.net DEvHammer

Bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to blog about recently, in no particular order:

• The SideShow Team Blog announces the availability of a beta release of SideShow gadgets for Windows Media Center. View guide information, schedule recordings, control media playback, and more. Cool stuff!
  
• Some cool flat-look control skins for Silverlight 2, beta 2. Corrina has lots of cool Silverlight stuff, so check back there often.
  
• Great example of community innovation from Roanoke. Robin and her crew at RVNUG ran a special user group meeting in which attendees were split into teams and asked to unit test a special version of a starter kit that had had several bugs added. Apparently attendance was high and participation was 100%. Great job!
  
• A good post on debugging ASP.NET applications in production. 
  
• Building Virtual Earth apps with Marc Schwiegert. Having done a fair amount of stuff with VE for Community Megaphone, I would highly recommend anyone interested take a look. Easy and fun.
  
• Encoding screen recordings in VC-1 using Expression Encoder 2.
  
• Increase your Visual Studio environment font sizes for presentations, thanks to Sara Ford.
  
• Downloadable Code Snippet editor for Visual Basic 2008. Simplify creation and management of code snippets for VB.
  
• This one’s really cool…Page Brooks demonstrates how to use Silverlight to control your treadmill. Yes, you read that right. I think my favorite part is the marrying of new-tech with old-school…the app apparently uses recorded encoded sound clips to control the treadmill. Guess they haven’t heard of bluetooth yet.

That’s it for now…I’ll be posting my weekly event round-up later today!