This month, we're putting together the overall plan and guidelines for Starter Kits for ASP.NET Whidbey. Jeff King (Scott's PDC keynote demo buddy ) is managing the overall Starter Kit plan for our team, and has been putting together some samples. Over the next few months, I'll use this blog to share some of the starter kit designs and ideas with you, and get your feedback. If you have any ideas at any time, feel free to shout! Like V1, the aim of the starter kits is to have real world applications that work “out of the box”, but are easy and tempting to customize. The first step is to put together a set of guidelines for consistency that apply to any starter kit; we'll then use these guidelines to create specs for each specific...

Duncan's post on the Commodore 64 brings back a flood of memories. The Commodore 64 was really my first major computer. Although I used several others at school or friends' (like the TRS-80, PET, TI-99/4A, the Atari 800, the Apple IIe, and the original Mac), the 64 was the first computer I owned. I got my Commodore 64 for my 12th birthday - we forked out Cdn. $1500 for a system that included a C64, a 1541 floppy drive (170K!), and a 1526 printer. We added a 1701 monitor a few months later - it was the only component I still had by the time I entered university, because it had RCA jacks for inputs, which made it great for a dorm room TV. Some random memories: The 1526 printer was a big mistake. It was billed as a near-letter-quality printer Read...

It's been a while since Rob set this up for me, but I'm finally online and blogging. My only hope is that I can keep it updated with frequent entries! For those of you who don't know me, here's a brief bio, from the February 2004 aspnetPRO magazine: As the Group Program Manager of the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, Shanku Niyogi leads the program management team responsible for design of both ASP.NET and Microsoft’s web development toolset in Visual Studio.NET. Shanku joined Microsoft as a developer in 1998, with several years of experience in the Windows software industry. He worked on both Windows and web versions of Microsoft’s chat software, before going on to be a development lead on the Adaptive User Interface team, looking at...