Console.WriteLine("Hello World");

(When mentioning Twitter, I also want to point out Twitxr (Photo-Twittering))

Claiming this Blog in the name of ... *cough* ... myself!

Technorati Profile

My fingers really don't like typing the new URL after using Twitter.com for so long, but Twitxr.com is really worth a visit!

It is a Twitter-like micro-blogging site that includes photos and locations. Some of the very neat features include the friends-map/a>, showing where your Twitxr buddies are posting from. This also enables you to discover new Twitxr-ers in your vincinity.

Last but not least is the very cool iPhone Twitxr app - snap a photo, type a comment and hit a button - done. All you need is a Jailbroken iPhone (I recommend visiting Zibri and the brilliant iClarified tutorials for that). It works like a charm on my 1.1.3 iPhone.

AAlso, Twitxr will allow you to generate a unique email address that you can use to send your photos to if you have a different, internet-enabled camera-phone.

Micro-blogging sites are really growing like crazy... I wonder, where this is headed! So far, you can follow me on:

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/techpreacher
• Pownce: http://pownce.com/techpreacher
• Twitxr: http://twitxr.com/techpreacher

I dig http://favorites.live.com and now comes http://skydrive.live.com . This is great. No more sharing-files-through-my-private-ftp-server-hassle for me! Skydrive (love the name) is in beta right now and not available in every region. Just be patient!

Now the philosophy question for today: "To http://favorites.live.com or to http://del.icio.us ... That is the question..."

Metablogging via Live Search's Weblog: Adding the power of the Live.com search engine to your weblog in the form of a neat AJAX component is real easy using the live search box. I put it up in just a couple of minutes (okay, the background image took a moment to build) - you can see it in action above.

No posts from me for almost two months. Bad blogger! I'll try to be more frequent again.

First news is that I changed my blog software again. Comment spammers are just annoying. Even though they had to go throug my captcha and get no Google-juice (sorry, MSN-juice) from my blog, they still post their nasty comments everywhere. This time, they made such over-sized comments containing the strangest characters, that my blogging engine just gave up trying to render them properly. That is why you may have seen ASP.NET errors on this page.

As they mostly spam old comments, I am now limiting the posting of comments to three days. After that, a post is regarded as "closed" and no further comments can be posted. I also had to flush all old comments, as the "bogus" new comments killed my rendering-engine. I am truly very sorry for all the good and legitimate comments that were lost during this process.

I just added nGallery to my website today in order to be able to share photos with my friends and family. Very nice software, easy to set up an to adjust to your needs.

On Wednesday before eastern, one of the two redundant power-supplied in my server blew, together with the quite old UPS I was using. I never found out which component killed the other. So I ordered a replacement at Dell and was told that they would like to replace both power supplies under warranty "just to be sure".

So I took both components to work where Dell agreed to pick them up and replace them. But on the morning of that day, Dell called me, telling me that while in transit, the driver had been stopped and robbed of both his car and cargo - and that they would be trying to send another driver again the next day(!)

It sounded to me like the classic stagecoach robbery - where the village waits forever for the mail that never makes it...

And no, this is not an April's fool!

And thanks to Dell for the fast processing, despite the crazy circumstances!

This is a most memorable moment. After going through a major blogging-crisis, "12'o clock flasher girl" has done it again, and posted to her blog - thanks to the constant nagging of her loyal readers and myself.

Thank you! :)

Stephanie just pinged me in Messneger and told me of her many, recent media-appearances in press, radio and on TV. It looks like she is becoming a celebrity in the Swiss blogosphere. This is cool! She has some info on her activities:

http://climbtothestars.org/about/presse/
http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/02/15/interview-radio-en-ligne/  http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/02/16/infimes-precisions/

She also tells me that she will appear on Swiss TV (TSR2) on Sunday night (Feb 20, 2005). I however don't know which show she will be in and it's in French... (Time to brush up my Franglais :)

Congratulations, Stephanie!

Even though the recent controversy on pros and cons (and maybe even uselessness) of the addition of the rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a href= - tags, I have decided to implement it in my referrers section anyway, hoping that this might help the global struggle to stopping referrer spam - and that it doesn't kill the power of links between blogs - which should not come from referrer pages but from genuine blog entries in my opinion... Or am I wrong?

Via email from Dani: It looks like my previous post on my server's uptime has caused some controversy.

