February 2008 Entries
As a father with two boys who are both interested in science and technology, it seemed a natural choice to check out the LEGO Mindstorms NXT set when it came out. Stepper motors with integrated rotation sensors, sensors for ultrasound, touch, light, and sound, USB and Bluetooth connectivity... well, you get the point! When my boys saw the NXT, they were very excited about it. When the box arrived it was like Christmas and birthday combined! We built the model in the book first. A fun start. Then we built the models included on the CD. Very...
The Office Developer Conference has a fairly broad focus since you can do so much with the client and server products. VSTO customizations are definitely where it's at. VBA's role was relegated to talks on bridging it to VSTO. Interestingly, VBA isn't going away any time soon. There is too much of an investment in VBA technology at many companies to just abandon it. Of course, many companies had classic VB applications that became unsupported with the advent of .NET. I think that they will deprecate it eventually, or it will morph into a managed scripting environment (Monad? VSA?). VSTO...
I tried to publish the Office Live post this morning after the keynote, but I got an error about being out of disk space. That made no sense. I haven't uploaded files in awhile -- in fact, nothing much has changed lately (I'm disappointed to say...). The error specifically mentioned being out of space in the PRIMARY filegroup indicating a database error. GoDaddy limits SQL Server hosting space so in fact, it really had to be the database. Curiouser and curiouser... Well I signed into the admin area and immediately thought of checking Feedback (the only thing I have...
I just sat through a keynote by Rajesh Jha (Corp VP, Office Live) about Microsoft Office Live Small Business and I must admit to being really impressed. They've created a platform for small businesses to get online, manage contacts, market, and offer e-commerce (and more through extensibility). Using Lists for items, people, groups, etc. you build the site as a means to display and interact with the lists. It's really a classic data-driven web site, except that the nitty-gritty details are abstracted away. Really, it's what I hoped for from Google with Page Creator and Google Base. I think that...
I'm here! It's sunny and nice in San Jose, CA -- a welcome change from negative temperatures, windchills, and the white covering over everything back home. If you're interested in saying "hi" to me, let me know! I just got out of Bill Gates' keynote speech. This is the second time I've seen him up-close and personal (first time being PDC 2005). He's a good speaker. Very at-ease, in-control, and quite polished. I'm sure that it helps that he lives and breathes this stuff and makes presentations to people all the time. So far, no actual sessions, but...