Neil Cowburn - OpenNETCF - General

OpenNETCF is now a Microsoft Gold Partner

Neil Cowburn — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:04:10 GMT

Over the last few months we've been working hard to attain the Gold Level partner status in the Microsoft Partner Program and I'm extremely pleased to say that we've done it! For our customers, this is an assurance that by choosing to work with OpenNETCF products and our consultants, you really are choosing a high calibre company.

Massive amounts of credit for Mark for driving this internally. Good job!

Show us some Smart Device Framework love

Neil Cowburn — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:58:35 GMT

For all you Facebook addicts, you can now show us how much you appreciate the Smart Device Framework.

The story of the name "Padarn"

Neil Cowburn — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:16:59 GMT

I thought it would be nice to explain the somewhat esoteric name behind our new web server product. It's not a particular thrilling story, but it's somewhat personal to me.

It started with a client project which was code-named after the main river through the city in which our client's HQ was located. During the early stages of Padarn, we needed a code-name as we couldn't decide on a product name, plus we're lazy. Why use 2 or 3 words to describe something when one well-defined, universally understood term will do? Following the water course theme I suggested Padarn, which is taken from Llyn Padarn.

Llyn Padarn is one of two lakes in the rural Welsh mountain village of Llanberis, which just happens to be where I live. The other lake in the village is called Llyn Peris and a forms part of a pumped storage hydro-electric power station. For those with QuickTime installed, you can view a stunning QTVR presentation of Llyn Padarn here.

UK tops sales in EMEA

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:12:17 GMT

I'm not the kind of guy who harbours deep feelings of national pride. However, when I checked our product sales reports this morning, I admit a little smile did creep across my face. The top 5 EMEA countries are as follows (in descending order):

United Kingdom
Germany
Netherlands
Italy
France

But where is the Cancel button...?

Neil Cowburn — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:15:27 GMT

You have to love well-designed and equally well-tested error dialogs like this one from the FaceCode installer:

Even better is the implied statement that the error dialog will not cancel the installation process. Serves me right for being way too optimistic about a piece of software that's not had a rev for about 2 years.

Tags: Bad+error+dialogs, FaceCode

.NET Compact Framework and Micro Framework Community chat on Skype

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 22:34:38 GMT

.NET CF/MF Community chat hosted by neilcowburn.

Join now

Starting tomorrow morning, I will be hosting a .NET Compact Framework and Micro Framework Community chatroom which makes use of Skype's public chat feature. At first, this will just be a place for like-minded folks interested in mobile & embedded development to hang out, chat, share knowledge and network, so it will be a no holds barred kind of place where you set the agenda. I'm pretty much on Skype all the time. If there is enough interest, I will schedule regular, more formal chats about topics you want to talk about. So drop by just to say hi or come and ask any burning questions you may have about the .NET Compact Framework or Micro Framework.

See you in the chatroom!

New product logos

Neil Cowburn — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:01:22 GMT

Today, we unveiled new products logo across the whole of OpenNETCF.com and our online store. If you've visited my blog in the last week, some of them will be familiar to you from the sidebar over on the right.

One of the real joys of working in a start-up is that you often find yourself doing things you wouldn't normally do as a developer. For me, this is my chance to do some graphics work. Anyone can tell you that I'm hopeless at designing UIs, but I know my way around Photoshop so I really relish these moments when I get to work with it as part of my job. Anyway, enough of my self-indulgence. Here are all the new logos:

(Left to right, top to bottom: Smart Device Framework, Telephony library, Popup Menu, Calendar, Advanced Debugging Toolkit,
AutoRun Manager, Desktop Communication, OpenTimeCE, zlibCE, Serial library)

Tags: OpenNETCF

Microsoft Community Leader/Influencer Program

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:21:11 GMT

Why does Microsoft UK not have anything like Microsoft Germany’s CLIP?

"CLIP is Microsoft's basic care program for all operators of German-language, non-commercial on-line and off-line Communities focussed on Microsoft products, services and technologies - e.g. in the form of websites, on-line forums or user groups.

With CLIP, Microsoft would like to support you with your Community work. CLIP helps you with personal support by Microsoft experts, supplies you promptly with technical information and makes sure that your qualified Community experiences the public attention which it deserves.

Nominating new CLIP Communities takes place quarterly. If you operate a Community and would like to apply for the CLIP program , send us simply a e-mail - indicating of your address, URL and a short description of your Community activities."

Tags: Community, Microsoft

Windows Vista RTM installed and running

Neil Cowburn — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 18:14:07 GMT

Last night I was looking around MSDN Subscriber downloads for something else when I noticed Windows Vista RTM was up, so I downloaded it.