I was talking about 519 days it took until the system failed for the first time - not until I booted it for the first time. I actually boot it quite frequently for security updates, yet I absolutely don't regard that as a "system failure".

The message also pointed me to the Uptime Project - an interesting site with some impressive data (uptimes of 3 years and the like) - yet I can't get myself to install an extra piece of software (just) to monitor system uptime and send that info to a central tracking service in order to participate.

You can still get uptime-data for a specific domain from Netcraft - this is the most recent uptime average graph for CORTI.COM:

I didn't know that the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research has a blog. They do. It's called Raindrop.

Metablogging on a blog (nearly recursive)! I just saw at Ben's that Aurel has started a blog himself! Another smart guy starts blogging, that's good news!

I recently felt that I don't have too much relevant stuff to tell the world - left alone to blog about. My last posts were mostly a list of upcoming events or just-released articles here at Microsoft. http://msdn.microsoft.com does a better job at aggregating this than I do - including RSS. Hence, blogging has been down and naturally my readership starts decaying (I even managed to get off Scobleizer's OPML :)

Anyway - talking to Aurel today, he told me that this is a normal phase many bloggers go through - let's see if there's hope... I am currently weighing off the pros / cons of me going on with the blogging.

I have revised my ASP.NET based CaptCha control that I use in the comments section. Daniel Turini told me (in my comments) that my first control lacks security as I loaded a static image for each character that the user needs to type - something easily breakable via a small script. The new CaptCha control always loads the same image which is an ASPX page that generates an output stream containing a bitmap, that consist of the pass phrase stitched together from an array of static images. Therefore, a program can no longer guess the correct pass phrase by analyzing the HTML source (which is now always the same).

Thanks for the hint, Daniel!

The new version can be downloaded here.

I decided to make my weblog engine a little more comment spam unfriendly by adding a captcha validation to the comments section and by not displaying URLs or email addresses written in comments as hyperlinks anymore as I was recently flooded by comment spam.

If you are intersted in my ASP.NET based captcha control, you may download its source from here. You can simply add it to your ASP.NET project and send it a Validate() method, which returns a boolean telling you if the user entered the right string or not. The control needs view state enabled to work properly.

Hm, my referrers page lists lots of hits from the weblog list on the ISV community page up on MSDN! Thanks a bunch for the listing!

I was recently asked how to read RSS feeds while on the road. This is my answer:

I am using NewsGator to read RSS on my Pocket PC Phone (Which is an XDA 2 from Orange at the moment):

I use a PC with NewsGator to synch all my RSS feeds to different folders that reside in my Microsoft Exchange 2003 server account (online, not a PST). I use my own Exchange server for that, but of course any corporate Exchange account would work as well.

I then use either Exchange 2003’s Mobile ActiveSync capabilities or IMAP4 to synch these folders to my Pocket PC Phone. Both variants allow me to select on a folder level, what gets synchronized and what doesn't. So I can choose to only take the most important blogs on the road. I am using a GPRS connection to synch while on the move.

Another option is to read the posts using the new "Mail folder tree view" of Outlook Mobile Access which is an enhancement introduced by the just released Exchange 2003 Service Pack 1. This allows me to drill into the mentioned RSS-feed-folders using any mobile device with Web access (HTML, WML, xHTML or cHTML), as Outlook Mobile Access is using ASP.NET Mobile Controls to render the pages according to the viewing device's capabilities.

Some of the major advantages here are that no software needs to be installed on the Pocket PC or SmartPhone, leaving more free memory on the device and that my "read posts" are always in sync, no matter where I read them (desktop pc or mobile device).

Of course, the obvious, possible draw-back is that a Microsoft Exchange server needs to be available for this to fully work.

Synchronized RSS folders in my inbox
OMA's new "Mail folder tree view"	Reading a post in OMA

Oops, I did it again. I am very busy at the moment with speeches daily (it's: prep a speech at night and give it the next day) that keeps me from blogging yet again. But I already got feedback on the missing posts yesterday at our software architects forum (where our guest speaker David Chappell got ill after (just) a few hours of speaking, I do hope he gets well again soon!!!) and Robert Scoble sent me mail on things that he wants me to blog so he can link to them :)

Ok, I get the message, I'm at it! And thanks for all the positive feedback :)

I took a few minutes today to update my blog engine to work with Technorati. One part is the "link cosmos" for each entry, that can be accessed via the small new Technorati icon in each post (Kudos to tbray.org who inspired me to do this).

