Stuggling, but only 3 weeks to go now...

If you've downloaded SP1 of Visual Studio 2008, and are looking through the Visual C++ samples trying to locate anything to do with TR1 language extensions or the MFC Feature Pack, you'll notice they aren't there. The SP1 samples are avialable, but ship as part of a seperate download available from MSDN Downloads . The sample pach weigh's in at a heft 7.9MB, and contains a heap of samples to get going with the major MFC improvments that SP1 contains.

Posting high-resolution photos on your web-site brings in the occassional request for permission to use the photos is some publication. I've had requests before from Israel Ministry of Agriculture to use camel shots from Broome in one of their publications, and Busselton Online (which doesn't seem to be online anymore :)) wanted to use one of my shots of the area on their website. A couple of weeks ago I got a request from Cangage Learning to use of of my Antelope Canyon shots on the cover

Over the weekend of 25-26 Oct, I paddled from Cronulla to Kiama with an overnight at Corrimal. After really bad weather mid-week that culminated with 4m swells and 40 knot winds from the south on Wednesday, it looked like the conditions weren't going to be suitable for a long paddle. Over Thursday and Friday, a high-pressure system moved in, allowing the swell to begin to drop, and Saturday morning dawned with a good forecast of 2m swell and variable winds of about 15 knots out of the north.

I recently purchased a Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx for use as both an in-car unit and a sea kayaking navigation aid. While navigation on the current routes I'm doing in pretty easy (essenitally, keep the land on left while heading north), its good to track the speed I'm paddling and get a good handle on distance to go. Mounting the GPS on the kayak was something that I was initially concerned about, but last Sunday I did the 40km paddle from Yowie Bay in the Port Hacking to Watsons Bay in Sydney

After 6 months buried in a banking project, I'm emerging from the other end with a presentation this Thursday at SDNUG on ASP.NET MVC . Full details on the SDNUG site - if you're in Sydney, come along and be wowed.

A couple of weeks ago I purchased the eGlass BookReader from Handango, partly because of the problem with WMDC that I spoke about in my last post . The reader was pretty poor, particularly in its reading experience of PDF books. In reflow mode, you have to change back to scaled view before you can advance to the next page in the document, which makes for a tedious reading experience. In the end, I ditched the eGlass reader out of frustration. I got an email from Handango asking for a review, and

I had the frustrating experience of having a new WM6 device ( HTC Touch ) developing a problem synching to a new Vista machine. The Touch was in its third week of a synch relationship with Vista, so it could be hoped that honeymoon bliss was still lingering in sufficient proportions to prevent a dreaded 0x8503001c error. The only change to the system has been to do a sync over Bluetooth, and that seems to have toasted WMDC somehow. I tried deleting and re-creating the partnership (which didn't

Working with linked servers in VSTS Database Pro can be a bit painful, especially when the linked server is a production server that should be (and typically is) inaccessible from developer's machines. If the appropriate linked server settings aren't set up on the design-time validation database server(which is the local database by default), the Database Pro project won't be able to build, which will prevent all sorts of useful things like schema compares for happening. The solution

I've just completed a short,rushed project that involved moving data from one SQL Server 2005 in a DMZ to another SQL Server 2005 server inside the network. The database in the DMZ is deployed on a per-web site basis, and there can be many copies of the same database sending data back into the central database. I initially choose a push model, which would ease the deployment burden, as each copy of the website database could point back to the central server to push its data back. If a new site