Alex Lowe's .NET Blog

Dictionary.com defines “evangelist” this way (there are three other definitions but they are very similar to this one): “A bringer of the glad tidings of Church and his doctrines. Specially: (a) A missionary preacher sent forth to...

Stefan Demetz wants Microsoft to create an Apache Foundation like organization for .NET developers . Here are a few observations (and my personal opinion) regarding the .NET community: Personal opinion: Microsoft should be a supporter and active...

I think that some MVPs and a very small percentage of Microsoft employees misrepresent these groups because it makes them feel more important and/or makes the program look very desirable to those on the "outside". This has a positive and a negative effect...

Well, let's start by getting out of acronym land: Microsoft MVP = Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. The official MVP program website is here . First, I don't work in the MVP program so what I'm about to say is, in some cases, my perspective on...

Robert Scoble believes that MSDN Magazine is like the PDC (in terms of content) but a cursory glance at the articles over the last 17 months doesn't support that claim. There wasn't a single issue in 2003 with content (that made the cover - most articles...

My blog moved to http://callmealex.com/cs .

Tim created a fantasy football league for all of us .NETers. Anybody can join and it should be a good time!

Ok, so the heading is a little misleading and I'll explain in detail why later in the post. A few months ago (in March) I volunteered to work with a group of high school students at a local high school here in Detroit, MI. U of D High is a private...

It looks like the Business Objects folks want in on the blog action and they've setup a blog and a special section for articles over at ASPAlliance.com . I think it would be a very cool blog entry (or perhaps an article) if they'd do a comparison of...

Ok, so I've now seen a bunch of posts on the subject of "why developers don't build scalable systems". Sure, it's been phrased different ways: “Why don't .NET developers grok scalable distributed computing? “ ” Disinterested Programmers...

Here are a few things I've learned about the Class Designer and ASP.NET Projects: The Class Designer will *not* pick up classes defined inline in a .aspx page The Class Designer will pick up classes stored in the new /code directory ( read more...

Roy brings up a great point that was raised in his comments - local Microsoft offices have a new challenge as the product groups become more transparent and involved in the online communities. As someone who works in a local Microsoft office in the...

I've seen a few posts in the blogosphere regarding the DevDays events that have occurred throughout the world. The one thing that is very apparent is that you are not guaranteed to see the same content or even get the same “goodie bag” from...

Are you using the Microsoft JVM? If you should know that (the quote below is from here )...... “ In a settlement agreement reached in January 2001 to resolve a dispute over Microsoft's distribution of its Java implementation, Sun and Microsoft...

James Avery has written my thoughts on Sam's post better than I could in this post . Enterprise Services and Remoting are things that every “Enterprise Developer” should be aware of and using in many of their applications. That said, not everyone...

Technically, there are now two models for MSF - formal and agile . Oh, and one cannot forget Visual Studio Team System (something I've been drooling over for months now). All I can say is, software development life cycle tools for .NET development...

I would like to know if developers are more likely to watch a webcast or attend a local event (assuming the topic is the same and it is of interest to them? Personally, I like the local events because there is more to be gained from the event than just...

Is MSDN Flash useful to you? Do you subscribe? If you do, what do you like/dislike about the newsletter?

ASP.NET Page Template techniques has become a hot button issue among ASP.NET developers. I've done a bit of research on the topic so I thought I would list the articles I read during my research to save you folks a bit of time: http://www.codeproject...

Well, I'm off to my weekly status meeting . But, before I go, I wanted to pop in and recommend to everyone that they have a status meeting. Yeah, that's right, most organizations that I work with rarely have status meetings where the developers (or...

Chris Sells has a bunch of free tools (some .NET) available on his website. Here is the skinny on a couple of them: In writing the resources chapter of my WinForms book, I found that there was no single utility for displaying the resource contents...

Welcome to my blog and my first blog entry! Scott was kind enough to offer me some space and this very cool little application so I figured I would hop on the blog bandwagon. This blog will focus on many of the same things that my AspToday.com column...

Disclaimer: I don't work on the team that runs the Regional Director program but I do have a fundamental understanding of the progrma and I frequently work with the Regional Directors in my district.When in doubt, refer to the official Regional Director...

I've been using Advanced Intelllect's aspNetMime product and this thing is very cool. We use the component in our moderation tool at the ASPAlliance Lists . I can't imagine writing all the code to decode Quoted Printable, 7bit, 8bit, etc. encoding so...

We, in the United States, often forget how blessed we are in many ways. Space travel has become routine and things like a shuttle returning to Earth barely get 30 seconds on the evening news. Well, today, our routine little world once again came crumbling...