Today, I decided on doing the brave thing and upgrading XP Pro to Vista Ultimate. The install didn’t take that long given that I had some big apps installed (VS 2005 being the biggest). The machine I installed on is my main workhorse, a Alienware Area-51 m5500 (2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, NVidia GeForec Go 7600 256MB) and the only issue I had was with the graphics drivers for the GeForce Go 7600.

Vista initially identified the card as a standard VGA card but after going into Device Manager and choosing upgrade, it found the GeForce Go 7600 WDDM drivers. These drivers are from May 2006 and so are waaaay out of date. After updating to the WDDM drivers and reboot, I tried to refresh my Windows Experience Index so that Aero would be enabled, only for the machine to blue screen every time I tried. Knowing that NVidia had newer drivers out for Vista RC2 I downloaded them and tried to install. No luck. The installer failed to identify the GeForce Go 7600 card and cancelled out of the installation.

The NVidia installer is a compressed archive, so I extracted it using WinRAR and went back into Device Manager to manually update the driver. Clicking the Update Driver button the into property page for the card and then clicking the Have Disk button, I browsed to the folder where I had extracted the drivers. This displayed a list of possible drivers to install. I chose the closest approximation, the GeForce 7600 LE. This installed prefectly and I was prompted to reboot to complete the installation.

After the reboot, I went back into the Control Panel and updated the Windows Experience Index and this time, no bluescreen! Areo was enabled and the Glass effect looks good.

SharpOS

Neil Cowburn — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 11:39:54 GMT

[via Mono-dev mailing list]

A number of the Mono devs are pursuing the idea of creating an operating system mainly from managed code. Super cool stuff, although Mircrosoft have the edge on them. Subscribe to the mailing list to get the latest info.

Google now offering source code hosting

Neil Cowburn — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:16:27 GMT

"So Google today launched its source code hosting effort.

I suspected they were working on something along these lines, because the Subversion folks went to work for Google some time ago. "

[via Miguel de Icaza]

This is interesting, given Microsoft's history with GotDotNet and now CodePlex, as well as the popularity of SourceForge, RubyForge, NovellForge, Tigris and all the other source code hosts. I suppose the most interesting part is the effect this could, potentially, have on the likes of Koders and Krugle as source code indexes. I say potentially as this is dependent of projects moving the repositories over to Google.

Looking through the list of projects, I spotted pandoraplayer, a GUI player for Pandora.com. I love Pandora and will be keeping an eye on this project.

Cheap(er) CDs -- At long last!

Neil Cowburn — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 14:07:42 GMT

I knew this would happen ever since Apple opened the doors on the iTunes Music Store -- the music industry has started to crack under the weight of the competition from Apple. Universal Music are going to be pricing their offerings at much more realistic price. Currently in the UK, the average price of a new CD is around £13 (approx. US$25), but as reported in the Guardian today, Universal will be bringing the price down to a level comparable with the ITMS, with new CDs costing as little as £6.92. Bargain! Still, the major high street outlets (Virgin Megastores & HMV) tend to offer fairly new CDs at reduced price as part of bundle deals ("3 for £20" and "5 for £40" are common deals).

Personally, I'm much happier with purchasing music online. In fact, I've bought more music online in the last few years than I have at music stores. DRM is a bit of a pain, especially when you have multiple machines, but 5 minutes work with a CD-RW and the DRM problem vanishes.

Now the next big issue the music industry faces is copyright law and the restrictions placed on users wanting to purchase music from outside their copyright juristiction. This needs to change and maybe one solution is for governments to have reciprocal rights agreements so that residents of one country can purchase music from another and vice versa.

It's MEDC time!

Neil Cowburn — Sun, 07 May 2006 00:05:10 GMT

I’ve arrived safe and sound in Las Vegas for MEDC 2006. The flight was too bad, some 9 hours in the air, but coming from (reportedly) the wrong side of the pond, it’s the price I pay.

I’ll be blogging the MEDC throughout the week, mainly through photography since I have my trusty EOS 350D with me. On the occasions when I don’t have the 350D with me, I’ll snap away with my SPV C600 and upload the photos to Flickr using ShoZu, which is a nifty little app that handles all the work needed to capture, describe, tag and upload images to Flickr. And it’s free! I’ll let you know how I get on with it over the next week.

Any photos that I do take will be tagged with MEDC and I encourage anyone else attending the conference to get moblogging and use the same tag. Click here to view all the photos with the MEDC tag. I’ve already started with a photo of the view from my hotel — the gold foil covered Mirage. Stunning!

Finally, I will most certainly be keeping an eye out for the cast and crew of one of my favorite TV shows, CSI! Having watched the last 6 seasons, Vegas feels somewhat familiar…

The Pain of OS Re-installation

Neil Cowburn — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 09:35:54 GMT

Here's a thought on how Microsoft can help improve the regular OS blitz-&-install that many go through: offer the software updates from Windows Update and Microsoft Update as a quarterly ISO or MSI package or plain, old Zip file that can be downloaded and installed offline.

