June 2003 - Posts
Last evening I went to a dinner with a lot of MCT and MVP, and I've meet a lot of interesting people.
We went in a tipical Catalan restaurant, we've eaten a lot and we enjoyed very much the evening.
We divided the "course" in some "modules":
Module 0: openings
Module 1: fish
Module 2: meat
Module 3: ...
all the modules were "teached" with a lot of wine and beer...
Very nice dinner, thanks to Ronald, Fernando, and all the nice people that I meet there (especially the Italian MCT/MVPs)
After spending 6 hours in Milan MXP airport thanking the nice practice of OVERBOOKING, I'm finally arrived in Barcelona.
Very nice place, very nice people, very hot city, especially the METRO!!!
If you need a suggestion for the evening try Rambla Catalunya, it's full of people and tapas bar, and it's a very nice place to walk in or where to eat something.
So, the first session is began, let's enjoy Tech Ed 2003
Last night I've installed, using Remote Desktop, the Windows 2K SP4 on our Web Server.
Yes I know, I've to wait, I've to test it, I've to check that everything goes well in a test environment, but... hey I couldn't resist so I've installed it.
The Server rebooted and after some minutes I went back to check that everything was ok, but... Nothing happened, no Remote Desktop, no WWW, no PING, nothing...
I've spent all the night thinking "...ok Lorenzo you have to wait, you have to test, you cannot do risky things over the RD, tomorrow morning you aren't in the office, what do you do now..." and so on.
This mornig I called our office and I discovered that there was an Hardware failure during the Power On Self Test... @#!?@# a simple F1 after reboot and everything is ok...
So, let's wait for SP5... or perhaps I can try a remote update to W2K3.... I'm joking, I know that's impossible, but perhaps on the next Windows version...
What do you think?
I was very busy this week, I'm teaching a VB.NET course, I've done some work in ASP.NET, and I'm studying the labs for the TechEd.
Yes, I will be there as a proctor at the Hands-On Labs and I can assure you that there are very nice labs to try. I've to prepare for them if I want to be ready... :-)
Here is my schedule:
Tuesday 01-Jul - 16:30 -> 19:30
Thursday 03-Jul - 11:30 -> 15:00
Friday 04-Jul - 13:00 -> 17.15
I'll be at the DEV section of the HOL.
See you there!
I use SharpReader to surf between blogs and websites 90% of the times, and here is a small list of what I miss:
- A "GO" button in the title bar...
- "Back" and "Forward" buttons in the title bar
- Support for 5 buttons mice (especially for the Back and Forward buttons)
- I don't like how the SPACE BAR key is working, I want that it cycles trough all the unread posts, also if they are older than the current one (like the MSDN feed...)
- Support for bookmarks will be great
- Open a new browser window when I press the middle mouse button (like Crazy Browser)
Perhaps I think that what I really need is a new browser with a feed aggregator inside, and not a feed aggregator that I use also like a browser.
Anyway great work Luke, I really really really like your program.
I've received some great feedback on my last post about the 70-310 exam. Someone have privately asked what tools do I use to prepare for the exams.
I've already passed the exams 70-305 and 70-306 (for the new MCSD.NET cert, I was a VC++ MCSD, an NT4 MCSE and a MCDBA...) and on my way there are 70-310, 70-300 and one of the electives...
To pass them I've used the official MS Press books. I know that there is a lot of unuseful material in them (how to use a wizard or how to drag'n'drop something), but they have quite all the most relevant information if you know how to filter them.
I've also bought the Transcender pak for MCSD and it was very useful.
Of course I've read a lot of other sources, like MSDN, GotDotNet and other books relevant to the topic that I've to study.
While I was studying for the exams I've prepared the study guides on Cramsession.com, both on VB.NET and VC#, Web and Win, and they're full of useful links and materials. I've done them BEFORE doing the exams, but they are quite complete I think.
It's about a week that I'm studying for the Exam 70-310 - XML Web Services and Server Components in VB.NET (I've to complete my MCSD.NET cert to keep my MCT cert alive in October :-( but I've done only 2 exams... ) and I think that it's a very interesting exam, perhaps the most useful that I've done until now (it's the 16th...)
Today I bought the official book from MS Press and it's a very nice reading, I've learned a lot of things that I didn't know, especially about the developing of Windows Services in .NET, a topic that I've never touched. I've read 80 pages in less than an hour, I hope to finish it in the weekend.
It's worth all the Euros that I spent.
When I've done the exam (in the second half of July, I've no free days until that moment) I'll let you know if it was useful also to pass the exam...
Has somebody already read the book and passed the exam? Any comments?
Hey, Funkidator says that my feed is funky!!!
Incredible!!!
Thanks to everybody for the great welcome.
Thanks also to Scott for setting up this fantastic blog site and for preparing my account, I forgotten to mention him this morning..
Let's speak more about the first game that I'm developing for the CF.
I've started to develop it in VB.NET (given my experience), but after a while I've decided to switch to C#, because I've found much more samples for it, especially on the MSDN site and on the books that I have (for the normal Framework, but they're very very close).
I don't want to start a new flame, because I prefer VB.NET for the other projects that I'm working on (and given the type of the projects I can find more samples also in VB.NET)
I've decided that the game will be a PUYO-PUYO (r) clone, a game that I liked a lot when I was a teenager. It's a Tetris(r)-like game where 3 or more small creatures of the same color must be joined togheter to make them disappear.
I'll let you know when my graphic artist will give me the prototype of the graphics.
Hello everybody,
I'm a dotNET programmer, trainer and consultant from Milan, Italy.
Finally, after a lot of months spent reading all these blogs I decided to share my thoughts with the rest of the dotNET community.
I've programmed arcade games five years before joining the "serious" side of the development community.
In the last 3 years I've used dotNET to build Web and Windows applications and components, I've taught a lot of courses and spoken at various conferences here in Italy.
This year I'll be in Barcelona for the TechEd, as an MCT proctor for the hands-on labs, so you can find me there.
But I've decided that in my spare time I've to come back to my first love: games programming. I want to take my games with me, so let's try the Compact Framework and see what it has to offer.
Well it's enough for my first post, please forgive my poor English.
Bye, Lorenzo
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