By Brian Swanson on 6/24/2005 7:41 AM

via Brad McCabe's weblog:

For those of you who are C# programmers and a little miffed about the new “My” namespace that's coming out for VB.NET 2005 developers, there's hope.  C#.Net 2005 is going to be released with a “that” namespace that will closely mimic the “My” namespace that's been discussed by so many...

via IDesign site:

“The My class in VB often simplifies and streamlines many operations, from Network programming to clipboard, to audio access, and so on. What takes sometimes a programming fit in C# can be done in one line using the My class in VB. If VB has Me and My, then C# should have this and That. The That class is the C# equivalent of the VB My class. It is a static class that uses the VB implementation as much as possible, and it requires adding a referencing to Microsoft.VisualBasic. The That...

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By Brian Swanson on 6/20/2005 8:44 AM

via Mital Kakaiya [MCSD.NET]:

Do you know how computer thinks? Play chess with a computer and see "inside PC's brain".

This is a VERY cool site.  It's a java chess game, and after you make your move you will see the computer decide which move it should make based on what it thinks you will do...VERY COOL STUFF!

 

 

By Brian Swanson on 6/13/2005 8:58 AM

I was at my wife's office for lunch today and saw the latest edition of Fortune Small Business, which the cover article spoke of Microsoft using Anthropolgists to study small businesses.  Of course Scoble beat me to blogging about it...

Using Anthropology is something new in the industry that hasn't quite made it to the mainstream. The article discusses Microsoft's efforts to better understand their small business customers and what their “friction” points are in their day-to-day operations.  I thought it was funny after reading the article that Fortune didn't do a good job (in my opinion) of helping people understand why Anthropologists are perfect for this type of work.

So here's my attempt:

First let's define Anthroplogy: The scientific study...

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By Brian Swanson on 6/13/2005 6:18 AM

via Panopticon Central:

“...the 8.0 VB language specification posted up for downloading. It covers all the new language features in VB 2005 and should be completely current with Beta2.”

This is a interesting document as it describes all the ins and outs of the Visual Basic language and changes that are coming with the next release of Visual Studio.

By Brian Swanson on 6/7/2005 9:37 AM

It's hard to believe it's been almost 2 years since the last Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, but I was there.  I saw what is now finally beginning to come out.  Avalon, Indigo, Whidbey, Yukon...

Registration for the next PDC opened today.  You can get more details here.

I'm planning to go along with a few of my developer friends.  I don't think my company will pay for it though, so I need to raise the money myself....I figure it'll cost me about $3,000 after everything is said and done (Conference Registration, Flight, Hotel, Rental Car, Food not supplied by MS, etc...)

I need to figure out how to add one of those donation buttons to my blog here, so people can help send me to PDC! 

I'll be kicking my after-hours/weekend consulting into overdrive to raise the extra money I need to go to this conference. 

It's worth every penny, especially if you are working on any projects that are in the early stages. ...

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By Brian Swanson on 3/22/2005 1:58 AM

I’ve been downloading a LOT of sample, example, and open-source code lately. I’ve got this idea, and I’m doing research on it. For the first time ever, I’m actually trying to design the idea before I start writing code. Novel concept isn’t it? One of the more interesting articles I’ve read lately while doing some research for my project was on MSDN. In an article titled "Plug-Ins: Let users add functionality to your .NET Applications with Macros and Plug-Ins", Jason Clark does an excellent job first explaining why making an application extensible is so important, and then moves into describing the functionality in the .NET framework that allows for making extensible applications. He covers all aspects of extensible applications, from FINDING assemblies that could be loaded as plug-ins for your application, actually loading them at run-time, how to implement secured and unsecured plug-ins. It’s a full-featured article that is a must read for anyone who’s working on an application that will have any extensibility functionality in it. For me the only downfall of the article was that all the code samples were in C#. I consider myself a fairly competent programmer, and can read C# quite fluently. But, I’ve never taken the leap to actually become C# programmer in full force. So, to make things easier for myself, I converted all of the code samples provided by Jason to VB.NET....

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By Brian Swanson on 3/2/2005 10:30 AM

So much going on, so much to talk about and still I say nothing…

 

I’ve been working fairly hard lately, and have been working on my own projects at night even harder so my blog has suffered.

 

Enough excuses, enough whining, on to some real content…

 

For those of you who don’t know I work for a publicly traded company where I’m a VB.NET programmer (hold the jokes, hold the rotten tomatoes).  I work on anything from simple ASP.NET reports to a complex WinForms application for allowing our customers to run their entire businesses.

 

First my history with programming…

 

I started out in “programming” writing in ROM-BASIC for an Atari 800 that somehow my oldest brother convinced my parents to buy us.  Man we were cool, we’d spend an entire day typing in some program (usually a game) from the latest magazine, then we’d spend most of the night debugging it to find which line we’d mistyped and finally we were ready to play it for about 15 minutes...

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By Brian Swanson on 12/17/2004 3:51 AM

The guys who developed SharpDevelop wrote a book in the last year or so that describes the process they went through to develop their SharpDevelop Open Source product.  It explains why they made some of the design and architecture decisions they made.

I doubt this free e-book is a complete copy of that book, but it's a good read for those who are interested in “Dissecting a C# Application: Inside SharpDevelop”

 http://www.apress.com/free/index.html

I know they are working on a new version of the book, so this e-book might be a complete copy of the original book.

Just thought I'd pass it along...