I've just flashed my Toshiba M200 with XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (XP SP2) and it's taking *longer* to install the post-SP2 updates than it did to install the OS in the first place. I would love to be able to download a package with either all the post-SP2 updates or just those from the last quarter and slipstream them in my installation procedure.

This is why fact checking is so important...

Neil Cowburn — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 11:51:31 GMT

Looks like someone at the Inquirer needs to learn the difference between GPS and GPRS.

Apple come good

Neil Cowburn — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 13:45:42 GMT

Buying an Intel-based Mac just got a whole lot more compelling... Kudos to Apple to listening to the community on this issue! I hope they continue to do so. Now if only Apple would license Mac OS X to OEMs and for use on non-proprietary hardware, that would be awesome.

BBC Climate Change Experiment

Neil Cowburn — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 09:23:44 GMT

The BBC are conducting a public experiment in conjunction with the University of Oxford to run climate prediction models on participants PCs. It works in the same way as the SETI@Home, Protein Folding, and various other experiments listed on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) web site. That is, it's a grid computing project where the climate prediction modelling is performed using the idle CPU cycles of your computer and it comes with a nice screensaver to give you a visual representation of your progress.

The aim of the experiment is to run tens of thousands of climate change simulations start with known weather conditions in 1920 and predicting the climate through to 2080. At the time of writing this, over 20,000 participants had signed up for the experiment and were active! The experiment will be officially launched during the Meltdown documentary to be aired on February 20th on BBC Four. This is superb timing as I'm about to begin a short course with the Open University on modelling climate change.

Links: BBC Climate Change informational, BBC Climate Change Experiment, Open University Climate Change, ClimatePrediction.net

Technorati Tag: BBC Climate Change

Vista Contest: Guess the Launch Date

Neil Cowburn — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:51:59 GMT

Over at Wired News, they have an article on their Vaporware Awards. Vista comes in at #4, which is hardly surprising. However, the accompanying blurb about Vista contains a link to the Guess the Launch Date Contest being run by Microsoft EMEA. Too funny!

A new year, a new start

Neil Cowburn — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:56:48 GMT

News is starting SDF to creep out from Chris Tacke, Alex Yakhnin and Mark Arteaga that SDF 2.0 is nearing completion. These three along with Peter Foot, Daniel Moth and Alex Feinman deserve all the credit for hard work they've put into SDF 2.0.

The v2.0 release will bring some major changes to the model we've used in the past, and more information will about this will be coming out over the next couple of weeks. While I've been involved in the discussion of these changes, I've had to step aside from being more actively involved so that I can concentrate on being there for my family through my dad's illness.

I've talked about my dad's cancer a few times on this blog so it seems only fair to bring some closure to the thread. On January 15th at approximately 10pm, he died in hospital from the symptoms of his cancer. He wasn't an old man, aged just 56. I was fortunate enough to be at his bedside with my mother and my wonderful girlfriend (who my dad thought the world of) during his last moments of life. In a lot of ways, I'm relieved that he is no longer suffering -- he'd been in and out of hospital since the discovery that the cancer had metastasized, back in August 2005 -- in other ways, I'm sad that I've lost the most inspirational figure in my life and the man who is responsible for my software development career.

The last few months have seen me in deep thought about my own life and what it means to me. One of the things my dad repeatedly said to me over the years is that I should live the life that I want, just make sure that it's a happy life. I realised that I'm not actually happy and haven't been so for a year or two. I kept on smiling through the rough times, but behind those smiles was a troubled person. So once my shoulder has recovered, I'll be making some changes so that I *am* that happy person my dad wanted me to be. Anyone who knows me to almost any degree will know that part of these changes will involve spenting more time bouldering and generally mucking around in the mountains (hopefully not dislocating or breaking any limbs...).

Here's looking forward to a better year than 2005.

Accidents will happen...

Neil Cowburn — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:52:28 GMT

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas and a happy New Year holiday. For me, it is best summed up as painful and frustrating. The week before Christmas, Kat and I decided to take a trip to North Wales to revisit some old haunts and to get some fun time in the mountains. Unfortunately, on our first day in the mountains, I had an accident and that kind of scuppered any plans we had made.

We were around 100-150m from the summit of the highest mountain in Wales (Snowdon, 1085m [higher than anything in England, around the average height for Scotland]). Kat had been showing symptoms of flu for a couple of days and the cold air and moist conditions in the mountains had taken its toll on her lungs, so we decided to make our decent. Shortly afterwards, I slipped on a rock and fell onto my left arm. The excruciating pain with a quick self-diagnostic revealed that I'd dislocated my arm at the shoulder. Given the cloud cover, steep terrain and the fact I was perfectly capable of walking, I made the decision not to call out the mountain rescue team and to make my own way down the mountain -- approx. 700m down over approx. 6km.

