Bungie's flagship first person shooter Halo 3 will be available tomorrow May the 16th in beta form.  Owners of Crackdown will be able to download it via Microsoft's Live Marketplace for free.

Here is what will be with the beta:

When gamers gather online to play the multiplayer beta via Xbox LIVE in May, they will be treated to three richly detailed, action-oriented maps: Snowbound, High Ground and Valhalla, which represent a mixture of large- and medium-scale combat environments and are brand-new to "Halo 3." Each map will test gamers' mettle as they are placed behind the controls of new "Halo 3" vehicles such as the agile Mongoose all-terrain vehicle, and armed with deadly weapons such as the new and improved Assault Rifle, the ferocious Brute Spiker, the devastating Spartan Laser and the treacherous new Spike Grenades. This is just a taste of what gamers will experience later this fall when "Halo 3" goes on sale.

Gamers worldwide who did not participate in the "Rule of Three" promotion but are interested in joining the multiplayer beta of "Halo 3" can still participate through the purchase of the critically acclaimed Xbox 360 title "Crackdown," which was launched in February. Each copy of "Crackdown" has been specially marked with a "Halo 3" beta sticker prior to the beta period, and starting May 16 the game will act as a key for gamers to download and participate in the "Halo 3" multiplayer beta.

The website can be found at Halo 3. I'll see you all online!

I'm not sure how I missed it, but the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar version 1.00.2188.0 was released 5/7/2007. This is a free web page development tool by Microsoft. This is an add-on for Internet Explorer that enables the developer transverse and edit the page DOM, view object class names, match CSS selectors to page elements,  use a color picker and a pixel ruler. Other features include displaying image dimensions and table outlining.  

These tools are intended to help the developer diagnose and troubleshoot their web pages and doesn't including any script debugging at this time. I'll be adding this add-in a cool developer tool list that I have been working on.

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.