http://blog.darrenstokes.com Thoughts on .Net, Visual Studio, and other things Fri, 08 May 2009 12:03:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I'll be heading to TechEd North America this weekend.  This year it is in Los Angeles.  It has been quite a while since I've been there so I'm really looking forward to it.  Hopefully the flu scare and the economy (and associated budget cuts) won't cut down attendance too drastically. http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/05/08/heading-to-teched/ J.P. Hamilton has organized a Coding Dojo that will cover TDD.  It will be held at the Microsoft offices in Houston at 6pm on May 7th.  Space is limited to 40 participants so sign up early if you want to attend. http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/04/28/houston-altnet-coding-dojo-on-tdd-may-7-2009/ The product I have been working on, Reference Assistant, was released a few weeks ago.  Reference Assistant is an extension for Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 (and soon 2010).  In short, the goal of the product is cut down the time spent debugging runtime errors due to missing dependencies or ... http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/04/27/announcing-reference-assistant-10/ Recently I was writing some new functionality that ran work on background threads.  The functionality isn't that important but one of the classes I was using to get the correct behavior was AutoResetEvent.  Specifically the AutoResetEvent.WaitOne() method. Since I really don't use this class very often, I relied on intellisense ... http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/03/30/watch-out-for-those-waitone-overloads-when-you-need-backwards-compatibility/ Ben Scheirman has announced that he is putting together a Houston ALT.NET Conference and it will be held at the Microsoft Offices the weekend of April 3-5, 2009.  It will follow the Open Spaces format and it should be good based on my prior history with these sorts of events. ... http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/02/02/houston-altnet-conference-coming-in-april/ Over this past weekend, I upgraded a laptop from Vista Ultimate SP1 to the new Windows 7 Beta (both 64-bit).  I decided to throw caution to the wind and forget the whole VM thing.  The upgrade lasted just under 7 hours but, before you think that might be a long ... http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/01/12/impressions-of-win7-beta-upgrade-from-vista-ultimate-sp1/ After spending time listening to the Virtual ALT.NET Meeting last night, I decided that I needed to go ahead and join Twitter because I was clearly missing out on some interesting community discussion. James Avery had already told me that he found it a great resource, but sometimes I guess I ... http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/01/08/i-finally-joined-twitter/ The Houston .NET User Group is putting on the second Houston TechFest on January 24 at the University of Houston.  The conference was originally scheduled for the Saturday that Hurricane Ike hit the Houston and Galveston area so this is rescheduled date. Here are several tracks to choose from concentrating ... http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/01/07/houston-techfest-coming-12409/ Chad Myers announced that there is VAN (Virtual ALT.NET Meeting) tonight.  It is hosted on Live Meeting. I've been wanting to attend one of the Houston Geek Dinners for the Houston ALT.NET group but I keep missing them.  The next geek dinner is tonight and, unfortunately, I am going ... http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2009/01/07/virtual-altnet-meeting-and-houston-geek-dinner-tonight-1709/ I am absolutely terrible at editing graphics.  There are things in life that I am good at and the task of creating graphics for my applications is simply not one of them.  I've been in a continual search for an image editing program that makes the task easy for me.  ... http://blog.darrenstokes.com/2008/11/08/iconlover-my-icon-tool-of-choice/