Three Year Blog-aversary...

Today is my three year Blog-aversary and this my 1,900th post.

What have I learned in the past year?

1) You have to blog because to YOU want to blog.
Unless you’re getting paid to blog, blogging just for your "audience" will quickly lead to burn out.

2) You have to blog about what YOU want to blog about.
Again, unless you’re getting paid to blog, it helps to blog about stuff YOU find interesting. This will also keep blogging fresh. Blogging about stuff you think your readers want, again will lead to blog burn-out. It’s your blog, blog if you want too, blog about what you want too...

3) "Attack Kittens" grow up to be "Attack Cats"

4) Canada is like this whole other country! ;)
The family and I are currently in (on? at?) PEI, and what a beautiful area and country. I dig visiting Canada... And OMG, the difference in house prices, compared to the Los Angeles area anyway... but then again, what area’s arn’t cheaper than the Great LA area :|

5) Kids grow up so fast.
You’d think I’d have learned this already, but the SPEED they grow up! One day they are your little buddy and the next they are kicking your butt on Need For Speed (and talking about "why I get my car"... sigh...)

6) There is no tomorrow
I have to stop putting things off for "tomorrow". Do it today. Tomorrow is always a day away... (LOL, now I bet you’ll have the Anne song stuck in your head all day... sorry :)

Okay, that’s enough. I’m sure I learned more this past year (err... um...yeah... um), but it’s time to kick the family out of bed and start the day (this four hour time difference is a killer).

Blog@u when I get back...


Related Past Post XRef:
Two Years and Counting...

Family Vacation Time... Prince Edward Island, Here We Come

We’ll it’s that time of year. The time of year filled with joy, fun and excitement. The time of year where you eat to much, spend too much and realize that sometimes going into the office isn’t all that bad.

Yes, it’s family vacation time for the Duncan’s.

We’re heading out to spend a week with my wife’s family on PEI (Prince Edward Island).

While I’m taking my notebook, my goal is to remain off the grid the entire time (stop laughing... really that’s the plan...). There will be no blogging for the next week+, no feed reading, no email checking, nothing (stop with "the look"... I can do it... I’ve heard it is possible to have a life offline... really... Well I saw it on some web site so it has to be true, right?).

Well okay, I AM going to try to post on 8/7, my three year blog-aversary, but no promises (as I’ll be on a dial-up connection...OMG, dial-up? I can’t remember that last time I tried Net’ing via dial-up... ).

Luckily my parents can house-sit for us, eliminating that stress point. But this also mean our kitties will be very spoiled by our return. :o

BTW, I bought two new 1GB CF cards for our digital camera, so expect allot (800+ per card, LOL) of pictures when I return. ;)

Take care and as my state governor says, "I’ll be back..."

Performance Console (PerfConsole) 1.0 - Analyze Visual Studio Performance Profiler's Reports

Microsoft Downloads - Performance Console (PerfConsole) 1.0

"Brief Description
The PerfConsole allows developers to analyze Visual Studio Performance Profiler’s reports.

Overview
PerfConsole is a simple performance investigation tool which tries to adopt a debugger like experience to drilling into Visual Studio Performance Profiler generated data. ..."

From a document included in the download;


"...What it is
PerfConsole is a simple performance investigation tool which tries to adopt a debugger like experience to drilling into Visual Studio Performance Profiler generated data. Generally if you run the Visual Studio Performance Profiler it will output a .VSP file; additionally the Visual Studio Performance Profiler provides a utility VSPerfReport.exe which will convert that .VSP file to a set of .CSV files which contain processed data (much like you would see in the VS UI). PerfConsole understands how to read that .CSV output and give the developer a nice way to easily traverse the data.

Mission Statement
PerfConsole was designed to be

-Lightweight (requiring nothing more than a base .Net 2.0 install) analysis
-Simple to learn and use
-Easily extendable
-Useful for investigation
-Useful for automation

..."

The C# source for the PerfConsole is also included in the download. Also included is the source for two included extensions...

The "debugger like experience" is right on target (i.e. no click-ity click, lots of type-ity typing). There’s little GUI and if you’re not comfortable in a command line driven environment, then there will be a bit of a learning curve for you...

