In my previous post on Tablet PC pen input I explored handwriting recognition. I explored how the language specific recognizers of the tablet API translated your scribbling into text, listed the possible alternatives and the confidence it had in the results. The Tablet API has another recognizer built in, this one recognizes gestures. In this...

The European Microsoft anti-trust case stirred quite a pen back in march 2004. The case had two parts. One of them was that Microsoft should split Media Player from Windows. My rant on the subject was a little oil canister (a honey pot attracts hackers, an oil canister attracts flames). As a result of the settling Windows XP N(o Media player)...

It’s conference and meeting season. Teched US is just behind, next week is TechEd Europe and as a side show Dutch usergroup dotned meets the 4th of july for a presentation by Juval Löwy. In september the summit will be the PDC. Why should you go to conferences and meetings ? There are lots and lots of reasons. Let me name some of them...

Having spent 3 solid days on doing a crash-course VS 2005 training it's time for a little diversion. Finally I made the time for another post on programming the Tablet PC. The tablet PC is very good in recognizing handwriting, it will even make sense out of the worst scribblings you can imagine, for instance my own handwriting. The image shows...

Channel9 has started a contest where you can win a ticket to the PDC, including an airline ticket and hotel. You take part by blogging. Including a post why you should win the prize. Do take part ! And here's my contribution : Why do I want to go to the PDC ? Because I was there last time and blogged about it Because I do like to...

This posts is not about managing .net objects ! Darrell and John spread the word on the Finalizer, a robot running on .NET. It's a battlebot backup up by its own website. Great. But it is by long not something new. Over here in (er gaat niets boven) Groningen we have the RoboChallenge where robots compete. Not by smashing each other up but by...

As a start to the next 2 years of blogging I want to look back on an "ancient" technology : COM, which is still the glue between software parts created with a great diversity of tools. COM brought me to .NET, exploring the world of COM in Delphi I discovered the .NET 1.0 betas. Never to leave again. COM support in .NET is good. You can make...

 Today is a celebration. Exactly two years ago my first blog-post showed up on the dotnetjunkies. At the time blogging was quite new to me, being an author for the junkies I was invited to start a blog. And the remainder is history, blogging has taken the place of writing articles. To some it even replaces visiting conferences. To me the best...

Controls on your webforms all have an ID, like TextBox1, LinkButtonAdd, etc. This ID is not the internal Id used by ASP.NET. In case you have a datagrid with multiple rows, each having a Select link button you would have a problem. In case you have a web usercontrol on your page with a Button1 on it and a Button1 on the hosting page that would...

Last thursday evening, may 26th, we had a great meeting of the Dutch dotned user group. Sander already wrote a detailed story on this, Frans did one as well. Here come my 2 bits. Hosted by Atos origin in their brand new almost futusristic Utrecht office we had a meeting around the theme of code generation. With VS 2005 generating so much code...

It's almost weekend, I want to finish this week with some soundbites. Recently I complained about my wide screen monitor, which is a marvel to the eye, making irritating noises. At the moment I beleived a design flaw was the cause. But this week the monitor's image started flickering as well and I contacted Philips. Their web-based support is a...

In my apps I organize all interaction with my databases in components. On my component is a connection to the database and a couple of data-adapters to read and write data. These components are housed in a separate assembly. From there I can use them straight to fill the datasets on my web– or win-forms, or write a webservice (or other)...

Today was the final of the RoboChallenge where robots compete on the ability to find and catch differnent colored balls. Amongst others the event is sponsored by Microsoft: .NET was used amongst the platforms used for the robot software. Amongst others I saw Eclipse and Delphi. Some robots were a PC on wheels. others were controlled by a fixed...

Thursday may 12th the finals of the robochallenge will be in held in MartiniPlaza Groningen (the Netherlands). Last year it was great, saw the weirdest thing running .net yet. This year the number of competitors will be even higher. No robot wars, the competition is about finding and grabbing objects smart, fast and efficient. The challenge is...

I’m a big fan of the tablet PC and have a category tablet PC on my blog. But havn’t blogged that much on the Tablet recently. I’ve been writing a lot of ASP.NET production code and didn’t have the time to care of my pet. Time for a little catchup. On the hardware front things are moving in a steady pace towards main stream adaption...