I’ve been working with Visual Studio 2010 betas for a while now (it’s really great) and have gone through multiple upgrades of VS and the .Net runtime over the past few months. While working on a WCF REST service this week I started seeing assembly load...

One thing that’s somewhat painful about testing/debugging SqlClr application code is managing the connection strings used for internal DB calls inside the system. SqlClr has the notion of a “context connection” connection string which uses the same connection...

My boss and I were lamenting the lack of the "friend" declaration in the CLR languages like C# this week. We're working on tightening up the Publishing API for the MTPS system (the publishing system behind msdn2.microsoft.com) and wanted to be able...

Went with the family to see Doc Watson play at the Woodland Park Zoo last night. The zoo hosts concerts featuring some pretty great mid-level touring bands every summer on the North Meadow , and, since we live a block away, we go to most every show. It...

I'm on my annual F1-oriented vacation and travelled to Indianapolis for the USGP again. I'm a big fan of Kimi Raikkonen, so the USGP was a real dissapointment. We have great seats at turn one, which is where Juan Pablo Montoya took out Raikkonen (his...

File under "Goliath interviews David, Remains Incredulous." Saturday's Wall Street Journal has an interview with Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. Brian Carney, the interviewer, seems distinctly ill-at-ease with the notion that Craigslist isn't terribly...

Craig Andera has been working with my team on a set of web services exposing MSDN2 content hosted by MTPS (our content publishing and rendering system) to SOAP clients. Yesterday at TechNet they pulled the wraps off and announced the public availability...

An article I wrote for MSDN Magazine covering the metadata aggregation system my team developed has been published. Online version at http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/07/InsideMSDN/default.aspx . This article builds on the talk I gave at...

It's been a Wilco-oriented week. Followed up Monday's Nels Cline show with a Jeff Tweedy solo show last night. As an added bonus Wilco's drummer Glenn Kotche opened and sat in for a few songs with Tweedy. Now you might be thinking A drummer opened...

I promised to post links to some of the resources I mentioned in my talk at VSLive this week. Here they are: Presentation deck (.ppt) Presentation deck (.htm) Chris Brumme's blog post on SQL Server's hosting of the CLR MSDN2 docs on SQL...

I've been pretty lax about posting of late (new baby, you see), but I just returned from giving a talk at VSLive in San Francisco and have several posts in the pipeline. Après ceci, le déluge. I gave a talk on my team's use of SQL CLR integration and...

Another interesting paper from the Honeynet Project . This one relates their discoveries about the tools and techniques Phishers use to turn compromised servers into phishing support sites. Pretty scary how well organized these people are. http://www...

"Imagine a large group of small unmanned autonomous aerial vehicles that can fly with the agility of a flock of starlings in a city square at dusk. Imagine linking their onboard computers together across a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless network...

5 May is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Netherlands from German occupation. The Dutch hold a Liberation Festival every May 4th & 5th to celebrate Freedom and to " reflect on the current meaning of freedom, democracy and justice." ...

I'm working on a project that makes extensive use of Yukon's CLR integration. This makes things that have traditionally been difficult to do in T-SQL (like string manipulation) a whole lot easier. If you aren't familiar with the basics of SQLCLR integration...

Steve Butler turned me on to this nifty utility that replaces the stock Task Switcher functionality. I installed it on my laptop, and now the plain old Windows task switcher seems so, well -- plain, that I've put it on all my other machines too...

The MSCOM Community Team has launched a spiffy new way for the developer community to find answers to technical questions and communicate about MS development technologies. http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/ Pretty neat stuff. The ability to register...

From WilcoWorld : "Jeff Tweedy and Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig will discuss their opinions regarding file sharing, free culture, and the arts. Lessig wrote the 2004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock...

Slobberbone is (was) a terrific band from Denton, Texas. Sort of alt.country ( whatever that is ) I suppose. Or straight up loud rock. They've stopped regularly at the Tractor in Seattle and I've seen them several times there. They played their last show...

Charlie "Yardbird" Parker died 50 years ago this week. I was first turned on to bebop and to Bird in the mid eighties at a dive bar in Kansas City MO called Milton's. I didn't know then that it was a legendary part of Kansas City Jazz History; I just...

A great overview on Botnets: how they work, how they are used, and how to observe them using honeypots . Should be required reading for everyone with an always-on broadband connection who believes that they don't need to worry about strong firewalls and...

Videos for several talks on ASP.net 2.0 given by Jeff Prosise have been posted to MSDN. He's a great speaker, ASP.net has some really cool features, and they're free. http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/support/multimedia/default.aspx [updated: URL corrected...

100 or so of us saw Bettie Serveert play the Crocodile in support of their new album "Attagirl" Tuesday night. Wow. These guys have always been great, and they keep getting better with every album and tour. They brought along their sampler/keyboard guy...

I'm evaluating the use of BizTalk 2004 as the underpinnings for v.next of a project, and as I ramp up on this vast and powerful suite of tools have been struggling mightily to work within the constraints the BizTalk schema editor. It's nice, I guess,...

I seem to spend a lot of time cutting text from web pages or Visual Studio and pasting it into email messages. Oftentimes this causes all manner of wierdness in Outlook 2003, especially when the email messages are formatted as rich HTML. I found a nifty...