Joel From Canada

 I received my official email today stating that I’ve maintained my Regional Director status with Microsoft.  Happiness.  Even better, an old employee/friend Derek Hatchard is now also part of our mix.  Derek is a great guy – real bright – I’d like to say I taught him everything he knows, but that’s clearly not the case.   Derek is located in the Canadian East coast and is doing lots of great things.

Just started reading The Da Vinci code this weekend.  Yikes, can’t put it down.  If you’re into religion, conspiracies, secret societies you should go and read this book.  It’s also brought back my fascination with PHI. 

So, I’m planning on doing a bunch of presentations at our local universities.  I am expecting a “if it ain’t free, we don’t want it” type of crowd so I went searching for a free – open source (lightning strikes) editor and stumbled across SharpDevelop (www.icsharpcode.net).  I was blown away.  How can this be…?  Open source…. Hmmmm. 

You know… I’m getting a little ticked about this Mad Cow stuff.  When Canada got its case this past year, the word, including the US, went nuts.  How can this happen?  Canada must be a backward country to allow such things to happen.  Countries like the US and Japan took no chances proposing that it raised a SIGNFICANT health risk to consumers.  From then on, the Canadian economy was crippled for months (combined with the SARS outbreak – which I found funny that the US didn’t have one single case…hmmmm), and is in fact still on a slow recovery.  I would also like to point out that it is known that the cow that was found to be infected in Canada originated in the US, but that story was quickly hushed for some reason (more “hmmmmm”). 

Don Box started it… I think it would be fun to continue… 

I like speech technology.  I think it’s really neat but has a ways to go.  Recently, Microsoft announced its new SpeechSDK used to bring speech recognition to web apps.  My first thought was “web apps – who cares?”  Thinking more on this I realized the importance of server side speech recognition, especially when it comes to customer service and phone support.  I realized this even further after I blew my Sony receiver this past weekend.   I decided to call customer support to find out where I could bring my cooked receiver and was pleasantly surprised when I was told that instead of hitting numbers on my phone to navigate options of customer support  I could just “say” what I wanted.  Yup – Sony has implemented some form of server side voice recognition technology – and it did a good job.  Turns out that I ended up pressing buttons anyway, since for voice recognition to work you need to wait for all of the prompts to complete before speaking your entry.  I’m impatient and ended up pressing the correct option as soon as I heard it.

Is it possible to create a Microsoft Management Console Snap-In with .NET?  I know about the MMC Snap-in Designer for Visual Basic – but don’t know if there is anything newer or pre-canned for the .NET world. 

I kinda like using Visio to play around with ideas.  I find it expressive enough for me to refine concepts into something that looks more like a software design.  What I can’t seem to figure out, however, is how to create a Visio Solution where I can have many sub-projects responsible for specific parts of my design.  I would be able to work with the Visio Solution as a whole, but toggle between different macro sets (sub files I guess) as I need them.    For example, I typically work with the UML software development templates.  These are OK for initial idea refinement.  What I also like working with is the Brain Storming templates (I like MindManager better for this however).  Both templates are “active” where Visio provides additional features to help manage, build, and validate your UML model or your mind mapping ideas.  However, you can’t use both active templates at the same time in the same file – I need to keep two copies of Visio open and toggle between the two as I refine my ideas.  It would be “cool” to be able to work in the same model “solution” instead of completely separate instances of Visual Studio.