Kevin Dente's Blog

Today was a pretty darn interesting day. I spent a big chunk of it writing a Visual Studio .NET add-in that uses the CodeModel to munge around with C# source code. The experience ran the gamut, from initial excitement at early successes, to frustration as limitations were encountered, to satisfaction when the goals of the project are finally met. It isn't too often that all of that happens all in one day.

I guess I'm a late comer to the Red vs Blue BloodGulch serial. Holy crap, Batman, it's brilliant. I laughed. I cried. OK, I just laughed. A lot. Those guys are amazing.

A recent issue of The Daily Grid pointed me at a new tool called Desktop Sidebar (unfortunately, the link seems to be dead at the moment - hopefully it will be fixed soon). This is a very cool tool. It gives you a highly configurable side tray that makes all kinds of information available - news, weather, stocks, etc. It provides a POP3 email checker, integrates with Outlook to display your corporate emails, schedule, and to do list, and provides a Media Player controller. It can display system performance information, including your most active applications (nice). You can also put shortcuts on it and use it as an app launcher. All of this info is displayed in a set of panels. You customize which panels you want displayed and in what arrangement. The panels can be sized, overlayed, and stacked.  The whole tray can be docked to either side of the screen or float, and supports auto-hiding.

Microsoft posted some great info about upcoming releases of the .NET Framework and VS.NET. Some of the questions that the article raises for me:

I just started playing around with HTTP Handlers in ASP.NET for the first time. A couple of observations:

My cell phone is toast. Not completely - it works if the battery is disconnected and AC cord is attached. But that kind of defeats the whole notion of a "mobile" phone. So I need a new one.

Goodness. Rory has posted the first commercial that I've seen for a web log (though apparently it's his second - I missed the first). I had no idea the web log market was getting so competitive.

The very cool kbalertz site now has RSS feeds. Theoretically this is cool, and yet I don't think I'll be switching from the e-mail based version. Why? Because you either subscribe to one giant feed of all KB items, or you subscribe to one feed per KB category. I certainly don't want all items, but I don't relish the idea of adding 50 new RSS feeds to my blogroll either. OK, that's an exaggeration, I think I monitor about 10 categories currently. But even that's a lot of new feeds to poll, and I could easily see that number going up over time.