At some point, I hope the traditional help viewers, like dexplorer.exe for MSDN local help, can evolve beyond the traditional tree view of categories into a view with the ability to display more information. For example, it might be useful to have a 3D look where each node could contain more information than just a category or item title. In the diagram below, each node contains some information about what is contained below (category counts, item counts, content ratings (pulled from the online site), and a star if you have a favorite underneath the node. The color coding could indicate where...

Two great keynotes today. Pat Helland's “Metropolis” talk about SOAs had one of the most thorough analogies comparing the growth of the cities with the growth and future of IT. We finally got the Whidbey bits during the morning keynote. I hear they are also up for MSDN subscribers to download.

Nothing kicks off a conference like Krispy Creme doughnuts, Bill Gates, and models dressed as airline stewardesses. Starting to wind down a bit now. Whidbey has had a few hiccups during this day of presentations but has also gotten lots of applause - particularly edit and continue, the hands off HTML designer (no code munging when you switch to designer view) - and the self contained web server (no more FPSE). Everyone anxious to get a copy of the latest bits tommorow. Tons of productivity improvements. The coolest part of BillG's keynote (besides the commercial - hilarous) - was the...

It is a little late to discuss leap years, since February 29th has already passed, but you never see what goes awry in any given leap year until after the magical date has passed. CNN has an article about a leap year related glitch in the Pontiac Grand Prix. The display shows the wrong day of the week now, and the possible solutions range from resetting the software to completely replacing the display unit. Have you ever wondered how many hours modern civilization has spent wrestling with the concept of a leap year? It’s the classic case of a business rule...

It seems if I select a vertical block in the 2003 IDE (hold down the Alt key and select an area with the mouse), and then go to the Edit menu and select “Advanced” -> “Untabify Selection”, CPU usage for devenv.exe spikes and control never returns to the GUI. Easy to reproduce in any .cs file where tabs exist in the selected region. If you are thinking of trying it – save everything first. Annoying, but easy to work around. Update: Just tried this in the PDC Whidbey bits and there is still a problem.

Last night Ron Jacobs talked about Shadowfax to the CMAP user group in Columbia, MD. I enjoyed the presentation and found it informative. I think it’s great that people from Microsoft like Ron take the time to come to user groups and give these talks. Is it just my perception - or does no other technology circle get this type of community support? Speaking of user groups, Geoff Snowman's blog is the place to see what events are happening in the mid-atlantic region.

There has been another flurry of postings lately regarding how technical publications should adapt to the blog frenzy. Specifically, Jason Mauss and Tejas Patel had some thought provoking posts. I have a stack of technical magazines sitting beside my desk right now that I have not gotten to because I’d rather be reading blogs. I’m also a fan of constructive criticism, so I’m trying to go scan through the pile to see what I would do to make these magazines more appealing to me by listing what I do like. First, Game Developer. The one highlight of every issue is the Postmortem,...

I had an interesting experience this week with a client using Analysis Services. They have an OLAP cube which holds all the transactions at a hospital for the past 3 years. There are 35 million records to keep track of every $3200 pacemaker and $3 aspirin tablet used. The cube reprocesses on schedule every weekend – this typically takes less than 8 hours. This week the cube had not refreshed and I had an email asking to investigate. I logged in over a VPN and saw the SELECT statement from Analysis Services was still going strong after 52 hours. Not good! First we checked...

Driving home the other day I was thinking about various snippets of recent conversation over Yukon. One underlying theme is the question: Will developers go crazy with the CLR integration and hang themselves? String and array manipulation will be much easier, but the ability to throw blocking I/O statements into stored procedures is a sobering thought. I started to do some googling to see what has turned up in the other database circles where JVM hosting has been around for a few years. It appears there are not too many complaints, and hardly any “best practice” documents to address performance related...

Although Bill Gates says it won’t happen, here are 10 things I’d like to see if Microsoft would acquire Disney: 10. Free passes to Epcot Center for all MSDN Universal subscribers. 9. Scoble exchanges butterfly suit for Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey outfit. 8. Windows ships with “It’s A Small World After All” as startup wav file. 7. Office Assistants Clippy the paperclip and Kairu the dolphin replaced by Grumpy and Sneezy dwarves. [“For crying out loud, you still need help with the mail-merge?”] 6. “Tomorrowland” attraction replaced with “Longhornland”. 5. “Honey I Shrunk The Kids Movie Set Adventure” replaced by “Windows Build Lab...

I finally put some time into Longhorn this weekend. At times I was a little bit frustrated (detail below), but overall the experience was exciting. Working with just what I had installed on the Longhorn Virtual PC, I decided to do a little Visual SourceSafe automation to display the file changes between two labels. Here is a screenshot: If anyone is interested in the code I’ll be happy to post it up for download, but I would like to improve the app some (details below). At this point I wanted to play with some of the basic Avalon controls, including the...

I went out this evening to vote in the Maryland primary. The voting machine was the somewhat controversial Diebold machine. After all the bad press I expected the machine to do something sinister while I was there – but alas – nothing extraordinary to report. No exit poll afterwards either. Bummer. The only thing to note is the final summary screen which shows all of the selections. In some circumstances there must be a scroll bar present which comes dangerously close to the final “Cast Vote” button. There is a caution at the top of the screen in a small light blue font...