Kentc's SOAPbox

My new blog home is at http://blogs.technet.com/Kent_Compton/

I know it’s been a while since I posted anything. I guess didn’t have much to say. After years of waiting, I finally found a way to purchase music over the Internet that works for my needs. I have four PCs where I listen to music. Each of...

Microsoft Research does some of the coolest work in software anywhere in the world. They send a newsletter to those of inside the company who are interested in their work (“Friends of MSR”) which I found out it is OK to post. Unfortunately...

You undoubtedly have read a lot of posts on blogs.asp.net that contain code snippets, insight into Longhorn, et al but for my money there’s no more interesting reading than Chris Pratley’s account on the birth of OneNote . Chris is the PM...

IMHO, blogging is a redundant communication medium inside a company or organization. How's that for controversial? News at 11... Companies could have had a "blog experience" as far back as 1996 using the first version of Microsoft Exchange using a combination...

Blogging has gotten rave reviews as a new breakthrough in communication. I like being able to subscribe to various author's thoughts as I imagine most of you do too. However, there are a few things I find confusing or that I believe could work much better...

Do you remember when hard drives were 10 MB and bad sectors would eliminate 20% of the drive? Hard drives were not very robust (nor were the PCs, the OSes, …) but that was pretty outrageous. Not only would the sectors go bad which wiping out large...

Thank you EVERYONE for your comments and assistance. Not that it matters, but I did know that DOS v COMMAND were different apps. I guess I should have said "DOS-like commands." :-) As far as my comment about wanting more descriptive help it would have...

Admittedly I haven’t used MS-DOS in quite a while and sadly even after all of the cool advances in Windows I find myself still needing it. For example I have to batch scripts I started to work on today. The first one is supposed to copy all of our...

I attended college at Indiana University in Bloomington. While IU is known for many outstanding schools (e.g. School of Music, Business, …) most people know it as the school Bob Knight coached at and even more so for his questionable behavior....

I was excited to learn that the new SPOT watches are now available. From what I’ve read, the SPOT watches are the first iteration of a new technology that is sent to you personalized (assuming you’re in one of the United States’ 100...

Why can’t all ISVs have something comparable to Windows Update? I want an option when prompted for media or for a file location that also goes out to their Internet site to download the most recent driver/file/etc. I have lots of CDs lying around...

I wish everyone a Happy New Year. Hopefully, this next year will welcome you all with great health, deep relationships, enjoyable occupations and super long battery life (couldn’t resist). Be safe! Kent

Why is it I never remember to post a complete blog until after I re-read my own post? I do this a lot in emails as well. Its embarrassing. I’m hoping that we’ll add some other squiggly line color someday that’ll remind me that I’ve...

…has replaced film photography in our home. It took me two printers and an upgraded camera to convince my wife that digital could compete and then replace traditional 35MM film cameras. Our first digital camera was my Christmas gift in 1998....

A couple of days ago I tried to burn a CD of some photos I’d taken at my niece’s basketball game so she would have them and could share them with her coach and teammates. The built in software in Windows XP normally makes that very easy to...

My first experience with a computer was on my college roommate’s Mac Plus. One floppy held the OS and the application Microsoft Word 3.0 is memory serves and the other floppy held my data disk. That’s pretty amazing given there are DLLs that...

I’m horrible at blogging. I started this with a few ideas in mind and it ended up being ~2100 words. If you’ve got ADHD you’ll never get through this. I barely got through it. I definitely live and love the digital lifestyle. 99%...

There were several people who posted replies to my “feedback” post. I’m not sure how to make a reply a top-level post so I’m forking the original post into this post. AndrewSeven ask a very legitimate question: “Does MS really...

Kevin Hammond (as is Rob Relyea) is a friend of mine who recently blogged about people feeling that our continuous feedback loop (that’s what we call it) is a burden. He was called out in this blog that seems to net out to: stop asking for feedback...

Why does it seem that every time I get on the phone I get an instant message from someone? We have an “on the phone” setting in our software but the only time I ever remember to set it is after the fact. We just got a new phones in our office...

I started this entry to praise the effort that Greg Reinacker was willing to put forward to help me and then went off on a tangent (although quite parallel if I do say so myself). In my blog yesterday ( http://weblogs.asp.net/kentc/posts/41278.aspx...

Welcome to my (our) new home! The folks in charge of MSDN are turning off http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/ and have asked us to move our blogs here. I am no ASP.NET expert or of any coding really but I know a lot about our (Microsoft's) technology from servers...

There's a couple of things that sort of define a platform. For Windows, I believe it is/was Office. For XBox, it was Halo. For XBox Live, it was Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. I just finished playing Midtown Madness on XBox Live with FunSlayer and DanO. I...

I just consumed Kevin Hammond’s blog shout out announcing my blog (what’s blog etiquette—is it OK to acknowledge a blog about your blog?). I’m a bit embarrassed (although the Paypal process is a “go” if you know what...