I am back in Reston Virginia, visiting my customer.  Today and tomorrow are pretty straightforward, but on Friday we are going to have an "architectural brainstorming session".  I hope I don't say something stupid. 

SWMBO found my blog.  I wonder if I will get in trouble?

 From wral.com 

A Fayetteville mother faces felony charges in connection with allegations she pointed a gun at her children.
Police said Deyon Branch, 29, became angry Thursday morning when her three children, ages 12, 10 and 9 did not clean their room.

My question is:  did it work?

Jennifer ditched me and went back to Washington, to meet with her customers. She always does a really good job, but gets wound up about things and has to call me to talk about it.   That can sometimes get tedious, but its better than sitting around by myself with no one to talk to.

Since Jenny isn't here, everyone goes to bed early; and today was no exception. Tonight, at 8:00, while I was upstairs supervising the brushing of the teeth, the doorbell rang. So I had to go downstairs, disarm the alarm, turn on the lights and open the door. It was one of Jenny's friends, delivering some useless crap wonderful items to decorate our home with. She said "Don't worry, I'm not a burglar". I replied "I know, that's why I didn't shoot you". She laughed nervously and left.

I have a way of making people feel more comfortable.

I don't really get into the whole mac vs. pc thing, but this is going around work right now:

Everyone hates the smug mac guy in the picture below.  He looks like a guy on my team. (I don't hate the guy on my team though.  As far as he knows).

I like this one too, on the WII vs PS3:

I don't have a dog in that hunt, but it's still funny.  

The bad thing about my job is that while I get to work with cool new stuff and learn about things that are coming up; I forget about the bread and butter dev issues that people who work on real projects every day have to deal with.  For example, most of the time, I am writing either sample code, or code for my own use:  I don't have to worry about deployment or source control or any of that mess.  As such, I never have to embed a manifest in an application:  if I need one, I can just throw an XML file into the same directory as the exe.

Tonight, though, I wanted to see how to embed a manifest as a resource in an .exe, instead of a text file.  After flailing around in Visual Studio for a bit, I admit I had to look it up.  Luckily, I found the exact answer I needed over at B#.NET....

Basically, you just add

"$(DevEnvDir)..\..\SDK\v2.0\bin\mt.exe" -manifest "$(ProjectDir)$(TargetName).exe.manifest"  –outputresource:"$(TargetDir)$(TargetFileName)";#1

as a post build step.  Easy squeezy.

So Beavis has been complaining that his computer was too slow. "Too slow?" I say, "Back in the day, this computer cost over $2,500.00 and used to make the lights dim in the neighborhood whenever I powered it up. People came from miles around to see it's PIII 550Mhz goodness, and it has a whopping FIVE HUNDRED AND TWELVE megabytes of RAM. You kids today don't know how good you have it, back in my day we had to wire up our own memory up and you had BETTER NOT DROP YOUR DECK OF PUNCH CARDS...". He rolled his eyes at me. Little bastard.

Anyway, I went and bought a case and motherboard for a little shuttle PC. I had some parts around, so I built a nice little machine that should be able to run vista: it has 2GB RAM, a dual core 2.6 Ghz Pentium D processor (which was a whole $70.00). I was able to salvage drives and stuff from other PCs. I put it together this morning, plugged the cable in the back, and hit the power switch on the power supply. It didn't work! Drat.. so I unplugged everything, and spent about 1/2 hour making sure I had all the plugs in the right place, etc. I finally figured out that in addition to the switch on the power supply, there was a button on the front of the machine that you had to turn on...you know just like EVERY OTHER COMPUTER IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE.

So I pushed it, and everything started right up. I am an idiot.

So I am sitting in a session, thinking about stuff, and taking notes using OneNote (which is one of my top 5 favorite applicaitons of all time...more on that later).  I was thinking about how to enumerate all top level windows, so I could grovel around and see what documents I was working on (i.e. I have 1 copy of winword.exe running, with 5 different documents).  Anyway, I switched to my "unfiled notes" page, and wrote:

If you can't read my chicken scratch, it says "How do I find all HWNDs associated with a process".  (An HWND is a handle to a window, which is a piece of information that you need if you want to get any information on what a window is doing.   But that is not important).

OneNote's handwriting recognition translated this to "How do I Thud all Huns".  There is a handwriting recognition training process I can do, but I started it and it was taking forever...I finally bailed at screen 20 of 55 (or some such)

I am out of the office this week at a conference, learning about new stuff we are putting out. It's actually not bad, although I have been looking at stuff (like IIS7 features) that isn't really germane to my job. One of the things that you are encouraged to do after attending a session is evaluate the course, and they promise that every time you evaluate, you get a chance at winning prize. I never win anything.

But anyway, I was evaluating a class tonight, and got this message after I had saved:

You have won! You may collect your prize at the Main Information desk located on Level 4 of the WSCTC using the following claim code: (whatever)

Thank you for taking the time to complete this eval. Please continue to fill out evaluations for your chance to win one of the more than 810 prizes available.

I bet it's a t-shirt, but maybe I will be lucky and win a Zune cable, because I left mine at home. I always think of Christmas Story's 'valuable Prize' that Ralphie's dad wins ..."F R A G I L E...it must be Italian"

Well, for the first time since about 2002 or so, we got a decent snowfall.  I know that my yankee readers (well, I know that I have ONE reader who is a yankee) will laugh, but snow here in NC is rare.

We've had a couple of false alarms, but today we finally got snowed on.  It snowed pretty hard until from 5:00 until about 10:00, and then tapered off.  We ended up with about 4 or 5 inches. Since school was canceled, we had a nice day goofing around in the snow and watching movies, etc.  Alex was really excited about the snow, mostly because it meant that he could have hot chocolate.  Izzy and Jake didn't really know what to do, since they haven't really seen snow yet.

Eric isn't in the picture because he decided that playing video games was more important than playing in the snow.  One of the things that we have started doing is banning TV during the week.  This has helped tremendously in keeping the kids relatively civilized and more active.  The side effect though is that on weekends,  they don't really want to do anything other than watch TV and play video games.  The first thing Eric said when I told him that it had snowed and school was called off was "Does this mean that I can play xbox???". 

I kicked him outside later in the day.  He didn't appreciate it.