Despite the pain, making for slow progress, the next 4 hours seemed to move pretty swiftly. A 20-mile drive later and I'm in hospital. By that time, it had been over 5 hours since I had fallen and I'd learned a few things about myself.

X-ray of my shoulder showing the dislocated arm

Setting my arm back into my shoulder proved to be a little bit troublesome for the medical staff, even with copious amounts of pain relief meds and muscle relaxants. Eventually, I had to go under general anesthetic before they could set my arm. Now my arm is in a special sling that is secured around my waist (to prevent lateral movement of my arm) and will be for the next couple of weeks.

Apart from some mild discomfort as the muscle and nerves heal, and adjusting to live with one usable hand, it's been quite an adventure. My independence factor has been quite high as I've learned that there's surprising number of everyday activities that you can easily accomplish with one arm. The biggest problem I've faced is not being able to drive my car.

Hats off to Metcheck.com!

Neil Cowburn — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 00:11:34 GMT

Tonight, I was checking the weather forecasts at one of my usual web-haunts for meterological information since I'm off on a trip to the mountains tomorrow. Metcheck.com have recently introduced a mobile site for viewing weather forecasts on the go at pda.metcheck.com (it's desktop viewable, too) so I decided to add my trip targets as favourites on my SPV C600.

I noticed that the temperature data for these mountains seemed a little out of whack. In fact, the data seemed to be a little on the warm side, so I compared the mobile site to the desktop site and found that the forecasts on the mobile site where only showing the base temperature and not the summit temperature.

I submitted some feedback to the team at Metcheck.com and 11 (yes, eleven) minutes later I received an email from Andrew Bond at Metcheck.com saying that the mobile site now contained summit and base temperature forecasts. That's what I call seriously impressive customer service!

Thank you Andrew!

Here comes the snow

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 09:57:28 GMT

It's days like this that make me wish I still lived in North Wales. Check out today's weather bulletin (PDF, 62KB) from the Met Office. Definitely a fun day in the mountains :)

Oh, look! Yet more betas

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 23:33:52 GMT

Apparently, Office 12 Beta 1 is out. I want. Especially OneNote 12. Please give me OneNote. Also, Office 12 for Mac* wouldn’t go amiss either. Thank you kindly.

* I apologise for openly admitting I own Apple products on this blog. For the record, I possess 2 PowerBook G4s, 4 iPods (1x 1G 10GB, 1x 3G 40GB, 1x 5G 60GB** [the video iPod], and 1x 1GB Shuffle) and can occasionally be seen wearing a Mac OS X Tiger t-shirt.

** It’s pure coincidence that I only own odd numbered generations of iPods. No, really it is.

YAMA - Yet Another Microsoft Acquisition

Neil Cowburn — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 18:57:21 GMT

So everyone is talking about Microsoft acquiring FolderShare. What most people have not mentioned is that FolderShare is now FREE OF CHARGE. Nice.

New MS Certifications but it's not all good

Neil Cowburn — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 14:58:47 GMT

News about the new certifications that are to replace the MCAD and MCSD is circulating around the net. In summary, the MSCD is being replaced with the Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, while the MCAD is being replaced with the Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist.Further to this, the MCTS is split into 3 technology specialisms for developers (there are 2 more specialisms for IT Pros), including .NET Windows, .NET Web, and .NET Distributed apps.

This is all good stuff, but I'm won't be happy until mobile and embedded development is fairly represented in the certification roadmaps.

Girly Geek Dinner II

Neil Cowburn — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 19:38:47 GMT

Last night, I attended the 2nd Girly Geek Dinner. Yeah, I know — I’m not a girl, but hey, a man has to do what a man has to do, right? :-)

In all seriousness, the last was a blast. I got to put a few faces to names I’ve either seen floating around or had contact with via email. There were a couple of enlightening elements to the night:

there were a few more men than I was expecting, which was cool
I can’t make my own simple decisions (I’m fine with complex decisions, just don’t ask me if I what I want to drink or eat)
I’m a sucker for red wine served with a smile
Apparently, I’m just a teddy bear

Eileen Brown was one of the speakers (I had to leave before the 2nd speaker took the stage) and was thoroughly entertaining. Eileen wasn’t the only Microsoft rep at the dinner. In fact, I think there were more than half a dozen MS folks hanging around. It’s good to see MS supporting the community like that.

All in all, it was a good night, even if I tried to leave about 3 times before making my escape (damn 2 hour journey home!).

