June 2005 Entries
I am a member of SABR (The Society for American Baseball Research). We have a list server where members can post messages to ask questions or make announcements. A fellow name Dave Smith runs an outstanding web site called Retrosheet.org. There you can find data for many baseball games dating back to the 50's and 60's. The Retrosheet site has been down for about 5 days now. Dave posted a messaged to the SABR list explaining the blackout: Since the Retrosheet server went down last Thursday, I have...
I think my favorite sessions at this year's TechEd were John R Durant's sessions on programming Office using the new Visual Studio Tools for Office. John is a very entertaining speaker and is very passionate about the VSTO tools. I loved his session on Outlook where he demonstrated creating an Outlook add-in. It's very easy to extend the functionality of outlook using these tools. I can see a lot of good uses for this. For example, a company may use email for its business, and one of its needs is...
Last night, I participated in the Mobilizer game, a scavenger hunt where teams compete to win a portal media center device. The game involved solving puzzles based on clues around the convention center. Each team was given a VX6600 Pocket PC Phone to use for the game. On the phone, teams accessed various web pages that provided clues. Based on the clues, the teams had to answer questions to complete the game. Finding the answers involved running around the convention center, as more points could...
Ari Bixhorn just did an excellent demo showing some of the capabilities of Indigo. He wrote a service that sends a message to his Pocket PC device based on events in Windows Media Center. For the demo, he used an example of his second grader watching Jerry Springer at home while he's at work. When the Springer show came on, he recieved a message on his Pocket PC based on the rating of the show. He then sent a message back to the television, “Your busted!” and changed the channel to Spongebob...
My week at Tech-Ed began this morning with Steve Ballmer's Keynote presentation. In it, he discussed the “New World of Work.” One highlight was the new features for Windows Mobile including “remote wipe.” This allows a company's admin to order a mobile device be wiped of all data if it is lost. Pretty cool. I've seen a couple of SharePoint sessions that did really provide me with much information that I wasn't already aware of. I'm sitting in an Indigo session now. The Orange...
My flight leaves Kansas City Sunday evening. I'm excited to arrive to Orlando for this year's Microsoft Tech-Ed Conference. I've already picked the sessions that I would like to see, and I'm looking forward to seeing some GrokTalks as well