I was reading my blogs yesterday morning and ran across this comic from Penny Arcade. I've played a bit of Xbox 360 and have run across this guy a few times. Usually I just avoid him, but this would be a nice option too.

Event Code: 117791

5/25/2007

9:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Welcome Time:
5/25/2007 8:30 AM Eastern Time

Join new and experienced Microsoft winform and web developers for a day long FREE Developer Event covering Enterprise Library and Software Factories from Microsoft Patterns and Practices. Learn to increase developer productivity and application quality using Enterprise Library building blocks, code generation, and proven practices for Smart / Mobile Clients, Web Clients, and Web Services.

More information here.

I thought I would pass this along:

This year Team Hanselman, led by myself and my wife, Mo, who had this whole idea, will be walking to fight diabetes on Oct 20th, 2007. We have set a goal of raising US $50,000. Crazy, huh?

If only 2500 of you, dear readers, gave US $20 to this cause, we've met our Team Goal. If only 1000 give US $50, well, you get the idea. If you can't donate, that's OK. Post about this on your blog, spread the URL http://www.hanselman.com/fightdiabetes or put some of our Diabetes "Flair" on your site!

Last year this time, there were over 5000 people subscribing to this blog (for the technical content, I assume) - this year there are over 14,000.

I haven't tried this myself yet, but here are instructions on how to setup an ultra fast USB flash drive with the Vista's installation files. You will then be able to boot and install Windows Vista to your computer from the USB flash drive.

This all sounds like a great idea for a tech support person. Microsoft seems to like the Apacer 4GB Handy Steno USB Flash Drive HT203, 200X Hi-Speed USB 2.0 due to it's 25 mb/sec read rate and 14 mb/sec write rate. These also make excellent drives for Vista's ReadyBoost technology, which can improve your computers performance. If you are lucky enough to find them in stock, you can order one for $56.99 from directron.com. Good luck on that.

Here is the link with details instructions on how to format, partition and copy the necessary files from the install DVD to your USB drive.

Looks like one of my favorite web blogs, "TheDailyWTF", is going PC and changing its name to "Worse Than Failure". You can guess what the original "WTF" stood for.  It is his blog, so he can do what he pleases with it, but I do like the original name better.

The UpdatePanel along with the UpdateProgress control seemed to be the perfect solution. Both work just like a standard panel control that holds other web controls like a container.

These extensions are really slick, but I ran into a few issues with Response.Write. 

My code has a routine that spawns an java alert box to display any errors messages. This is pretty standard code and will display a small popup window to output your message. This is pretty much a standard way of displaying a quick message to the user.  Nothing very special about this, except that it doesn't work with the new Ajax extensions.  

   1:  Protected Sub PopErrorWindow(ByVal ErrMsg As String) 

   2:   

   3:        Response.Write("<script language='javascript'>window.alert('" & ErrMsg & "');</script>") 

   4:   

   5:  End Sub

After embedding my controls within the update panel, I started getting the following error from the Response.Write in the code above. It seems that Ajax doesn't like the partial postback that I was doing.

I talked it over with a co-worker and after a bit of Internet searching and experimenting around with code, I was able to come up with the following code as a solution. Seems to work fine and I haven't found any other side effects.  

   1:  Protected Sub PopErrorWindow(ByVal ErrMsg As String)

   2:   

   3:          ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(Me.UpdatePanel1, Me.GetType, "Alert", "alert('" + ErrMsg + "')", True)

   4:         

   5:   End Sub

I hope this helps anyone else out there having a similar problem.

No I never worked for Apple, but the guy in this video did. He worked for Apple's customer telephone support line and was fired two days after he read a poem about their customer support center for the company talent show. I can only imagine it was the comment about "Stupid, rude American customers" during his ode to the Canadian FedEx Lady.  Either way, it damn funny.

Now don't get me wrong, I am a Windows guy and do run Vista, but I do enjoy the of the Apple Commericals. I found this one to be cute and wanted to share it.