Google Talk

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 16:53:21 GMT

If anyone is wishes to add me to their GTalk account, the address you want is neilco@gmail.com

UI = App

Neil Cowburn — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 08:09:31 GMT

"[Jeff Atwood] I don't care how many kick-ass Visio architecture diagrams you have; as far as the user is concerned, the UI is the application." [via Steve]

This is one of the reasons why I do not consider myself to be an application developer.

When Authentication Goes Wrong

Neil Cowburn — Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:53:37 GMT

I love the terrible grammar used in this error message in the bluetooth stack on my Toshiba M200:

It just reminds me of those horrible TV shows of the ilk "When Animals Attacks: Part 25". I will keep an eye out for a new series on cable, "When Authentication Goes Wrong".

Couple of nuggets for you to devour

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 23:28:22 GMT

Just a couple of items for your link-clicking-hungry finger today:

Vulcan.NET: new .NET language product brought to my attention by Ginny Caughey. Take a look at the Code Examples, in particular, the Desktop application to control a PDA example. Does that look familiar? :)

Donate a .NET book Amazon wish list: I've created an Amazon wish list of books I'd like to read. In return for donating a book, I will post a review on this blog and on Amazon.

Reminder: Help us to help you!

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 16:35:35 GMT

This is just a quick reminder that you can do your bit to ensure we at OpenNETCF.org are able to keep on providing the information, tools and code you need to be a better device developer.

Yesterday, we switched on bandwidth logging on www.opennetcf.org part way through the day. I just pulled down the log for it and saw that we’d served up 1.32GB of data. That’s in one day! Just think of the cost over a month.

Update: Yesterday (August 11) was the first full day since we turned on bandwidth logging on the server. The logs show that we actually served up 3.48GB of data. Admittedly, 2.71GB of that was for the Smart Device Framework installer.

Help needed: recovery of orphaned OST file

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 11:33:47 GMT

I need some help. Does anyone know how to recover an orphaned Exchange offline folder (OST) file?

Drop me a line if you do! Thanks :)

Update: The OST file is from a previous install of Outlook 2003. On reinstalling Outlook and syncing with my Exchange box, I noticed that not all my mail had been synced. I want to check whether is it in the previous OST.

OpenNETCFWhatsamadoodle

Neil Cowburn — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 23:23:30 GMT

I'm going to put my marketing hat on to clarify a few things surrounding OpenNETCF.org and its products.

"OpenNETCF" is not a product. Never has been, probably never will be. Following on logically from that, there is no such entity as OpenNETCF 1.x.
OpenNETCF actually refers to both OpenNETCF.org and OpenNETCF Consulting.
Our flagship product is called the Smart Device Framework which is a shared source project (not open source) run by OpenNETCF.org.
You may see the Smart Device Framework referred to as the SDF or OpenNETCF Smart Device Framework.

Referring to the OpenNETCF as a product name would be like referring to Windows as Microsoft e.g. "I can't wait for the next version of Microsoft". It just doesn't work nor is it correct.

OK, I'm going to get off this soapbox now. I'm only being picky over this because branding and identity are two incredibly important entities in these contemporary times. We've worked very hard over the past 3 years to establish the OpenNETCF identity and the Smart Device Framework brand.

Apple on Intel? For sure but not until 2006

Neil Cowburn — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 12:52:55 GMT

Yes, yes, I know! Everyone and their dog is talking about the announcement that Steve Jobs made yesterday at the WWDC -- Apple is ditching IBM for Intel. Wise move, Steve-o. What most people are (probably) misreading into this is that this means OS X on x86 architecture. Apple moving to Intel does not imply this at all. Intel don't just manufacturer x86 chips. Take a look inside pretty much any Pocket PC these days and you'll see the PXA range of processors in use. These are StrongARM processors, not x86. Could it be that Apple are moving to a StrongARM architecture? I've not looked into all the info out there just yet, but it's a possibility.

Also, what does this mean for Apple's business practices? If (and it's a big if) they choose to go with an x86 architecture, will Apple finally give up their stupid charade and enable OEMs to license OS X? If that happens, then this *will* no doubt impact on Microsoft's PC market share.

Interesting times.

It's raining, it's pouring... Wet in Florida

Neil Cowburn — Sat, 04 Jun 2005 13:05:17 GMT

A word of warning for anyone travelling to Orlando this weekend for Tech Ed: it's raining... constantly.

Florida is experiencing record levels of rainfall and this is expected to continue into next week. Pack an umbrella or rain jacket -- you will need it!

See you at Tech Ed

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 21:51:00 GMT

Stage 1 of my journey to Orlando, FL for Tech Ed 2005 was completed without so much of a hitch. Now it's a waiting game as there's only a 6 hours until I make my way to the airport.

