Brian H. Madsen - .Net Powered by Caffeine : Cool Guys

Developing with Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2010

Brian Madsen — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:34:53 GMT

WinCast on 12/15 @ 11:30am Pacific with Yochay Kiriaty

Title: Developing with Windows 7 with Visual Studio 2010 -- An Overview

Abstract: Yochay Kiriaty is Microsoft's premier Technical Evangelist on Windows 7. Come join the fun as he provides insight into how to leverage this exciting new platform with our latest tools. Learn about JumpLists, Thumbnails, and much more!

Here’s the link for the LiveMeeting session: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=3B784D&role=attend&pw=PN6.%3CQ%5Drb

Yochay’s blog: http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/developers/default.aspx

LIDNUG: Phil Haack in the hot chair, open Q&A on ASP.Net MVC – Dec 14 10:30AM PST

Brian Madsen — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:19:00 GMT

Ever wondered what ASP.Net MVC is all about? Well, you now hat the chance to ask all the questions of Phil Haack when he takes a seat in the hot chair for a full Q&A on ASP.Net MVC at the Linked .Net Users Group (LIDNUG).

More and more applications are utilising the extremely flexible/powerful MVC framework and with the latest release of Project Orchard (Open Source ASP.Net MVC CMS) on CodePlex it’s now even easier to get going with ASP.Net MVC. ASP.Net MVC 2 has also just been released to Beta.

About the event:

Title: Phil Haack in the hot chair – open Q&A on ASP.Net MVC
Venue: Live Meeting
Date: December 14, 10:30AM PST
Cost: FREE

About Phil Haack:

Phil is a self-professed geek, Open Source supporter (running the Subtext project) and a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft on the ASP.Net team working on the ASP.Net MVC framework.

He’s an internationally acclaimed author (Amazon), speaker and technology evangelist.

Moreover, he’s a family man…

Phil Haack’s blog: www.hacked.com
Phil Haack on twitter: www.twitter.com/haacked

ASP.Net MVC: www.asp.net/mvc

You don’t want to miss out on this event….

Send Sara Ford to Tech-Ed Australia, vote

Brian Madsen — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:18:01 GMT

An excellent opportunity has come up to get Sara Ford shipped down under to present at Microsoft Tech-Ed Australia!

Sara put a petition video together which you can watch here.

Afterwards head on over to the twtpoll and put your vote to good use by voting “Yes, absolutely”!

Read more about her endeavours to go down south on Sara’s blog here.

Microsoft Tech-Ed Australia is promising to be an absolutely awesome event this year (yes, i’m going too!!!! w00t).

For a bit of behind-the-scenes look at what goes on in the lead-up to Tech-Ed, read the backstage ramblings of all the geeks that’s taking good care of us.

It’s also just been announced that it’s 90% sold out! so unless you want to miss out i’d be quick about registering!

Agile what???

Brian Madsen — Tue, 26 May 2009 22:47:11 GMT

the Linked .Net Users Group discussions on LinkedIn often has some excellent discussions brewing – one of the last ones that came up was with regards to the Agile development methodology and how to get started with it.

One of the guys, Neil Martin, offered up a link to a blog post he wrote some time back and it’s probably one of the better introductions to Agile that i’ve read in a while.

So if you’re considering to get started with Agile or if you’ve been thrown into the deep end because one of your directors got hold of this “Buzzword”, you should have a read.

http://neilmartinagile.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/agile-practises-some-guidence/

What i live best about this blog post is that it gives you information without packaging it up with expensive phrases – it’s for beginners of Agile and it’s written in such a way that you can relate.

Very well written Neil…

Perth gets Silverlight Designer and Developer Network!!

Brian Madsen — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:06:45 GMT

Finally!!!

Perth gets it's very own Silverlight Designer and Developers Network - SDDN - and they're kicking off their first event on Wednesday the 22nd of April, 2009 (yes boys n' girls, that's tomorrow).

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=90663012552

It promises to be an exciting event (i know, because Dave Glover presented to us tonight) and will show some of the cool new features of Silverlight 3.

So, Wednesday at 43Below, 43 Barrack Street from 6pm to 8pm.

