Even though my only reason to go to this event was for the off chance I would get a free copy of vista (even though it was just RTM), I still had a great time. The keynote was targeted at the buisiness crowd it seemed to me. I found that strange as there was a huge IT presence there. Towards the end they actually started showing some of the cool features of Exchange, Office, and Sharepoint which really impressed me (that or my head was starting to clear).  I can not say I did not get some business ideas out of...

I feel that piracy is a consumer response to poor quality. If only 10% of the movies / music released are good in my opinion. Do I really want to waste 90% of my money for a product you are unhappy with? So going to see a movie that might/might not be good with another person will cost $20-$40 dollars depending on theaters and if you smuggled snacks in with you. That's a lot of money on something you can buy that you will get more use out of. For me that might be a DVD of the movie...

I am working on a few small consulting projects with some people that are new the consulting thing. It has inspired me to write another post of tips on consulting lessons I have learned. 1. Only have one copy of your project or file. The biggest nightmare is having two (or more copies) of a work on your drive (or shared between the project members). This leads to all sorts of visioning issues, working on the wrong file, uploading the wrong file, etc. Just have one. If there are two of anything...... delete one.... please! 2. Release early, Release often. Now...

I was just talking to Tim Goodwin who was a co-worker of mine, and the best programmer on the planet (he made me say that). Seriously though he is a great programmer and seems to be 5-10 steps ahead of where I am. He suggested an alternative to using a strategy pattern for the enum refactoring. This method has a smaller code footprint which is nice and much faster to implement / refactor to. public enum lineEnum      Payment=1      Refund=2      Void=3end enum becomes public class lineEnum     public shared readonly Payment as lineEnum =  new lineEnum(1)     public shared readonly Refund as lineEnum = new lineEnum(2)     public shared readonly Void...

I have to admit that I have been an enum junkie. I know some people are cringing right now and others are saying "so what?". So let me explain An enum is a string representation that gets converted to an integer. The only reason for an enum is so that as coders we dont have to remember that a flag of 1=payment, 2=refund, and 3=void. So it allows us to use magic numbers... without using magic numbers. There are a lot of drawbacks to this method though. For instance, how do you show a string representation of the enum...

Well .NET 3.0 is out now and I have to play the devils advocate on this one. I really feel that these frameworks are comming out too fast. I am still working in a a place that is on 1.1 mainly and we are finally moving to 2.0 thanks to some microsoft hotfixes that address our migration problems (apparently 1.1 com+ components are not playing well with 2.0 components). I really can not wait to start using 2.0 as there are some really nice things there and am happy they released it. I know that most people who read this...