This trip is going to be a little different than my usual conference treks -- Kat will be travelling with me :) This means that some of my time in Orlando will be dedicated to having fun and relaxing in the warm sun. I've been monitoring the weather in Orlando using the Weather dashboard widget on my PowerBook and temperature has been averaging a balmly 32C!

We've purchased a ticket which gives us access to 5 of the parks in and around Orlando. I'm really looking forward to Sea World, Universal Studios and Busch Gardens. If anyone is going to be around on Saturday or Sunday and wants to do something, send me a SMS (+447817716612) and we'll arrange something.

Another highlight of this trip will be hanging out with fellow MVPs and MS reps. There's something about being surrounded by smart people that gets me on a high. Intelligence by osmosis, I believe.

On a different note, I heard from my insurance company this week and they're not going to pay out for my stolen camera. It's stated in my policy that personal possessions are only covered to a max of £100 (approx. $180). Given the excess I had to pay on repairing the smashed window, that leaves me with £40. That doesn't even cover the cost of Kat's stolen rock climbing shoes (which I've already replaced). I guess that means I'll have to be without a camera for little while longer... :(

Anyway, see you at Tech Ed. Come find me at the Mobility Cabana every morning throughout the week!

CLI209 and Beer

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 12 May 2005 21:57:52 GMT

CLI209 is the code for the session I was supposed to give today, but couldn't make the trip out to Vegas. I just got an email off of Chris and everything went well. Thanks, Chris! I owe you a beer sometime. Maybe I can use one of I.O.U.Beer credits I seem to be collecting :-) So far I have enough for good start to an evening. Feel free to leave your beer credits here, but I must warn you I will collect...

Speaking of beer, I'm off to get a nice cold one.

It never rains...

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 05 May 2005 12:26:12 GMT

... but it pours, as the cliche goes.

I, for one, can account for that. The last couple of months have been hard. Very hard. My previous contract entailed long journeys, long hours, hard work, and a expensive. However, the people I worked with were great and the hard work was fun work, too. I got the chance to really get to grips with VS 2005. My opinion? I much prefer working in VS 2005 than I do with VS .NET 2003 -- it's a very comfortable experience.

Anyway, after the contract ended, I headed to North Wales for some R&R. On the way, my car started making some strange sounds so I took it into the garage to get it checked out. My brakes where shot to pieces. Great. I'd just driven 200 miles with the last 40 miles or so over twisty mountain passes. I am ever glad the brakes didn't fail! Decided to get the tyres done at the same time. Cost of repairs: one arm, one and a half legs. Ouch.

The following weekend my car gets broken into. The thiefing prat got away with about £1,000 worth of swag including my beloved (and expensive) Canon EOS 300D digital camera and around £300 of climbing gear. My insurance is fully comprehensive, but I still had to pay an excess on the broken window. There goes the rest of the remaining leg and up to the elbow on the arm.

A few days after that, I split coffee over part of the keyboard on my Tablet PC. It seems some higher power is really trying to test my limits. Not to worry, I can cope with this. Just don't waste good coffee! Anyways, as you would imagine, the Toshiba M200 Tablet PC and liquid don't mix too well. So I'm in desparate need of a new laptop. No laptop == no work. No work == no income.

Since I'm still waiting for my previous contract to service my invoices, I'm unable to attend the MEDC. This is not without irony.

Things started to look up last weekend when I viewed some apartments in Oxford. My girlfriend finishes her degree in a couple of weeks so we're both moving to Oxford. There's more work in the south than up here in the north, especially in the .NET sector, and particularly in the .NET Compact Framework sector.

We found an apartment we liked and decided to apply for it. Now it's the turn of the letting agents to piss all over me. They want a reference from my current employer. Remember the coffee spillage? No laptop == no work. Also, it's approaching summer time. The market is very thin on contracts at this time of year, so even if I had a functioning laptop... I explained this to the letting agent and she said it would be fine if I had a guarantor. My parents agreed to be the guarantor, so phoned the agent back. Now she says I still need a professional reference. So, I'm back to square one. No work, no reference. No reference, no very nice apartment. I'm still waiting to hear from the landlord on his views of this situation.

So where does this leave me? Frustrated beyond belief, to say the least! How about no work, no laptop, and in a country where .NET == ASP.NET and not much else? That sounds about right.

To the higher power testing my limits: Enough is enough!

OpenNETCF.org News: We now run Vault and DragNet

Neil Cowburn — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 23:18:57 GMT

Over at the OpenNETCF.org site, I've just posted some exciting news which will allow users of the Smart Device Framework to be more involved in the development process.

