I've spent the last couple of weeks re-reading the first 6 books in this series, partially as a refresher, but also to see if I could find any clues as to what's coming up. One of the ways I searched for clues was by looking for unanswered questions, of which I've found quite a few. Another way was noticing the tone and foreshadowing clues. I'm sure that I've included some questions that are unlikely to be answered. The ones that I think are likely to be answered are in bold, and the ones that I...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/TQv

This is absolutely hilarious. To make a point with Google at the BooxExpo America, a publisher took a couple laptops from the Google booth. He returned them later with this beautiful quote: "there wasn't a sign by the computers informing him not to steal them." Engagdget has the whole story

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/TPr

Make sure you understand how SQL Server treats Case Sensitive Collations. It's very much a dictionary sort and not an ASCII sort. What does this mean? It means it sorts things aAbBcC, not ABCabc as you might expect. So, if you do a WHERE value LIKE '[A-Z]%', you won't get all things that start with capital letters, you'll also get anything that starts with a lowercase b-z. Details and example code can be found here...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/TPo

Recently I was having difficulties accessing files on my SharePoint 2003 site from my Office 2007 applications. After a little hunting, I found this whitepaper, which was somewhat helpful. I had to dig a little deeper to find my problem (it was an obscure bug that occurs when upgrading Office 2003 to Office 2007), but this is still useful. Overview: This white paper describes how different versions of Office programs work together with the 2003 and 2007 versions of SharePoint technologies. Although...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/TPp

Roy Osherove details several tips for a successful team lead on his blog. I agree and recommend all of them. I'm also sad to say that I don't always follow all of them. Here's the list, find the details on his blog. 40 hour weeks Lots of automation Daily meetings Frequent customer demos Acceptance tests Regression tests (automated) Best tools (always or close to it) Code reviews Test reviews Whiteboards (that we can actually use)...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/TPs

If you've done any work with WinForms apps in Visual Studio 2005, you may have noticed that you can't get your buttons and toolbars to look as "pretty" as the built-in Vista apps you get from MS. Here's a good article on CodeProject which details how to fix some of that. It details: Getting the fade effects on some common controls (Buttons, Checkboxes, Radiobuttons, Textboxes, Comboboxes) Getting images working on Buttons, and preserving fade-effects Getting the fade effects on toolbars Getting the...

• Share This Post:
• 
• 
• 
•   Short Url: http://wblo.gs/TPF