out of Kyoto irritates me to no end. Was it a perfect treaty? No. Will it solve the problem? No. Will it cost some money and take some effort? Yes. Is it a step in the right direction? You bet. CNN reported this today. Nothing new in there except for the fact that pretty much everyone who knows what they are talking about agrees that not only is global...

Got passion for .NET, creating great tools, and building great client applications? How would you like to help define the future of client development? I've got two positions open on my team, click here to check them out (there are two identical postings out there, so just use this one). If you've got a few years of industry experience (I'm thinking 4+) and believe you are an Unstoppable Coding Machine, submit a resume to the link above and we'll see what you've got. Prior experience with C# and the Win32 API is highly preferred but as...

Went down to Cabo over the last week. Had a lot of fun and it was nice to get away, get some sunshine, and get fairly cozy with some of the local Humpback whale population. A couple of funny things happened. First, Mexico's election was last weekend (pretty sure it was all of Mexico but it was in the state of BCS at least). They do their elections on Sunday and don't allow alcohol sales on Saturday or Sunday. ...

Wow, thanks so much to each of you that left comments for my last post! Very helpful, and there are some really good ideas in there. Just to wrap up and respond to a few things: The comments need to be scrubbed not because I know there is anything bad in there (I don't think there really is), it's that I can't be sure that there isn't. So getting rid of them completely is a brute-force approach...

I want to deliver Windows Forms source code to you. I've wanted to do it for years and I'm putting together a plan to make it happen. There are a set of issues here, and let me tell you that not everyone here is a big fan of it. But I think I can do it (other teams are trying as well). Now, this is not the MFC model where you'll be able to build it, etc. We're talking about just...

I've just noticed a couple of posts about issues in the designer where controls lose their position or disappear completely. As book author Matthew Adams cleverly points out, this phenomenon is excessively difficult to reproduce but unfortunately happens all to frequently. We heard about and read about this problem many times since Visual Studio shipped. Unfortunately, until we had some sort of a relatively-consistant repro, we couldn't do anything about it. The designer is very complex and is a mixture of .NET Framework, Visual...

I blogged a while back about my "Technojuggle" which was an effort to streamline the various gadgets and services I'm using, particularly focused around minimizing the number (if not the total cost) of bills I'm paying. The lynchpin in this strategy was being able to drop my land-line. Normally this would be no problem (e.g. cell-phone only), but I live near some sort of black hole from which cell signals can not escape. Unless it's cloudy, then it works sometimes. But it's not reliable, so I need a land line. ...