Of course .NET is not stupid - just the name of the product. While it does sound cool it's just not very user friendly in some situations. How many times have you needed to Google something and not been able to because .NET is treated as NET?

Anyway I have been adding a few new blogs to my blog list and just saw this post (or should I say rant) over at SecretGeek.com about the name of .NET. Man, I couldn't agree more :)

I am so glad that Microsoft decided to create a whole new language named C#. Always a good way to find .NET info on Google. Being bi-lingual I sometimes search Google for VB.NET specific stuff and I run into some of the some problems as with the generic .NET search term.

Oh well, I survive, but I can't imagine that the marketing people at MS didn't consider this.

Saw this over at guidmaster's blog and thought I'd give it a try to see if I could get to check out XDN :) So here's the offer for you guys:

FREE XDN Professional for .NET Bloggers during May 2004
Mike Schinkel, president of Xtras.Net, made an offer on his personal blog of a free XDN Professional membership (http://www.xtras.net/xdn) during the month of May 2004 for anyone that blogs about .NET frequently. If you are a .NET blogger, see Mike's post for how to get your free XDN membership.

I am sometimes amazed at the lengths people are willing to go to get the job done. Take for example the simple task of getting a date from an input field. Some months ago I was working on a site which the original contractor wasn't able to get done alone so I got to take a peek at how the big businesses do their coding.

One of the things I found was how little the previous coders knew of the .NET platform - it was really obvious that these particular coders had lots of experience with ASP 3.0 but not much with ASP.NET. An example of this was when they needed to pull a date from a textbox - they accomplished this by doing two things: First assuming that the string entered would be formatted in a particular way and second by iterating through the string picking up month, day, and year parts of the date.

I did a little scounting around the SDK docs and found a much nicer way of doing this:

Dim formatInfo As New DateTimeFormatInfo()
Dim myDate As Date
formatInfo.ShortDatePattern = "dd-MM-yyyy"
myDate = Convert.ToDateTime(myDateTextBox.Text, formatInfo)

I am certainly no .NET god so as I am writing this I am wondering how much cool stuff I am missing in the .NET framework simply because I don't know enough about it?

My adventure into the blogging world started with setting up dasBlog as my personal blog and learning how to use the templates.

Now I have reached the point where I am experimenting with blogging tools which allows me to write posts from a more userfriendly environment than the browser, although I must say that the use of the Office 2003 components as editor eases the process a lot. Being a developer I really want an easy way to format a piece of code. This is no easy task using the Office editor so I figured why not try one of these blogs editors.

Having played with W.Bloggar a bit I ruled it out. It doesn't support dasBlog properly, so categories and headline (?!) aren't sent correctly. It boggles my mind that the head lines aren't sent to the blog but hey it may just be me missing something :)

Off to search for some other tool. I am looking into using OneNote 2003 as a posting tool via e-mail posting to dasBlog. Stay tuned ...

Well maybe not the first .NET website EVER but it was for me :) When I was getting my feet wet with .NET (I was building the most horrible website in ASP.NET to learn the stuff) a friend of mine pointed out a site which he was involved in building. I saw the site and went, "oooooh, I want to build that kind of websites".

Today I started working on a new project which I wasn't too familiar with from the get go. I spent the entire day setting up my development machine and fired up the site. Lo and behold it was the same site as the one I saw almost two years ago. How freaky is that?

I just sat there and stared at the code while thinking about how the hell I had ended up in this situation. Sometimes it's the little things which remind you of how much you have learned :)

Anyway tomorrow will bring lots of interesting bits I need to get done. Can't really wait to get started for real :)

Chris Pratley who runs the Office team at Microsoft has put together a really well written post about how Word (and Office) came to be, and how the suite came to rule the planet as the most widely used Office suite.

Like always he does a great job with pulling you in so that you really understand where he is coming from.

I highly recommend his blog - there's lots and lots of info about OneNote in particular and the effort of making and maintaining it.

If you are at all interested in software development I recommend that you read all his posts as they all contain nuggets of useful info, particularly I enjoyed this one about pitfalls in development.

A new version of my favorite IM client has seen the light: MSN Messenger 6.2. Which apparently is a minor update with some small tweaks and a new toolbar for the browser. Now what is up with bundling toolbars with the IM client? IMO these things aren't related at all but on the other hand this is what MS does.

I wonder how long it will be before EU fines MS and makes them take out the IE bar :)

Anyway, you can get this new version at Messenger site and you can also read all about what is new in this version. For you lazy people who just want the goods right away here is a direct download link.

Ever wondered how to enumerate an enum? Well I did yesterday when I needed it to list the installed fonts on a system. It's actually very simple once you know how to :)

UPDATE: Found an article on Codeproject.com which describes even more tricks with enum. Go have a read.

So the server needed another boot, back at it again :)

Just read this post on Neopoleon.com about a book called Coding Slave which you can buy at CodingSlave.com. It actually sounds like a pretty good book which was discussed on a previous .NET Rocks! Show (you absolutely *have* to listen to this show) where some pretty interesting conversation came up, not about technology in particular, more like a philosofical discussion about the biz, the people, and where it's all heading.

Anyways, I wanted to buy the book but CodingSlave.com doesn't seem to ship internationaly and Amazon doesn't have it (!?). So I shot a mail off the Bob Reselman an e-mail which I got this reply to:

Why is it that work never fall in neat little packages? I have been sitting idle for a couple of weeks and now things are picking up which is great but why oh why do projects always fall on top of each other?

It seems that when one project is set to go another one lands in my laps immediately after :) Not complaining though, but there seems to be an eerie pattern underneath there somewhere :D

Am I the only one why experiences these peeks?!

Oh, my server is ready to go, gotta get some code done... Cheers!

Blog on line ... STOP! ... Have no idea what to write ... STOP! ... Will be back later with intriguing content ... STOP! ...