Free 500 page PDF on the Entity Framework

Brian Madsen — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 02:49:38 GMT

Sometimes you get this one shining community star that just goes above and beyond…and sometimes something good comes out of it too :)

Well, Zeeshan Hirani, from the C# UG in Dallas, released a 500 page PDF on the Entity Framework.

500???? pages???

After having read through it I was pretty amazed – that’s one huge contribution. Not only is the read an excellent introduction to EF, but it’s book publishing quality!!

I’d recommend Zeeshan consider his options and get a hard cover out there for us “physical fans” that still like the feeling of opening up that technical book.

Zain Naboulsi put me on to this one a few days ago.

If you want to have a look at this “e-book”, head on over and give some kudos to Zeeshan on his blog.

LIDNUG: Greg Low presents iFTS on SQL Server 2008, April 8th

Brian Madsen — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:36:00 GMT

Greg Low is visiting LIDNUG in April (yes, next week) – to be more exact, the 8th of April.

I got the “time” of the day mixed up a bit, but will remedy that ASAP!

You can get further details and register for the event here.

Needless to say, Greg is one of the foremost authorities on SQL Server and this is an event you don’t want to miss!

iFTS on SQL Server 2008

Developers like queries that are very constrained. Users don't. In this session, Greg will show how iFTS in SQL Server 2008 allows developers to build systems that answer the queries that users really want to ask.
This session got great reviews when Greg delivered it at TechEd Developers in Barcelona recently and is a must-see/attend for the serious developer who wants to draw more "power" out from SQL Server.

About Greg Low:

Greg is an internationally recognised consultant, developer and trainer. He has been working in development since 1978 and holds a PhD in Computer Science.
Greg is the country lead for Solid Quality (www.solidq.com.au), a SQL Server MVP and a Microsoft Regional Director.
He is currently one of only two people in the world to hold the new Microsoft Masters certification for SQL Server 2008 and teaches internal SQL Server classes for Microsoft on their Redmond campus.

This event is as usual held via LiveMeeting…

Linked .Net Users Group is based on LinkedIN - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=43315

Australia’s very own Visual Studio Tools Product Manager is blogging – Welcome Joerg Lindner

Brian Madsen — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:59:54 GMT

So this is how we put Australia on the developer tools map!!

Joerg Lindner, who recently joined us from Germany, is blogging – yeps, Australia’s very own Visual Studio Tools Product Manager is blogging.

Needless to say, it’s coming on a good time, with Visual Studio 2010 just around the corner.

I think this space needs monitoring because i’m certain there’ll be plenty of content coming out of this area in the very, very near future!

So stay tuned, subscribe to his blog (even if he only just put up the mandatory “I’m alive!!!” post, and i’m jumping the gun by spilling the beans early).

I think it’s safe to say that Visual Studio 2010 is one of the hottest topics in the industry today so it’ll be good to see what’ll be revealed to us here in Australia!

Anyways, welcome aboard the blogosphere Joerg – looking forward to reading your contributions.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ozdevux – Australian Developer & Design Tools Product Manager’s Blog

Back to basics - testing in full or testing for essentials

Brian Madsen — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:06:00 GMT

Colin Scott - the proverbial coder - has posted another addition to this "Testing" ideology with an excellent entry titled "Better testing through lower expectations".

Everybody (or rather, everybody should) talks about testing today but what is the fundamentals to testing? What do you test for? How do you write a test which covers key aspects?

In his blog post he talks about the fundamentals of testing and how to accomplish more, with less.

I like his "abstraction" of the top three principals of testing - i'll list them here because i'm in total agreement with him.

Principal 1 - a test s hould only cover one output or behavior
Principal 2 - Validate behavior or output - not both
Principal 3 - Favor stubs over mocks

He goes into detail for each basis of these principals and i think he's hit the nail on the head with this one.

This is a very good read if you're new to testing, or just want to brush up on some of the basics.

well written Colin!

to read the full entry, click here

The idealogy of "testing" is obviously an abstract topic as there's many ways to skin a cat.

I'd like to know what others think about testing - what process do you go through? what works for you and why? Do you test in full or do you test for essentials?

Thirteen23 releases “blu” a WPF twitter client..

Brian Madsen — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:00:08 GMT

yeah i know – we’ve seen tons of twitter clients out there – some has had some fizzle and delivered an experience, but most really just did what it’s meant to do, tweet.

