I installed Windows Vista Ultimate (x64) last night and everything went pretty smoothly.  This, of course, is on the second machine I have on my desk so I can see what works (and doesn't) before making the full jump on the main machine.  Out Of The Box Experience After the installation and major Windows Update updates, the only ...

-- Begin Rant -- Now, I'm not sure what the “real” reason behind a decision (albiet a rumor, but I don't doubt it) of pulling the VB namespace from the modified Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 that is being done for the Xbox 360.  My first question, not even VB related, is why in the world would a company want to ...

Obviously I've been pretty swamped with work and everything else... including working on XboxFriends.  Here is an image that demonstrates the ToolTip control that is included with Visual Studio 2005 utilizing the information in this article to display a snapshot of information that can add a lot of bang for the buck. Yes! That is a ...

The .NET Rocks road show was here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area a couple of days ago.  After the show, they did some interviews with the local crowd and I was hanging out with no real intention of being interviewed.  Of course, that didn't work out exactly that way and I did end up having to sit in front of the mic.  It ended up ...

I've just completed my round one work on XboxFriends.com moving to ASP.NET and bridging the gap between the WinForms world and the WebForms world.  I've still got a lot of TODO: items, but at least what's up there now looks more like a semi-professional site than the two hurried together pretty much static pages that were there. I'm really ...

Spent the weekend trudging through ASP.NET working on bringing some of the features of the XboxFriends desktop application to the browser.  Currently there are only two people using the new version of the software [don't ask, it's not ready just yet ;-)] to help populate the server with some useful data.  Now that this data exists, I'm ...

While working on the xbox friends thing, I decided to create a clone of the user interface that Windows Messenger uses.  It's sort of like a treeview (or group box) and has a vertical scrollbar visible when the list is larger than the displayable area. So, I add a vertical scrollbar to the control and make it visible when the need arises.  Easy ...

A few of us on XBOX Live were discussing how nice it would be to have an application that you could have on your desktop that would notify you when one of your friends was online playing a game.  We kicked around a few ideas and we ran into several problems along the way.  Since the XBOX Live website doesn't offer web services we ...