Kevin Dente's Blog

These shows kind of amaze me. I mean, I appreciate Microsoft's general strategy of carpet-bombing developer's with technical information on a new platform like .NET. And the human face that these videos present are a good thing. But does anyone actually have time to watch an hour and a half video on IIS 6? That violates the most important principle of technical communication - scanability. There's way too much information out there to process for this kind of thing.

The recently used applications list in WinXP is a great idea (although not a new one...wasn't that feature in the early betas of Win95 but removed because it wasn't "data centric"?). The problem is that the list is in exactly the wrong place. Putting it at the top level of the Start Menu completely breaks keyboard navigation of the Start Menu. It makes the keyboard accelerators non-deterministic - I can't hit Ctrl-Esc, C to launch the Control Panel because I might have recently run CardScan.

I've only recently become aware of the registration-free COM activation feature of Windows XP (aka side-by-side deployment). Very interesting. The idea is that you have an application manifest which describes all of the COM types that an application uses. Sort of an application-scoped XML file version of HKCR. Of course, Microsoft has all kinds of caveats about how the COM objects should work to support this mode of deployment, so I'm not sure if it our existing COM API would just work in a production environment. But it could be super-cool for testing different versions of our API on a single machine.

OK, I did a little regmon-ing, and I'm finally starting to understand the workings of Open With a little better (this stuff has gotten a lot more complicated since I last looked at it). Keep in mind that I'm working in XP here - don't know if the same applies for W2K, I haven't installed VS2003 there yet.

Another thing that's changed dramatically for me over the last year is the way that I shop for gadgets. There are some absolutely incredible deals out there, especially if you're willing to deal with mail-in rebates. There are numerous web sites out there dedicated to keeping you up to date on the latest deals. My favorites sites at the moment are Techbargains (which also provides an RSS feed) and BensBargains. Recent snags included a 4 megapixel Olympus digital camera with an Epson 820 photo printer for $318 total (!!!) and a Netgear wireless router for my girlfriend for $20. Hell, I haven't actually paid for blank CD-Rs in months (thanks to free-after-rebate) deals.

Ask and ye shall receive. Not willing to wait around for CodeProject to get their collective butts in gear, Wes Haggard took matters into his own hands and created his own RSS feed for the site. Super-sweet.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;[LN];813350

I'm amazed at how, in the space of a few short months, RSS and aggregators have fundamentally changed how I collect and read information. It's not very often that I can that say that about a technology. Although I've been aware of blogs and RSS for a while, it was really NewsGator that pulled it all together for me. Aggregators that brought all of the info to me were cool. An aggregator that brought all of the information to me into the one application that I spend virtually all of my time running is what brought it home. Usually the use of marketing-speak like "synergy" makes me dry heave, but NewsGator is a great example of that concept. It builds on the infrastructure that Outlook provides and extends it in a totally natural way. I have access to my mailbox through IMAP, so I can check the latest and greatest news from just about anywhere (what would I do without Mail2Web) without worrying about duplicating my feeds all over the place. As far as I'm concerned, it's the closest thing to the "Information At Your Fingertips"  mantra (remember Big Bill's grand vision) since the Palm came on the scene.