Does this new client do anything else but…tweet? not really…but it does deliver it in a neat and pleasant experience – oh, and it doesn’t run on “air” either (pun intended) – it’s a WPF client!

There’s just so many little pleasant surprises in this little twitter client that could and with blu, Thirteen23.com really did a good job. It’s easy to use, intuitive and actually managed to bring tweeting back to me.

When you start to write a tweet, there’s a “watermark” type character counter in the background, plus they’ve added tinyurl support as well.

You may also want to keep an “extra” eye out for specific twitters, so what do you do? well, you fav them :) simple as that.

But, what i like most is the little nifty “experiences” that blu has – for instance, when you reply to a tweet, the original tweet flips around and shows you the entry box for your reply. It looks great and was surprisingly cool..

I took a look around some of the other stuff thirteen23 has been doing and it’s really cool stuff..check them out!

LidNUG: Stephen Fulcher to present in March on ASP.Net runtime

Brian Madsen — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:49:00 GMT

The Linked .Net Users Group's next monthly meeting is just around the corner for the 5th of March (will get an Outlook calendar file up for the exact date and time for us that's internationally timezone challenged).

This month's event will be presented by Stephen Fulcher.

Presenter Bio:
Stephen is the CEO of Crocodile Software, a .NET and SharePoint solution provider. Previously, he spent five years as a Microsoft Regional Director and five years on the Microsoft Developer and Architect Evangelism teams. He lives in Houston with his family.

Stephen is a frequent presenter at events in Houston and delivers some exciting content.

Session Details:
"In this session, we will go through the key .NET application architectural scenarios and analyze (for each one) how to instrument and monitor for reliability, availability, operating conditions and security. We will also explore how this kind of approach will provide valuable business data to:

- Increase application security
- Dynamically change application behavior to help solve tough issues that are inaccessible using a debugger
- Monitor individual and corporate user behavior
- Contribute to decisions about version definition and application R&D
- Discover user behavior
- Help build the foundation for performance and scalability testing
- Help the sales team close deals and increase customer satisfaction"

As usual, the event is presented via LiveMeeting and I'll get the registration details up as soon as possible.

David Lean shows us how to use conditional formatting in SQL Reporting

Brian Madsen — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:43:03 GMT

wow i say!!

David Lean has just released an in depth, 4 part series on how to use conditional formatting in SQL Reporting.

This is probably the best and most in depth blog post i’ve seen on this topic!

seriously worth the read if you’re working with SSRS and wants to impress some narky execs with some flair in your reports!

After having had a good read through those 4 long posts i’ve come to the conclusion that SQL Reporting is far more adaptable and flexible than i’d previously given it credit for.

Enjoy the technical read!!

Microsoft releases Chart Controls for .Net 3.5 SP1 - and they're free!!!!

Brian Madsen — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 04:41:00 GMT

Microsoft just recently released some very handy .Net Chart Controls for .Net 3.5 and does require SP1 - something which i've been waiting forever to see.

These controls are very crisp looking and come in both 3D and 2D versions. There's a whole range of chart types available.

I'm going to have a serious play with them and see what capabilities these controls offer. I hope they include AJAX capability (for the ASP.Net ones that is) and that we can extend them if we need to.

This was announced on Scott Guthrie's blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

Here's a few links for those of us too lazy to dig them up ourselves (thanks Scott!):

Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=130f7986-bf49-4fe5-9ca8-910ae6ea442c&DisplayLang=en

VS2008 Support:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1D69CE13-E1E5-4315-825C-F14D33A303E9&displaylang=en

Forum:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/MSWinWebChart/threads/

Documentation:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=EE8F6F35-B087-4324-9DBA-6DD5E844FD9F&displaylang=en

Web and Winform samples:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=1591

Chart Control Language Packs:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=45&p=3&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=130f7986-bf49-4fe5-9ca8-910ae6ea442c&u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3d581FF4E3-749F-4454-A5E3-DE4C463143BD%26displaylang%3den

.Net 3.5 SP1:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=47&p=2&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=130f7986-bf49-4fe5-9ca8-910ae6ea442c&u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3dAB99342F-5D1A-413D-8319-81DA479AB0D7%26displaylang%3den

System Requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 3

.NET Framework: .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
Processor: 400 MHz Pentium processor or equivalent (Minimum); 1GHz Pentium processor or equivalent (Recommended)
RAM:96 MB (Minimum); 256 MB (Recommended)
Hard Disk: Up to 500 MB of available space may be required
CD or DVD Drive: Not required
Display: 800 x 600, 256 colors (Minimum); 1024 x 768 high color, 32-bit (Recommended)

As usual, it pays to keep an eye out on Scott's blog. Now i just hope they're easier to implement than some of the other third party vendor controls i've been working with in the past. Some has been an absolute nightmare to get working, some has used nifty Wizard-like UIs inside Visual Studio and others have "professed" to have capabilities for supporting AJAX where it was soon discovered that it was only in "some" scenarios (eg, the exact single scenario they had displayed).

Apparently the sample project from CodePlex contains more than 200 examples - i guess now its just up to me to have a real play with it.

Perth gets two (sorry, three) brand new MVPs – Congratulations to the both of you!!

Brian Madsen — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 17:36:00 GMT

The communities i Perth are thriving – evidence of this is that we now have two (yes, 2) three (i stand corrected, we have 3) new MVPs.

The first is Mitch Wheat – everybody knows Mitch as the leader and organiser of the Perth .Net Community of Practise user group. Mitch has been running the group for quite a while and as i’ve said before he does so brilliantly.

So welcome and congratulations to Mitch.

Mitch was awarded in the C# group, so we now have another developer based MVP in Perth!

The second person is Sezai Komur (apologies to Sezai for the terrible cut/paste job for his blog url) – whom got awarded in the SharePoint group.

I’ve been following his blog for quite a while now and he definitely know what he’s talking about.

I hope to see more from Sezai in the future and want to welcome him into our little cozy family.

Congratulations Sezai – SharePoint is THE platform of choice for many these days and i’m certain you’ll be busy!

Technorati Tags: Mitch Wheat,Sezai Komur,MVP

PSSUG: Peter Ward presents on Business Continuity with Backup and Restore

Brian Madsen — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:51:14 GMT

We're running again and this time around we have Peter Ward (again, yay) delivering a business orientated presentation.

There's more news - indeed big news, which will be announced at the event, so be certain that you come along.
We have changed venue (yes i know, again) and this time it's with bells and whistles with food as well.

As you know, we've had Peter present on a number of occasions, so that it's almost fair to say that he's one of our biggest numbers. For you that's been attending a presentation with Peter, you know already that it's going to be great!!

A little bit about Peter:
Peter Ward is WARDY IT Solutions Chief Technical Architect. Peter is an active member in the Australian SQL Server community and President of the Queensland SQL Server User Group. Peter is a highly regarded speaker at SQL Server events throughout Australia and is a sought after SQL Server consultant and trainer, providing solutions for some of the largest SQL Server sites in Australia. Peter also writes the editorial for the daily SQL-Server-Performance.com newsletter. In the last year Peter was selected as a speaker for Tech-Ed Australia and America, SQL Server Open World in and as a Spotlight speaker for the PASS Community Summit, the largest SQL Server event in the world. Peter has been awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his technical excellence and commitment to the SQL Server Community.

Topic:
Business Continuity with Backup and Restore

The Backup and Restore commands are the most important SQL Server commands in a Database Administrators arsenal. In the event of a system failure or user error, the Backup and Restore commands provide the ability to recover from what otherwise could be a catastrophe. With the release of SQL server 2005 and 2008 these commands have been enhanced significantly. For example, the ability to take an adhoc backup without affecting the restore sequence and the ability to revert a database from a snapshot. In this session, Peter Ward from WARDY IT Solutions (www.wardyit.com) will explain how to utilise many of the new recovery features as part of your SQL Server business continuity strategy.

Venue: Level 15, 191 St Georges Terrace (that's Fujitsu's main offices at the Parmelia House, Corner of Mills St and St Georges Terrace).
Time: 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Date: 16th of October, 2008

If you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact me (brian.madsen[at]live.com).

Be mindful, that this is a new venue (right across from where we used to hang out!).

