Following in the footsteps of a buddy of mine, I decided to find out how I would fit into the glorious land of Middle Earth.  Now if only the men of the Rohirrim and the Elves could just get along...

Elvish

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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For a limited time, Microsoft is offering TONS of free training on the new VS.NET 2005.  These courses will not be free forever, so if you're interested check 'em out and get some great training from Microsoft eLearning.

[Just a quick update.  I saw but failed to mention that there is also free training for SQL Server 2005.  Check them out...they're great resources to have - especially for the up-and-coming developer on the .NET 2.0 platform]

I was just perusing one of my long-time favorite blogs and found a reference to a utility for capturing windows called Window Clippings by Kenny Kerr.  What a slick little tool!  It's funny how the stars have aligned (but just a tad late on this one).  I was doing exactly this earlier today - capturing windows regions for a help document, and I had to go into each one and 'clean-up' the upper right and left corners because the XP-themed windows used a non-rectangular region.

One fantastic aspect of this utility is that though it ultimately captures a rectangular block, it identifies the window region and marks the rest of the image as transparent (for PNG images).  I've written many applications that use irregular regions and this utility will save me a lot of clean-up efforts on my screen captures.  Kudos!

[Update: My apologies to Scott Hanselman for the repetitive trackbacks...I've had to repost this a few times.]

Wow, we had a great .NET User Group event tonight.  Scott Golightly, though pressed for time, covered a great amount of material on SQL Server 2005.  We had about 50 people in attendance (which is precisely what we had estimated).  Scott covered the gamut of the new features in SQL Server 2005, from schemas, to Xml, to SQLCLR, to Service Brokers, to Notification Services.  It was a lot of fun and very well received.

We had some great giveaways as well, with more great ones in the coming months (hint: several VS.NET 2005/SQL Server 2005 licenses, etc).  Stay tuned.

Thanks, Scott, for a job well done!

As many may already be aware, MS had their Worldwide launch of VS.NET 2005, SQL Server 2005, and Biztalk Server 2006 in San Fransisco yesterday (November 7th, 2005).  I had the opportunity yesterday to attend the event which was pretty awesome!  (I'll be blogging more on that again later tonight as I have more time)  I did want to post this quick tidbit, so I wouldn't forget.

There are several incarnations of the VS.NET and SQL products being released.  In an effort to get product into everyone's hands, and to promote the revolution that is .NET 2.0, Microsoft is offering the Express versions of VS.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005 for FREE for a year.  Get it now and use it if you don't already.  Awesome power at your fingertips!

Many of you may have read by now Sony's irresponsible foray into DMR (Digital Rights Management).  I discovered this article by reading Scott Golightly's blog the other day, but didn't actually delve into reading it until today.  Scott mentions an article written by Mark Russinovich of SysInternals wherein he discovered a RootKit (an application that hide various parts of your computer such as files, system objects, registry keys).  Mark did some fantastic detective work (which is fully outlined in the article) and discovered the source of the problem being a CD manufactured by Sony.

I agree with Scott that Sony (or anyone else) are well within their rights to protect their property, be it music, software, etc, but taking that a step further and subversively installing software on a machine that masks itself, continually consumes resources, and hides other files, directories, and devices is plain wrong.  This is what spyware and malware do in an attempt to hide their presence.  Sony has way overstepped its bounds with this one.

I'm definitely gonna have to keep my eye out when purchasing a CD (or other form of media) that is labeled as copy protected.  I'll have to seriously consider ever making that purchase.

This has been a thorn in my side now for quite some time and I'm glad to say that it's finally been plucked.  After pleading and begging the original CAPTCHA control designer to fix the glaring issues with the control and never getting so much as a response nor an acknowledgement of any correspondance, he finally decided to release the source about a month ago.  I downloaded it immediately, intent on exploring what the cause of the issues might be, but didn't even crack the .zip until today - it's been that busy.

Well, I dove in to see what the issue was.  First of all there were two glaring issues that people constantly complained to me about:

1. Users would frequently get a red 'X' image in place of the CAPTCHA image.  This actually only happened if the user were to browse to a post on my blog that had a querystring or a hash (such as the #Feedback anchor reference).  Even though this was identified as a fixed bug on the source website, I know I'm not alone in continuing to experience it.
2. An invalid CAPTCHA code entered would post back and subsequently cause the form to clear and lose all changes and comments made.  This was most infuriating.

These issues were the biggest ones.  I recompiled and quickly fixed the first issue - not a problem at all.  The second one was a little trickier, mostly due to how the control responded to an invalid postback.  The control would Redirect back to itself, effectively negating any form content, and thereby clearing out the controls.  I saw that Miguel had written and commented out some code that attempted to resolve the issue, but it didn't work (hence it was commented out).

Ultimately, I fixed the control so it would leverage session state (if it is available - .Text blogs have session state off by default and I didn't want to enable it just for a silly control, but wanted to support it if it were present).  In the event that session state is not available, a cookie gets created that persists form values until they are posted with a valid CAPTCHA code.  There are still a few things that I'd like to address, but it's working MUCH better now.  Additionally, I fixed a few more bugs, made the code interfaces a bit cleaner, and tidied up the code where I saw fit.  Perf is a little better now too, as well as a few minor memory issues have been resolved.

In the coming posts, I'll be commenting on how I got it to work properly and how I worked around some of the interesting issues in the control.

I'll be submitting my source code back to Miguel here shortly for him to release, seeing that the code is his baby.  Hopefully, this makes posting comments on my blog a bit easier.

Having been turned on to a review by Orson Scott Card (one of my favorite authors - Ender's Game, anyone?) several weeks ago, I decided to go out an check out the movie. Oh my goodness!  It was awesome!  I've rarely had a movie experience quite like that - fantastic!  Even not knowing the backstory one bit I was completely engrossed in the film and quickly fell in love with the characters.

After seeing it we decided to go out and purchase the complete series of Firefly, the FOX television series on which the movie was based.  I was very impressed!  I'm now an addict of the series and really want to see the movie again (though I'll probably wait until it comes out on DVD unless someone wants to go with me [hint, hint]).  It's too bad they didn't keep up a good series, though FOX, it seems, does that: throws out good, quality stuff for trash.  I can't think of the last time I actually watched something on FOX since the X Files or the occasional The Simpsons episode.

Oh well, Firefly is beautiful...what a cool show!

<sarcasm>Well, today's a funny day.</sarcasm>  I was starting to reset an older machine (one that I've had for several years), when I heard the now-all-too-familiar 'click, click, whirrr, click'.  Well, chalk that up to another hard drive gone...I have a stack of 5 hard drives on my desk now that have failed within the past several months.  Se la vi.  Oh well.  I guess I'm beyond feeling now - this crash didn't even affect my disposition today, except that it made me laugh.

Fortunately, I had backed up all valuable information from the drive - so no data lost (this time).

This is, by now, old news, but if you're an MSDN subscriber, you'll definitely want to go get the RTM (Release To Manufacturer) versions of VS.NET 2005 and SQL Server 2005.  If not, but you anticipate running .NET 2.0 applications (which many undoubtedly will), the released 2.0 Framework is now available for download.

This is an exciting time!  I can't wait for the launch event.  I'm heading to San Francisco for the launch on the 7th.  If you're going to be there, drop me a line and let's get together!