Noah Coad

After three Visual Studio releases and five and a half years with Microsoft, I’m moving back to Texas! My journey began on a mysterious new product code named “Burton”, which became Visual Studio Team System.  Those first three years with VSTS shipping...

Microsoft wants you to be able to use the Professional version of its software development tools and is making it easy for students and new businesses to get started.  These are essentially free MSDN subscriptions that include VS Pro, SQL, Expression...

Sometimes you want to use a Difference (or Minus) set operation which goes like this: Give me all elements from set A that do not exist in set B.  Or simply put A – B.  The LINQ Except method does this if both sets A and B are of the same type...

Five years ago today I walked into Microsoft building 41 as green as the first day of college.  This entire time I’ve been in the Developer Division with the pleasure to work on improving some of the best software development tools in the industry...

Took me awhile to find this, so it is worth sharing.  If you have a computer (usually laptop, notebook, etc) with a docking station and want to tell the PC to undock itself from the station from the command line, this is it.  For me the scenario...

We just released VS2010 Beta 1 to the web for public download !!  This is very exciting as my team, the Visual Studio Platform (VSP) team, has made tremendous effort and new functionality in this release of VS.  My VSP team is specifically responsible...

I was just browsing my favorite computer supplier, newegg.com, when I came across this awesome deal.  It is a 1 TB "Hammer Storage" USB 2.0 external drive.  Sure it's not a major brand and the $100 is after a $20 mail-in rebate, but...

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1832128   (tis the season…) (thanks to noah's mark )

Today I saw some C# language syntax that made me think, "hey, wait a minute, I didn't know you could do that!", so perhaps it'll be new to someone else too.  Honestly, I don't know how I missed this memo. Let's start off with the code,...

RSS feeds are popping up right and left these days for everything from news, to friends’ pictures, to Internet searches.  Recently I discovered that eBay has RSS feeds for auction searches.  It is really handy to keep an eye out for those unique...

Update (9/4/08): Looks like KeyBank has ended this promotion by now.  Who knows, maybe they’ll try again in the future. KeyBank is giving away a free iPod Nano when you open an account!  About six months back Dawn and I got our spiffy iPod Nano...

What true geek doesn’t just love the site ThinkGeek.com ?   Where one can fulfill their gizmo, t-shirt, poster, plant, science, toy craze of nerddom.  I’ve had a number of items from the site on my wishlist through a few birthdays and Christmas...

Much of the time on the PC is spent rapidly moving from one task to another so quickly that it can be a challenge to keep context of all the projects, web sites, files, thoughts, etc one’s been working with throughout the day. It’s the bane of all PC...

Ever notice the text or font in applications that use an embedded Internet Explorer just isn’t the right size?  Either too small or large?  I’ve encountered this in a number of apps including Microsoft HTML Help Control (for .chm files), Windows...

I’m a big fan of keeping my hands on the keyboard as much as possible and having real quick easy ‘one-touch’ access to my favorite apps, web sites, and tasks.  It’s just amazing how much more productive one can be when using the keyboard instead...

With all the video's being posted these days, it can be a lot of fun to go trolling through YouTube, Soapbox, Google Vids, etc, but it can be quite time consuming to find the creme of the crop.  The time I have to watch videos is usually not when...

TechSmith, makers of my (up to now) favorite SnagIt and Camtasia have created the Jing Project , a new screen image & video capture tool.  It is slick, simple, easy, and fun.  I just installed it and am loving it.  Right now it's complete...

I love my Garmin Nuvi!  It is simple, elegant, easy to use, helpful, and effective.  The roads in Seattle are laid out far differently from what I was used to in Texas, and this makes navigating them a breeze.  When we're on trips, it finds...

Visual Studio 2008 has great Office 2007 integration with the ability to essentially open an Excel worksheet from within VS and add C# code as if it was a Windows Forms application.  Just today an acquaintance asked how to pull data off the web and...

I'm giving Twitter a try!  What is Twitter?  Simply put, it's short 140 character or less 'instant message like' updates.  My take on it is that I can use it to post interesting or funny little tidbits of info that I'd normally like to...

Every 8-12 month I take a look at the going prices of hard drives as I'm looking to expand my family's storage capacity.  To that end, I like to take a look at what drives are going for and make a little chart like this that shows the price one's...

   My session entitled Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips and Tricks has been accepted!  I've got a lot of ideas already but am looking forward to researching tips & tricks from the community, MVPs, MS devs, blogs, etc.  Here's the abstract...

Simply put, Starbucks charges for their wireless Internet access, Tully's is completely free.  I'm not a big coffee drinker (my drink: grande soy mocha 1-shot decaf w/ whip) but I hear from my Seattlites that Tully's coffee is better too.  If...

This is it, the final stake nailed in the HD DVD coffin.  HD DVD has been on a sinking ship, particularly since Warner Bros. turned their back on HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray .  I've been following this (VHS vs Betamax like) challenge in high...

My Moo MiniCards arrived!  I've been eyeing these little things for over a year now.  They're like a 'hip' little full color business card replacement.  A coworker gave me one to keep in touch and I was surprised by the impressive high...