To register for this session, click here:

http://www.sqlserver.org.au/Events/RegisterMeeting.aspx?EventId=358

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Technorati Tags: Perth SQL Server User Group,Peter Ward,PSSUG

Service and support when it matters…Applied Innovations

Brian Madsen — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:48:19 GMT

A little while ago I was contacted by Kentico (www.kentico.com) with an offer for a free enterprise license of their CMS system. As I had planned on moving the Perth SQL Server User Group over to a site where we’re have a lot more control it came at a very convenient time.

With the offer came also a further offer for free web hosting for the CMS system – this was provided by Applied Innovations (www.appliedi.net (my apologies, got .com/.net switched around)) which is a hosting company.

We got the CMS system set up (or rather Kentico configured it for us) and we were off. The along came the first problem i face – the domain name. Naturally I wanted a .au domain name, but for me to get a .org.au domain name the user group needs to be incorporated (eg. a registered non-profit organisation), which carried a lot of benefits + administrative burdens. In the short timeframe there was no way i could get that organised.

So i registered two domains first, www.perthsqlserver.com and www.perthsqlserver.org, and set about getting it up and working. When i found the “Domains” tab in the Applied Innovations’ control panel (Helm i believe) i saw that it was set to perthsqlserver.org.au, as we had originally planned. So, delete and….oops…

Here came the biggest oops – I had inadvertedly deleted everything – domain, site and database. Christ!!!! Well, what can you do but to contact the service desk at Applied Innovations to figure out what I could possibly do to get things back. Now, generally you pay anywhere from $80 to $200 to have a backup restored which I was prepared to pay, just so i could get the system back up and running again.

First i noticed that there was an “online” chat – well, normally they’re closed for us in Australia, since it’s out of hours for most other countries, but i gave it a good try anyways.

First surprise was the message “Welcome to Applied Innovations’ LiveChat service. How may I help you today?”…woah, it was open for business.

The gentleman on the other line "- Scott Brown – listened to my newbie’ish (ok, total foolish mistake) and said simply – i’ll just have a look for you. Remember the domain, ip etc of the server..i had to admit i didn’t. Nevermind, he’d dig around a bit.

After a few minutes he came back and said “have a backup here from 5am this morning, will that do?”. I was literally gobsmacked..that fast, and then a backup that wasn’t a week old?

Naturally i told him that would do just fine – 10 minutes later my site, database etc had been restored for me..voila! as easy as that.

So, how’s that for a piece of service? Big thanks goes to Scott Brown, Applied Innovations, for helping a poor smuck like me out. When it comes to services on the internet today, a lot of companies fall through when it comes to delivering this support to their customers – and remember, i’m a freebie here – not a paid business class service holder which i’d pay big money for. No, this service came as a freebie in support of the community.

10 minutes guys…and i had a backup restored from earlier that day (literally 3-4 hours old). Even more surprised was i when Scott simply thanked off and asked me if there was anything else he could help me with.

We’re now up and running – the Perth SQL Server User Group has found a new home, thanks to Kentico and Applied Innovations. I’m still in the process of configuring everything, but for all sense and purposed we’ll be moving along fast and get everything fixed for us.

After having had a good thorough play around with the CMS system, I have to admit that it’s very intuitive and lends itself very easily to building and configuring a web site.

It works very much in the sense that you set up web part zones and apply web parts to them – very easy to manage and it’s extremely feature rich, with polls, calenders/events, sponsors, membership areas, articles etc available straight out of the box.

I’ll be doing a full review in the near future and will also attempt to do some development work with it – seems that plugging modules into the system is not only extremely easy, but also supporting the ASP.Net framework exceedingly well.

Kentico has also just launched a free edition – something a lot of CMS systems doesn’t have - http://www.kentico.com/Company/News/Kentico-CMS-Free-Edition.aspx

Technorati Tags: Kentico,Applied Innovations,CMS,ASP.Net

Australia gets shiny new Developer Tools Product Manager – Joerg Lindner, welcome!

Brian Madsen — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:15:33 GMT

Australia has “lost” a whole bunch of DPE members over the last 1-2 years and it was looking more and more like everybody was abandoning us.

But, as it stands, that’s not the case. Australia just got it’s very own Product Manager for Developer Tools (think VSTS, Expression etc..cool geeky stuff).

