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November 2004 - Posts

Tuesday, November 23, 2004 6:20 PM

Book Review: Expert C# Business Objects

A few weeks back, I was talking to a fellow member of the West Michigan .NET User Group board, and we were discussing the architectural model behind the business objects that we used on the NxOpinion project . The more we talked, the more he said that
Posted by mswanson | 5 Comments
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Monday, November 22, 2004 11:46 PM

Greater Lansing User Group .NET Presentation

Last Thursday evening, I gave my presentation on Taming the Software Development Process: Tools, Tips, and Techniques to the Greater Lansing User Group .NET (GLUGnet). It was well-attended, and I'm guessing that there were around 50-60 people there. From
Posted by mswanson | 4 Comments
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Monday, November 22, 2004 11:12 PM

Half-Life 2 Review

Well, it's been almost one full week since I purchased Half-Life 2 , and in that time, I've managed to set aside around 18 total hours to play this game from start to finish. Valve has truly created an interactive masterpiece...one that will no-doubt
Posted by mswanson | 56 Comments
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Saturday, November 20, 2004 11:11 AM

Avalon November 2004 Community Technology Preview

Don't know how I missed this interesting bit of news, but Andy Boyd mentions that the Avalon November 2004 Community Technology Preview is now available via MSDN subscriber downloads (255.39MB ISO). You can also find the WinFX SDK documentation online.
Posted by mswanson | 5 Comments
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Tuesday, November 16, 2004 12:54 AM

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 Rocks!

Okay...I have a confession to make. To-date, I've purchased four TiVo units, and I'm currently running the DirectTV DVR that includes the TiVo service. My wife and I are both TiVo addicts, our friends are sick and tired of us talking about it, and I firmly
Posted by mswanson | 23 Comments
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Monday, November 15, 2004 11:58 PM

Sanitize Your Clipboard Text

I'm guessing this is mostly a geek problem, but I frequently find myself starting up NOTEPAD, pasting in some formatted text, selecting all of the now-unformatted text, copying it again, and pasting it into some other application. Does this sound familiar?
Posted by mswanson | 10 Comments
Saturday, November 13, 2004 12:04 AM

The Final Hours of Half-Life 2

GameSpot has posted an excellent, 25-page, in-depth article titled The Final Hours of Half-Life 2 . The report covers: The choice by Valve Software to develop their own game engine The inclusion of realistic physics and articulate characters Why Half-Life
Posted by mswanson | 5 Comments
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Thursday, November 11, 2004 3:37 PM

The Importance of Information Increases Directly with Distance and Cost

This is a maxim that I’ve generally found to be true in my many years of consulting experience. Although I’ve seen it in the technology industry, I have no reason to believe that it’s any different in other specialties. As a matter of fact, if you’ve
Posted by mswanson | 7 Comments
Thursday, November 11, 2004 8:42 AM

MSN Search Service Beta

The MSN Search team has released a beta version of their new service at http://beta.search.msn.com/ . Of course, being a beta, you can expect to run into some quirks. For example, all of my searches this morning result in: "This site is temporarily unavailable,
Posted by mswanson | 1 Comments
Thursday, November 11, 2004 12:40 AM

Embarrassing Music

About 15 years ago, I lived with a musically inclined roommate who actually built a full audio studio in the basement of the house we lived in. Yes, it was a full studio . It had sound-proof walls, large glass windows between the different rooms, high
Posted by mswanson | 8 Comments
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Tuesday, November 09, 2004 2:07 PM

What About Halo 2?

I've had a few people e-mail me this morning to ask why I haven't posted about today's release of Halo 2 . Well, although I was part of the beta program, and I think Halo 2 is a very good game, I'm personally much more excited about next week's release
Posted by mswanson | 58 Comments
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Thursday, November 04, 2004 8:14 PM

Scott Guthrie Blogs Again!

Scott Guthrie , the Product Unit Manager responsible for ASP.NET, has started blogging again, and he's already posted three excellent and informative items. All of them relate to the details of the development and testing process that we use within Microsoft.
Posted by mswanson | 0 Comments
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Thursday, November 04, 2004 7:53 PM

Book Review: User Stories Applied

This book came highly recommended by one of our Architectural Consultants, so I ordered it from Amazon , added it to my stack of books, and after some time, I've finally Stack.Pop()'d it. Author Mike Cohn, founder of Mountain Goat Software , is a very
Posted by mswanson | 0 Comments
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Tuesday, November 02, 2004 9:13 PM

Dual Opteron Goodness

If you follow my blog, you'll probably remember the dual Opteron workstation I ordered on September 29th from GamePC . Well, after waiting a full month (due to industry-wide video card delays ), the eagle has finally landed. As a result of the delays,
Posted by mswanson | 16 Comments
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