I needed a virtual machine to test an application in isolation and realized I didn’t have any of my .vhd images on hand.  

I looked around and came across this collection of downloadable VHDs directly from Microsoft, pre-activated, for both Vista and XP with different versions of IE including IE6 (XP only), IE7 & IE8.

The OSes are trial versions (of course) and expire January 1st for the XP installs and 120 days after first use for the Vista images.

Images require at least 1.5GB of HD space once expanded, so make sure you have some room available for it.

It appears the word/verb “Refactor” is absent “out of the box” from all if not most of the environments that provide a spell checker service or feature.  At least the ones I’ve used lately and since I started to notice.  From (this) Live Writer to Word to within the browser on the update textbox of twitter, you name it, I keep having to “right click, Add to Dictionary”.

Wikipedia does have an article for the term “Refactoring”, and so does Dictionary.com but the “verb” Refactor is not on either (Wikipedia redirects to Refactoring) and Merriam-Webster comes up empty when searching for either.

Is there a way to carry around one’s dictionary from environment to environment and use it on all if not most of the aforementioned tools? 

I guess I have to do a little bit of research, and no I won’t hold the post until I do.  I’d rather note my observation and I *should* then later do the legwork and update with my findings.  I reserve the right to slack on such task, do nothing and instead keep “right clicking, Adding to Dictionary” as I go.

Image by hisks

A couple of weeks ago, more precisely on March 31st, I attended the ArcReady event on Architecting for the Cloud.  Sparing you of all the details, suffice it to say that it was much needed motivation to take action on a few personal goals around something that has always been a passion of mine… Continuous Education.

I am currently working on some personal tasks pertaining to that goal, as I said before inspired and motivated by the contents of that ArcReady event.  Expect a stream of content coming from me on the topics around cloud computing, specifically developing for Azure.

Be it learning through trial by fire, attending a more structured lecture, seminar, conference or class or a combination of them, doing *that* allows me to frame my actions within the right mindset.  It is a way to cope with the routine of our daily grind, where implementation of current technology is not always a welcome approach and other priorities take precedence.

This coming Friday April 17th, I will be attending an all day seminar on ASP.NET MVC, presented Jeffrey Palermo.  Its a paid event at $125 for the day, including food.  Not bad.  Work is not picking up the tab (at least proactively), and I have no problem paying for it out of my own pocket.

I wouldn’t usually be willing to pay the $125 for a conference of this nature, but I’ve seen Jeffrey speak at a user group meeting and I genuinely enjoyed his style.  At times, speakers either by choice or inadvertently focus their tone and message towards a certain audience, leaving some others with much to be desired and some others lost in the land of glazed eyes.  In this case, Palermo certainly spoke to my “level”.  Lets leave it at that.

I know Brennan and Scott Isaacs will be there.  I don’t know who else, but I am sure 70% will be familiar faces as it always ends up being.

Next on the agenda for this month is an MSDN Events Unleashed afternoon session coming up Tuesday April 28th on Internet Explorer 8 for Developers and Developing on Microsoft Windows 7.  Interesting topics, enough to coerce my attendance.  On that, I wanted to comment on the fact that some people expect too much of these sessions, and honestly, they are what they are (isn’t that enlightening!)… You should attend with more than one point on your agenda.  It is a chance to network and a chance to be there when perhaps this one bit of information which you weren’t aware of gets revealed to you.  You may think on topics like these, having done your homework is good enough and “what else could I learn from going there?”, but you’d be surprised.

Via Jeff Attwood's post, in summary (because his posts tend to be very, hmm, thorough):

The primary improvement here is that we're only accepting a whitelist of known good URL characters. Allowing arbitrary random characters in URLs is setting yourself up for XSS exploits, and I can tell you that from personal experience. Don't do it!

We only allow certain characters to "end" the URL. Ending a URL in common punctuation marks like period, exclamation point, semicolon, etc means those characters will be considered end-of-hyperlink characters and not included in the URL.

Parens, if present, are allowed in the URL -- and we absorb the leading paren, if it is there, too.

The regular expression is:

\(?\bhttp://[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%?=~_()|!:,.;]*[-A-Za-z0-9+&@#/%=~_()|]

Via a dear friend of mine, this gem was made available for my enjoyment in all coincidence written the day of my birthday, and since being selfish is not in my nature I decided to share it with the five of you (literally).

I love these as a quick, hands on way (my favorite) to get up to speed with skills and technology you may otherwise miss or take longer to catch up to.

Here is the training kit from the horse’s mouth:

The .NET Framework 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit includes presentations, hands-on labs, demos, and event materials. This content is designed to help you learn how to utilize the .NET 3.5 Enhancement features including: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX History, ASP.NET Routing, ADO.NET Data Services, ADO.NET Entity Framework, WCF 3.5 SP1, and the .NET Framework Client Profile.

Download the kit from here.

I recently came across Microsoft StyleCop, that analyzes the code, within the IDE for style.  This includes things like naming conventions, formatting and other matters of visual appeal.  It differs from FxCop in that it doesn’t check for use patterns, it simply checks style. 

I’ve been looking at this tool in order to implement it at work, where we have a pretty consistent and adhered to coding standard, who’s style enforcement could be done by a tool and save some people some time.

In any case, I am sure most of you are familiar with it but I deemed it worth noting, writing about and referencing.

The team’s blog is a great resource for help, release announcements, and general information about the tool.

The tool itself is available here in its latest 4.3 release. 

Me and my addiction to books, especially FREE books.  Sorry.

Go to the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Learning Portal, click on Special offers (or scroll down a bit), and follow the link.

Via the author's blog post.

Draft version, PDF delivered, Free.  I don't need to "sell it" to you do I?

DSA Book

I'll never tire of watching and being blown away by the technology available on the Microsoft Surface platform.  The application demoed is a WPF (official WPF site) application for the healthcare industry.

This is a quick 5 minute video worth every second.