Joerg Lindner is his name – don’t quite know if he blogs yet but as soon as he does i’ll be certain to throw up a link to him.

Anyways, a big warm welcome goes to Joerg!

Technorati Tags: Joerg Lindner

Australia lost two more MS guys to Redmond…

Brian Madsen — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 23:09:34 GMT

Sometimes good things come out of “bad” events..Here’s two, which saddened me a lot (i should have blogged it earlier, but i was still choked up about it…sniff sniff).

David Lemphers and Michael Kleef left Australia’s MS offices to move to MS HQ in Redmond. As with many of the earlier “losses” it’s bound to leave an impact as these two guys are seriously motivated and on the top of their fields.

As i said, it’s a good thing..We get some highly skilled LOCAL talent into the MS pool of gurus and since their LOCAL they’ll most likely not forget about us small people left behind in Australia.

So, David and Michael joins Scott and Frank in Redmon…

Good luck guys..sad to see you go but wish you all the best in the future!

Technorati Tags: Michael Kleef,David Lemphers,Frank Arrigo,Scott Barnes

Visual Studio SharePoint Tools Blog Launched…phenomenal!!

Brian Madsen — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 23:03:58 GMT

Yeps – as the title indicates a new blog has been launched over at MSDN!

It’s good to hear that the Visual Studio Business Applications SharePoint Tools QA team has joined us in the blogosphere (phew, long name for that team!!).

They are promising a range of topics, some of them VERY relevant, especially with the lack of support Visual Studio 2008 has had prior to the extensions was released earlier last month.

So, if you are like me, and work with SharePoint AND Visual Studio this will most certainly be one of those blogs that gets a daily visit (if not more often).

Great work guys!

I think I’ll just put a little point out that’s constantly a dissapointment…

Authoring workflos…..uhmm..can only be done on a local server and we all know how smart it isn’t to run Visual Studio on a production environment. So how are you meant to test and debug a workflow, that for some obscure reason, doesn’t run on your remote test environment or production environment? Well you can’t..it’s almost as if authoring a sharepoint sequential workflow is a fire and forget scenario. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, by why on earth hasn’t this been looked into further?

you simply can’t debug a failing workflow on a remote server without having visual studio running.

and the error reporting is extremely bad by default..so, back to drawing board to see what could possibly have gone wrong.

Anyways, hopefully the team will eventually start thinking a bit further and get us some hooks into SharePoint that will allow us to debug remotely.

that being said, if somebody has magically managed to get this working, please let me know!

The blog was launched on the 1st of July, 2008 with a post that goes into a bit more detail.

Find the post here: http://blogs.msdn.com/vssharepointtoolsblog/archive/2008/07/01/welcome-to-the-visual-studio-sharepoint-tools-blog.aspx

Again, welcome guys, even though you’ve been blogging individually for a long time it’s good to see the team collaborate to help us poor simple MOSS developers out.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2007,Blogs,Jung Lou,Brent Williams,Peter Jausovec,Visual Studio SharePoint Tools

Nigel Watson - compassionate geek

Brian Madsen — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:59:02 GMT

I was surfing around this early morning as my virtual image was taking yonks to boot up and i came across this post over at Nigel Watson's Blog.

What I liked about this post is that it shows an almost uncommon compassionate behavior. Nigel was out driving (from point A to B) and came across a roo lying in the bend of a road. Deciding that having it there, at a point on the road where the speed limit was 100kph, could prove disastrous to other drivers, he turns around and proceeds with moving it off the road.

He then notices that "Mom" still has a little Joey in her pouch (Joey is what baby kangaroos are called). They then pick the Joey out and wrap it nicely in a blanket and calls http://www.wildlifevictoria.org.au/ as soon as they arrive at their destination.

What a very, very nice gesture and it almost makes me ashamed to say that I honestly haven't done something like this, even when I've passed a roo lying on the road.

Food for thought - I'm vowing now to always check if i should happen to come across a roo. More people should honestly think like this, me amongst those for sure.

Well done Nigel - showing that us geeks can be compassionate as well even when it doesn't include the latest gadget!

Here's some pics I "borrowed" from Nigel's blog.

Technorati Tags: Nigel Watson,Microsoft