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• A Live Mesh Moment

  While I was out in the bush near Krueger national park in South Africa recently I found a great use for Live Mesh ...  After a full day of seeing some excellent big game I had a ton of photos to show for my effort. Later that night, back in the lodge, I was briefly able to get on the spotty, very low bandwidth wireless network to work for me.  So I shared my pictures using live mesh and immediately shared getting a cloud hosted backup of my precious photos.   As they were uploading I was thinking about how much I wanted to share this experience with my wife and kids who where half a world away and fast asleep.  I thought it would be fun to make the kitchen laptop display my latest pictures.  So I "connected"... Posted Jul 15 2008, 12:35 PM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random

• Very Simple .NET Thumbnail Creation Code

  When I was working the update for my Ajax demo , I needed to create thumb nail from a director of photos.  There are tons of tools out there to do this, but I thought I'd share the very simple code I used.  It takes all the jpgs in the root path and creates 160x120 thumbnails of them. It also copies the original photo into fullpath.    namespace ThumbNailer { class Program { static void Main( string [] args) { string rootPath = @"C:\Users\brada\Desktop\ForDemo" ; string thumbPath = Path .Combine(rootPath, "Thumb" ); if ( Directory .Exists(thumbPath)) DirectoryDelete(thumbPath); Directory .CreateDirectory(thumbPath); int imageNumber = 0; foreach ( string s in Directory .GetFiles(rootPath, "*.jpg"... Posted Jul 10 2008, 12:15 PM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random

• I have a theory... help me prove it!

  I have a theory that you can't build amazingly great products if you don't deeply know the customer. An d the best way to get the visceral and lasting impression is to physically go see the customer work in their own environment. This where I need your help. I am looking to get smarter about the way custom application development in small business really works. While Microsoft has some great feedback channels for large ISVs and large business. The small business is a slightly harder area for us because of its breath. My, somewhat crazy, idea is to get folks from my team physically outside of the Microsoft campus and get a first hand experience of what life is like for folks doing custom application development in small businesses. To make the... Posted Sep 21 2007, 12:48 AM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random

• I have a theory... help me prove it!

  I have a theory that you can't build amazingly great products if you don't deeply know the customer. An d the best way to get the visceral and lasting impression is to physically go see the customer work in their own environment. This where I need your help. I am looking to get smarter about the way custom application development in small business really works. While Microsoft has some great feedback channels for large ISVs and large business. The small business is a slightly harder area for us because of its breath. My, somewhat crazy, idea is to get folks from my team physically outside of the Microsoft campus and get a first hand experience of what life is like for folks doing custom application development in small businesses. To make the... Posted Sep 21 2007, 12:48 AM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random

• Ready for Houston TechFest Tomorrow?

  Well, I got into Houston late last night and now all I have to do is talk to a few customers and fix up my demos for tomorrow’s TechFest 2007 ! This is a FREE event, brought to you by the good folks at the Houston .NET Users group (and their generous sponsors).. I will be talking about Silverlight and some other good stuff. I hope to see you there! Read More... Posted Aug 24 2007, 08:39 AM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random, Silverlight

• Devscovery in Redmond, WA and Silicon Valley

  The good folks at Wintellect are putting on a conference focused on the latest of Microsoft technologies in Redmond and Silicon Valley (both at the Microsoft ft campus). This is a great chance to get some training from industry experts. Devscovery (August 14-16 at the Conference Center on campus; October 15-17 at the Microsoft Conference Center in Silicon Valley) is a three day, multi-track event produced by Wintellect. The keynote speaker at this year’s Redmond event is Mark Russinovich; John Robbins will deliver the Silicon Valley keynote. Other speakers include Jeffrey Richter, Jeff Prosise, John Robbins, Jason Beres, Walt Ritscher, Dennis Hurst, Bryan Sullivan, Scott Seely and Paul Mehner. Topics covered will include Silverlight, WPF, WCF... Posted Aug 01 2007, 07:46 AM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random

• Some help downloading Visual Studio 2008 Beta2...

  OK, so as many of you have noticed, Visual Studio 2008 Beta2 is big (about 3GB for the ISO image). So this is the perfect sort of release to try out the new Microsoft Secure Content Downloader which is a technical preview from the folks at Microsoft research. The tool leverages the fact that there are 100s of other folks downloading the same file to speed things up considerably. (Notice, I am testing this out over a wireless modem, I'd suggest finding a a faster connection ;-)). Once it downloads the ISO image, you can burn it to a DVD or use something like ISOBuster . Download it here Read more about the technology here I'd love to hear how it goes for you... how long did it take you to download VS 2008 Beta2? In fact, the more of us that try... Posted Jul 28 2007, 08:09 AM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random

• Visual Studio in Second Life

  Did you know that Microsoft is investing in Second Life? That is right... we recently bought an island and have developed it with some really cool stuff. Check out the details here https://www.visualstudioisland.com/ I am all for new, cutting edge stuff, so I volunteered to do a talk in the brand new auditorium we build there on the island. Not sure exactly what I am going to say yet, or really how I am going to say it... any tips would be really helpful as I am brand new to Second Life... It turns out there is quite a bit going on the island. Check out of few events: All times are PST.... 7/31 4:30 PM - Amanda Silver from VB fame will give a talk on Silverlight and VB.NET 8/21 4:00 PM - "Summer Luau" party... I can't wait to see what this is... Posted Jun 29 2007, 12:19 AM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random

• Help! My hard disk crashed

  The kitchen laptop crashed today with a few weeks worth of unbacked up information (including pictures of the kids recent birthday party, and the like…) I tried booting off the XP recovery disk and running chkdsk, but about 60% of the way in I get an error: “The volume contains one or more unrecoverable problems” I have looked online and there a several “harddisk recovery programs”, but it is hard to know of any really work… Any thoughts or advice for me? Thanks Read More... Posted Jun 23 2007, 01:32 AM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random

• Defy All Challenges - Video Posted

  I love the new VS " Defy All Challenges " theme.. One of the thing that gets me up in the morning (ok, more likely staying up at night) is the idea that we are helping development teams across the world create amazingly better solutions to their everyday challenges. I recently shot part of a Red Vs. Blue inspired video about exactly this... I was honored to be in amongst the some real heavy-hitters that I personally respect a ton! Soma , Anders Hejlsberg , Brian Harry , Scott Guthrie and KD Hallman all appear for short segments... Expect to see more soon! Video: Defy All Challenges Mix I'd love to hear what you think... Who do you think landed the best line? Read More... Posted Apr 11 2007, 08:26 PM by Brad Abrams Filed under: Random