Sign of Sanity in Hollywood? Lucasfilm & YouTube

YouTube and fan-made Star Wars videos

"Lucasfilm has been informed that YouTube recently removed from its site several fan-made Star Wars spoofs and parodies. We would like the fan film community to know that this was not done at our request.

Apparently the action was taken by YouTube as a result of a misunderstanding of a request to remove an item containing material taken from starwars.com without our permission. We have asked YouTube to restore any works that they inadvertently removed." [Post Leached in Full]

Nice... This looks like proof that Lucasfilm get’s it...


(via Dan Cameron 2.0 - Lucasfilm tells YouTube…)

TFS Work Item RSS Feed

Naren’s Blog - Work Item Tracking RSS Feed

"John wrote a RSS feed sample a while back and I am posting it for him here. This is simlar to version control feed Jeff posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/ jefflu/ archive/ 2005/ 09/ 23/ 473248.aspx .

A code comment excerpt from WorkItemRssFeed.aspx:

// This feed returns information about the most recent N new work items. See maxWorkItemCount
// below.
//
// Invoking this page without any parameters returns information about all Team
// Foundation work items up to the maximum count. If an ID is supplied,
// the most recent version of that work items is returned. if an alias
// is supplied we will return the most recent work items modified which are assigned to that user
// by adding ?assignedto= or ?ID=.
//
// E.g., http://localhost:8080/ WorkItemTracking/ v1.0/ WorkItemRssFeed.aspx?assignedto=bissvc

The file WorkItemRssSubscriptionGenerator.aspx shows available filter options and a nice UI to specify filters:

..."

Very nice. When I get back from vacation, the week after next (more on this in a later post), I want to setup and use this...

"PowerShell and Amazon Web Service"

Computer Bits - PowerShell and Amazon Web Service

"...I don’t want to sit in front of my computer and manually check the price myself. Wouldn’t it be nice if I can have a script to check the price automatically? It would be nicer if I write the script using PowerShell!

Ok, enough rambling. Let’s get started. To use Amazon Web Service, the first thing to do is to create an account and obtain your own Access Key ID. You can create a free account here. ..."
My interest in PowerShell has greatly increased recently and this morning the above post caught my eye.
Cutting and pasting (and updating to use my AWS key), the provided example worked first time (WinXP, PS RC1). I love it when stuff "just works".

I dig the idea that I can easily and reliably talk to a web service from within a shell and extract the data I’m interested in using OO like methods (with no manual/extra text or XML parsing).

So many possibilities ...

(via Amazon Web Services Blog - Linked List - XSLT, PowerShell, .Net Sample, Hosting Site on S3)

SharpDevelop for Applications (SDA)

The #develop teamblog - Announcing SharpDevelop for Applications (SDA)

"SharpDevelop 2.1 "Serralongue" ships with the ability to be hosted in your application to provide IDE services for your users to extend / automate your application. Basically what we have done is split up SharpDevelop.exe into two assemblies, ICSharpCode.Sda.dll and SharpDevelop.exe, whereas the latter assembly only calls into the SDA API to bootstrap #develop itself.

To get an idea what you can do with SharpDevelop for Applications (SDA), I have created a screen recording of a walkthrough of the SdaUser sample that ships with Serralongue:

SharpDevelop for Applications demo (5.97MB)

..."

This is pretty darn cool for OSS development. Why develop your own add-in IDE when you can just use SharpDevelop from within your app?

Check out the above video for a nice 7 minute preview of SDA in action.

Sharing .Net Assemblies Without GAC'ing Them (via AssemblyResolve Event)

DevCity.Net - Sharing libraries without placing them to the GAC

"You may want to use this when, for example, you want to keep a few libraries with some business login on a remote file server on the network and have the ability to easily update these libraries without sending their copies to all users of an application. Or Maybe you may want to share a few libraries between several applications on a computer to quickly update the libraries in one place, but you can not use GAC for some reason.

How to implement

Every time the .NET runtime cannot find the necessary library in an application directory or GAC it raises a special event - AssemblyResolve - of the Application object. A developer can subscribe to this event to implement custom logic. ..."


A short How To on using the AssemblyResolve event to access/share assemblies without using the GAC...