A personal thank you to Chris Kinsman for putting me in touch with Eric Sink and, of course, to Eric for making the donation. Everyone in the team is much happier now that we've moved away from NotGotDotNet.

Neil the Nerd King

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:41:11 GMT

If I ever needed proof that I should get out more, then here it is:

>Man, 95% is just shocking! At least I don't own a pocket protector... I'm going to hold onto the last 5% of humanity with all my might.

Call to action: Help us help you!

Thu, 13 Jan 2005 22:14:59 GMT

"Help us help you" -- That's the angle we're taking with a new campaign which will hopefully generate enough revenue to cover our running costs and any other expenses we may incur.

So, if you think we have provided something of value in the SDF (or maybe you just love me for the HTC imaging library I wrote last year) then, please, we urge you to make a donation, no matter how large or small, and help keep OpenNETCF.org up and running.

Below this paragraph, on my blog, on the main OpenNETCF.org web site, and in the OpenNETCF Forums you will find a PayPal Donate button which you can use to start the donation process. Go on! Rekindle those New Year warm and fuzzies by helping us help you.

Help us help you!

Hotmail Ads

Sun, 09 Jan 2005 10:15:41 GMT

Last night, I was sorting through some old photographs when I came across these two Hotmail postcards from circa 1996 (I think). They just crack me up every time I see them. Does anyone else remember these? Also, where there anymore in the series?

ActiveSync 3.8 is out

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 10:44:52 GMT

ActiveSync 3.8 has been released. I've just installed it and sync'ed my Smartphone over Bluetooth. Syncing seems a little quicker. Exlploring the device is definitely quicker, IMO.

Vonage launch in the UK

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 10:24:11 GMT

VoIP provider, Vonage, have launched in the UK for £9.99 per month for unlimited local and national calls. BT say they don't see it as competition given they are planning a pure IP network at a cost of £3bn and to be completed by 2009*. Does this mean the end to analog telephony? You betcha! I'm just waiting for Dixons to stop selling analog phones... ;)

I'd be tempted to give Vonage a go if it were not for a few things:

I use my Smartphone as my main phone
Average number of people who call me per month: 1
I use SMS and IM more than I make voice calls
I have Skype, but no one on my contact list :P

These next 5 years are going to be interesting from a consumer point of view as the digital lifestyle really takes hold. Digital service provision is certainly were the hot money is to be made right now.

* If the whole ADSL/broadband fiasco is anything to go by, 2009 is way too optimistic and ambitious a target for BT. Given their past record, I'd say 2015 at the earliest.

NAnt 0.85 RC 1 is available

Mon, 29 Nov 2004 12:09:00 GMT

Over the weekend, Gert sent a message to the NAnt-Dev mailing list announcing the release of NAnt 0.85-RC1. Release notes are available here.

MSDN Product Feedback center

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 08:37:06 GMT

Is anyone else able to make suggestions at the MSDN PFC? Everytime I click "Make a suggestion" it takes me to Step 1 where you search for existing suggestions. I search. I find nothing. I click "Make a suggestion". I'm then asked to search again (back at Step 1). This is broken or is it user error?

Update: Click "Search" on the Make a Suggestion, Step 1: Search for a duplicate suggestion pages just takes me back to the PFC homepage.

Update 2: The same thing happens if I try to file a bug report.

RFID: A solution to supermarket queues?

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:26:54 GMT

This weekend while I was at the supermarket with Kat, we began analyzing the inefficiency of human-operated checkouts.

At Kat's local supermarket, we typically spend anything from 10 to 20 minutes queuing to get to the checkout. That's a ridiculous amount of time wasted, especially when all you're buying is a litre of milk! The problem consists of a number of factors:

number of items being purchased
efficiency of buyer to unload the basket/cart
efficiency of the cashier to scan the items
efficiency of cashier/customer to pack the items post-purchase
efficiency of payment processing

Let's look at this factors individually.

Number of items: The presumed assumption about the number of items is that the greater the number of items, the longer it will take to get through the checkout. This is true above a certain quantity of items. Below this critical mass, the weight of the other factors takes precedence, rendering buys of less than, say, 10 items not affected by the quantity of items.

Cart Unload Time: Some people are hopeless when it comes to unload their carts (in the UK, we call them 'trolleys'). If a single individual is performing the purchase the unload speed is usually quite acceptable. However, there are factors which complicate cart unloading, such as nagging children announcing to the world that they need the bathroom or they must have that Mars bar or they will cry. These complications only seek to distract the unloader from performing their duty. For Kat and I, we have this process down to an art form - we both simultaneously unload the cart which often results in some startling unload times.

