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October 2004 - Posts

Thursday, October 28, 2004 8:17 PM

Photo Story 3 Available for Download

We released the latest version of Photo Story yesterday, and it is now available for download for Windows XP users. If you're like me, you probably have a hard drive full of digital photos that you'd like to make into an easy-to-download (or e-mail) slide
Posted by mswanson | 35 Comments
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Thursday, October 28, 2004 7:42 PM

Presentation Model Thoughts

I'm currently spending time on a user interface framework for the 2005 version ("Whidbey") of Windows Forms. Yesterday, I tried to implement a version of Martin Fowler 's Presentation Model and incorporate it into my existing architecture. Part of my
Posted by mswanson | 4 Comments
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Saturday, October 23, 2004 2:14 PM

Unreal Engine 3 Overview and Half-Life 2 Review

As an avid magazine reader, I picked up a copy of Maximum PC 's 3D Gaming Tech Guide Special Issue: Fall 2004 . If you're interested in 3D gaming, this is an issue that's worth purchasing. In addition to hardware and software reviews, there's an excellent
Posted by mswanson | 3 Comments
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Monday, October 18, 2004 8:37 PM

Half-Life 2 Has Gone Gold!

According to this Vivendi Universal Games press release , Valve Software 's Half-Life 2 has gone gold and should be in stores on November 16th. For those wondering when Steam users will be able to play all of their downloaded content, Shacknews reports
Posted by mswanson | 3 Comments
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Friday, October 15, 2004 9:26 PM

C# Edit and Continue Support in Visual Studio 2005

This is one of those things that I knew customers would be excited about, but I had to keep quiet. Sometimes that's tough to do with a feature that you know so many people are waiting for. Well, we announced today that C# now includes the same edit-and-continue
Posted by mswanson | 4 Comments
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Thursday, October 14, 2004 1:43 PM

The Google Desktop

A beta version of the Google Desktop is available for download that enables you to search through all of your Outlook/Outlook Express, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, and AOL Instant Messenger files and data. It even searches through your Internet Explorer
Posted by mswanson | 6 Comments
Wednesday, October 13, 2004 12:13 AM

The .NET Show: Connected Systems (and Chris Sells on .NET Rocks!)

There's a new two hour episode of The .NET Show on Connected Systems that features Don Box , Doug Purdy , Eric Schmidt, and Richard Turner . The talk discusses "how today's networking infrastructure can be utilized in order to create a Connected System
Posted by mswanson | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, October 12, 2004 11:50 PM

Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1

Here's a release that will make many of you very, very happy. If you've installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 as a guest operating system in a virtual machine, you've no doubt noticed that the performance of the virtual machine is incredibly poor (and I'm
Posted by mswanson | 3 Comments
Monday, October 11, 2004 12:17 AM

Macro Wallpaper 3: Fallpaper

For those that requested some fall-themed macro photos for wallpaper, here you go. They're not quite up to my normal standards, but I have a feeling you'll like them anyway. Each image is 1280 x 1024 and weighs in at around 230KB in size. I hope you enjoy
Posted by mswanson | 12 Comments
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Friday, October 08, 2004 9:43 AM

ASP.NET Module to Resolve Canonicalization Issue

We've released an ASP.NET ValidatePath Module that takes care of the recent canonicalization issues that were initially reported on NTBugtraq . If you're not familiar with the vulnerability, you can read about it on our security site. The two solutions
Posted by mswanson | 0 Comments
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Thursday, October 07, 2004 9:48 PM

Glass Windows Wallpaper and 3D Animated Desktop

Here's a thumbnail from some very nice wallpaper images from DivineError. He has a 1600 x 1200 version , a 1280 x 800 widescreen version and a non-glass version . He's created a lot of other great images too, if you spend the time to look through his
Posted by mswanson | 14 Comments
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Thursday, October 07, 2004 10:12 PM

Replicating OnSuccess and OnFailure in MSBuild

As you may have read in an earlier post , I'm currently helping a customer migrate their project from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to Visual Studio 2005. Our current build script uses NAnt , and we're in the process of converting it to MSBuild . Since we're
Posted by mswanson | 4 Comments
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Thursday, October 07, 2004 8:53 PM

New William Shatner Album: Has Been

Hilarious! Yes...you read that right...William Shatner has an album. Why didn't I know about this? I think William Shatner is a genius. He continually reinvents himself, and he isn't afraid to make fun of his career. I was at Best Buy today, and obviously,
Posted by mswanson | 6 Comments
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Wednesday, October 06, 2004 7:09 PM

My Candy Cigarette Addiction

Anyone else love candy cigarettes ...err...I'm sorry...just plain Candy (they don't like to use the term cigarette next to the word candy anymore). A former Microsoftie and friend named Bill (who now works for Sagestone Consulting ) was thoughtful enough
Posted by mswanson | 9 Comments
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Tuesday, October 05, 2004 11:56 PM

CruiseControl.NET and MSBuild

I'm currently helping the Robertson Research Institute convert their large C# Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey") Beta 1. For the past year-and-a-half, we've used CruiseControl.NET (CC.NET), NAnt , NUnit , and FxCop
Posted by mswanson | 12 Comments
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Monday, October 04, 2004 8:48 PM

Birth of a Blog: Objects, Systems and Everywhere in Between

One of the best architects/developers/people I've ever had the pleasure of working with has finally started his own blog! I've been encouraging (okay...prodding) him to do this for awhile, because he has a lot of knowledge that other developers can definitely
Posted by mswanson | 0 Comments
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Sunday, October 03, 2004 5:44 PM

PhotoStamps

For seven weeks during August and September, the US Postal Service authorized a public market test for PhotoStamps . They cost about twice as much as normal postage, but in my opinion, the novelty is worth the price. So, I ordered a few sheets printed
Posted by mswanson | 3 Comments
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Sunday, October 03, 2004 2:12 PM

How Much Is One Million?

While watching the trailer for the upcoming film, Paper Clips , I was reminded of an experiment I performed back in high school. Mind you, my experiment didn’t have as much meaning or purpose as the project documented in the trailer, but it does illustrate
Posted by mswanson | 8 Comments
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Friday, October 01, 2004 12:20 AM

Ordered A Dual Opteron Workstation

You may recall that I've been waiting for one of two "triggers" to order a new computer. Well, even though my first trigger, Doom 3, has already been released, I found that it ran very acceptably on my current P4 1.8GHz Dell Dimension 8100 computer. So,
Posted by mswanson | 14 Comments
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