Kevin Dente's Blog

Craig Andera blogs a simple ListItemWrapper class for dealing with Windows Forms listbox items. This is such a common scenario that I’d really love to see a simple ListItem class as part of the framework (no sign of one in the March community preview release). While there’s no technical reason why it has to come from Microsoft (obviously it’s pretty easy to create - I’ve done it myself numerous times), it would cover probably 80% or more of my usage of the listbox, and that makes it worth it in my book. All we need is a ListItem class with a Text string property and a Tag object property. You could even throw in a couple of jazzy data binding bonus features if you really want.

My fiancé is a Mac person. She’s a web designer (and a damn good one), so I cut her some slack on that one. This weekend she upgraded her Mac to Panther (OS 10.3). On a lark, I decided to check if the new version supported Windows-based VPNs (PPTP, I guess not strictly Windows-based, but I believe it came out of the Windows world). Lo and behold, it did! I configured it to connect to my company’s VPN (a process that was harder than it should have been – sometimes I think Mac’s reputation for ease of use is overblown). Once configured correctly, it worked like a charm. I installed Microsoft’s remote desktop client for the Mac, and connected to my box at work. Bing, bang, boom, I was seamlessly controlling my XP machine from my fiancé’s Mac.

I installed Outlook 2003 the last time I repaved my machine, and generally it has worked just fine. But several times recently I've ended up with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of RSS posts in my “For Follow Up” folder (I use NewsGator as my RSS reader). I was mystified as to how they were getting there, because I never right-clicked on a bunch of posts and selected “Follow Up”.

I finally started playing around with the Whidbey March Tech Preview, and thought I'd blog some comments as they occurred to me.

UPDATE - WallyM posted a fix in the comments section. Thanks Wally!

A while back I bought a Netgear MR814 wireless router for my girlfriend's house. However, I've always had problems holding a strong wireless connection. The back of the house doesn't get a very strong signal, and my connection would frequently drop. For a while I chalked the connection losses up to poor signal strength, but recently I found the following article on Netgear's support site:

Yes, it's official. Season 2 of Red vs Blue stinks. Actually, it was official 3 or 4 episodes ago, but I was holding out hope that things would improve. It pains me to say this, as I was a huge fan of Season 1. What happened? How did things go so wrong? In my opinion, it went wrong when they took out the f***ing swearing. Half (or more) of the hilarity of the show was the military guys ripping in to each other. Some of the insults have even made it into my friends' vernacular.

Got the email from Comcast today - the connection speed on my cable modem internet connection doubled today. Just ran the speed test - 3150 kbps. Woo-hoo!!