Item scanning: How many times have you been at the checkout and the cashier just cannot get the scanner to read the barcode on particular product, so he/she tries, in vain, over and over and over again, until they finally give in? This happens particularly frequently with frozen goods, where a thin veneer of ice reflects and refracts the scanner's laser to the point of a failed read occurring. When this happens, the cashier usually resorts to manually entering the barcode's digits into the POS system. Sometimes, the barcodes, for whatever reason, are just totally illegible and the supervisor trump card has to be called into play. If the supervisor has to go look up the value of the product, this can add in the region of 2 minutes to checkout time. From my observations, tinned goods are the easiest to scan because the regular shape and size of the products.

Post-purchase packing: This is a big of bug-bear for me. Some supermarkets have introduced what they call 'Scan & Pack'. This is where the cashier will scan and then pack the items themselves. In my scenario, this is the most inefficient option to take -- Kat and I are both perfectly capable of packing our own items. Plus there's the factor of there being two of us compared to the one cashier. Two dedicated packers are going to out-pack a ‘scan & pack'-er any day. Quite often, the cashier will ask if they should pack the items. In this scenario, we refuse 100% of the time.

Payment processing: It goes without saying that cash is by far the fastest method of payment. Although, for more and more people (myself included), payment by credit or debit card is far more convenient. Since the introduction of 'Chip & Pin' cards in the UK, electronic payment has increased its efficiency somewhat by removing the need for individuals to remember how to hold a pen, let alone how to use one. Chip & Pin is not without its problems though -- a forgotten PIN is often expedited by the purchaser forgetting which family member's birth date they used for the 4-digit security number.

I hope you can see by now that the supermarket is actually quite a complex user scenario with a lot of mitigating factors whose sole purpose is to increase the stress and frustration levels of those in the queue behind the purchaser. So how can RFID help to remedy this?

By introducing RFID, it is possible to remove two of the above factors out of the equation -- these are: cart unloading and item scanning. RFID does not require an individual to pass the product in front of a laser beam in order for it to register with the POS system. Instead, low-powered radio frequencies are used to provide all the information a barcode scan & database lookup would provide.

By removing the scanning factor, together with the increased adoption of electronic payments, it negates the necessity for the cashier to be present at the checkout. However, this will have a significantly negative impact on the local socio-economics by potentially increasing the unemployment levels should the ex-cashiers be unable to find a replacement occupation.

By adding a card reader and RFID scanner to the cart, a further two factors can be removed formed the equation (namely, payment processing and number of items). With the on-board card reader, preliminary payment processing can begin as soon as the card is inserts. As the shopper moves around the store and items are added or removed from the cart, the RFID scanner tracks these and adds or removes them from the purchaser's bill.

So, as I hope you've seen, the whole supermarket experience can be improved by using RFID. One obvious benefit is to the health of the shoppers – less queuing will result in less frustration and stress. However, this effect may be negated by worrying about the privacy issues raised by tracking the products. Personally, I believe this to be no more worrying than store loyalty cards which already record the entire detail of an individual's purchases. This data subsequently gets analysed with a whole bunch of other data to form a "shopper profile" where stores can fairly accurately predict which products the shopper is likely to buy (and when).

INETA Speaker Training?

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 00:09:11 GMT

Just a quick question: do INETA provide speaker training?

RANT: People who translate code unnecessarily

Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:06:43 GMT

Like Daniel, I'm advocate of developers being conversant in both VB.NET and C#. But what I am not an advocate of is people who feel the necessity to translate code between the two languages just because some class they found is not in their preferred language. I get a lot of emails about the camera API proof-of-concept I posted a while back, and most of them are from VBers who have written the same code but in VB.NET.

WHY DO YOU DO FEEL THE NEED TO DO THIS?!??!

Don't you know that you can have both C# and VB.NET projects in the same solution? Are Microsoft doing a bad job at educating users or do you just not know how to use your development environment properly? Don't you understand that whether the ASCII characters you see strung together before you form a C# snippet or VB.NET, it does not matter when you compile the application?

If you follow the advice of Daniel and myself, then you will have no problems with having mixed language projects in your solution. In fact, I'd say that that is the preferred method of making the most of a useful class! Don't waste project budget by needlessly rewriting code just because (a) you can and/or (b) prefer a particular language. You ain't going to gain anything by translating code

I'm fine with people translating snippets, like Daniel does. Heck, I even post some snippets purely in VB. Just don't waste time translating entire class libraries. There's more important things you can be doing with your time.

No Comment... well maybe just one....

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 14:15:47 GMT

[GotDotNet] "The Gotdotnet team is aware of the current site operational issues and is working on a solution."

I tried, in vain, to give GDN another chance the other day. The result? More three minutes to check out a 5KB file, which in the end did not check out properly -- VS showed the file as checked out but when I tried to modify it, I was prompted to check the file out... I sensed a vicious cycle just waiting to happen so I stopped.