I usually don't post on stories that are related to politics, but I'm going to make an exception for this.

A number of new C# bloggers have showed up this week, and I promised I'd give some “props” for all my “homies” before they entered the “blogsphere” and are“assimilated”.(”Word!”) (And yes, if you're wondering why they all showed up at once, we decided to incentivize them (a word...

As part of a consolidation move, my blog is migrating to http://weblogs.asp.net/ericgu (RSS). The new blog is up and running, so I'm going to start posting there instead of here. The existing content will get migrated over at the end of the month. I've only played with it a bit, but I think that I will like .Text better than Blogx. The huge...

Rory wrote a post about strong AI and whether we should spend money there rather than going back to the moon. I started writing a comment for his blog, but then decided to write my own entry. I don't know if you were around during the 80's, but there was a big push towards AI during that decade. The buzz was that the Japanese were going to "eat...

I spent a fair bit of time putting up my lights this weekend, and had to do some troubleshooting sets that weren't working. This can be tough to do without a bit of help. While many bulbs have shunts that prevent the string from going out, they don't always work, nor do they help when lamp wires break. When that happens, I fall back on a...

I few years ago I wrote a small utility class named Win32Window, so that I could write an automated tool to close down some of the dialogs that would appear whenever outlook lost a server connection (which was often, since it happened whenever I opened or closed my laptop). It wraps some of the high-level Win32 window handling functions. As part...

Another question, this time from one of the other PMs on the team: The C# team is trying to understand how you look for code when stuck or trying to learn some new technology. Currently the solution we provide is in the documentation – you can find among other things - Walkthroughs on the product Documentation for each method How to articles that...

The year is 1974. Disco was at it's height (or depth, depending on how you look at it). And I was reading a book by Bertrand Brinley called The Mad Scientist's Club. I has a story of a bunch of boys who have various adventures and make their townspeople look foolish. I loved it. Unfortunately, I lost the book. Last year, I thought of it again, and...

Waaaaaay back in college, I spent some time on queueing theory (you know, Poissan distributions and all that). The most surprising part for me was that a random distribution of arrivals pretty much ensures that you will have clusters that are very busy, and times when you are totally idle. Once you work on the math a bit, you understand why,...

Reading Chris Anderson's post about Deep Fried Turkey got me thinking... I've been barbecuing turkey for about 5 or 6 years now, and in the spirit of sharing, here's my recipe: Supplies Bird, 1, large. We generally have a lot of people over (~15), so this means somewhere around a 22 pound bird. I prefer a fresh turkey over a frozen one, but...

I'm not talking about the metaphysical question of whether there is a purpose of existence. I'm speaking of a more concrete concern. Why am I here, sitting at my desk, working on a computer, at 1:48 PST, on a late November day? When I could be here...  

The C# PDC sessions are now online. Experience what we saw at PDC last month, minus the pervasive campfire smell. You can either download the slides or watch the presentation (using Microsoft Producer, IIRC). I'd suggest watching: TLS320 - Visual C# "Whidbey": Language Enhancements (Anders Hejlsberg) TLS321 - Visual C# "Whidbey": IDE...

We've put a C# Whidbey Sneak Preview document on the dev center. It has a good overview of the new cool stuff that will show up in Whidbey. Note that this isn't an exhaustive list; there are some things that will show up that aren't in the document.

This afternoon after lunch I ambled over to our admin's office in search of a small snack. I opted for some m&m's brand chocolate candies with peanuts. As I ate the 7 m&m's that were in the package, I noticed that the package was labelled "Fun Size". Others may disagree, but personally, I don't think that 7 m&m's produce an experience...

One of the big new features for VS in Whidbey is the ability to write custom visualizers for your classes. Visualizers are written in managed code, and present whatever interface they want to view and edit the data. There are some obvious place where we're going to use this - if you've ever tried to look at the data in a dataset, you know that...