The other task was to add the needed method to call the XML-RPC API to ping Technorati whenever I post to my blog. I am looking forward to seeing the results...

Metablogging via une fille du limmatequai: Did you ever think of convincing your partner to start a blog (as I did with 12 o'clock flasher girl)? Think twice!

Another spontaneous tech dinner yesterday at the XII Apostel in Zürich. Thanks to all (Salvi, Irmgard, Ben, Dani & Fabian) for coming and for the interesting chats. Fabian is taking over the role of Microsoft student consultant for Ben and both Dani and Fabian are now working on their project for the imagine cup. Hot stuff - although I am refraining from interfering with their project in any way for fairness-reasons :)

Someone sometimes during the dinner came up with the crazy idea to dig up all the electronic equipment carried by the party. See the result for yourself:

It's 1:24 AM on a Friday night and I should probably be anywhere but online - but there is this urge to open the laptop one more time before calling it a day - and that's exactly when I get email from Damir who points to his blog on the German speaking Developer community. +1 on my daily RSS dose :)

Thanks, Damir!

I have added "FreeTextBox" to my blog engine in order to have an online "richt text" editor and an image upload / gallery solution. This control is really well written and very simple to integrate into existing ASP.NET projects - it took me 45 minutes from finding the control to having it implemented in BlogX, including some code changes to the control itself, as my images do not live in a subfolder of the blogging solution.

The Image Gallery of FreeTextBox

Meta-blogging:

TA has a nice, little article on German (language) blogs of Swiss bloggers. Seems like the Swiss are catching the blogging-fever now as well :)

The local moblog-hosting company "Kaywa" is getting its share of attention as well.

I started blogging on January 12, 2003. So it looks like I missed my first blog-o-versary. Oh well, never mind! Thanks for reading this blog, anyway ;)

It's great to see that bloggers are picking up on the subject of DevDays! Fabian, Daniel, Ben and Urs have already written about it. Will I ever learn to blog "live"?

Update:

Craig, one of the speakers, adds more comments of our DevDays. Thanks for the compliment, Craig!

Dev starts his own blog and his first post is on DevDays as well. Cool!

In a talk I had with Rafal Lukawiecky today, I may have convinced him to start a weblog! ;)

He told me he had given it a thought to start one, but wanted to know if I would recommend him to do so. Yes please!

People who know him - probably one of the most brilliant speakers in Europe and a great eVisioneer(tm) - will appreciate this piece of information.

His speeches at DevDays were brilliant once more - and the slides will soon be downloadable with all the others from CodeZone.

The Comment Spam Manifesto is growing into a great resource on how to defend your blog against comment-spam. And it feels good to read if you have been hit by comment spammers.

<Quote>

Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated.

</Quote>

(This picture is a property of bravesoldier.com.
No direct relation, but I just thought it fitted very well in here)

Via my referrers: The Belux MSDN flash, October 2003 edition, links to my Visual Studio .NET wallpapers. Thanks, guys. It's great to see that someone is reading my stuff ;)

<update>
Tom Mertens tells me that it's Belux (Belgium and Luxembourg), not Benelux (add "ne" for Netherlands) as I initially wrote. Sorry guys, that was literally "politically incorrect" :)
</update>

This is too good and deserves some meta-blogging: Edgar Sánchez has created a >> great summary << about what is new in ASP.NET 2.0 (Whidbey timeframe) based on an interview with Scott Guthrie on ".NET Rocks!".

Hot stuff.

Via my referrers: Daniel Buchmüller is online, and he didn't even tell me :)

He is currently spending time in the Swiss army, but in his regular life he studies physics and is into programming. I've had quite a few interesting chats with him via Messenger.

Welcome to BlogSpace!

This weekend I finished Tron 2.0 only to start Homeworld 2. End of year always means that all the good game titles get released in the shortest possible intervals. Homeworld is my all-time favorite computer game series - perfect deep-space real-time strategy, graphics and atmosphere.

But Irmgard decided to keep me from playing by requesting a new control for her blog - one that displays current books, cds and games in the sidebar (you can see it in action on the left side of the page). The control gets it's data from an XML file that is edited via InfoPath. Another addition to BlogX that will keep me from switching to another blog-backend-software (Das Blog)

Our academic alliance manager, José Osuna is now online as well. Our team, the Swiss .NET developer and platform evangelism group, counting 9 employees and 1 student consultant (who is so efficient that he counts for at least one employee ;) now has 5 active bloggers! Ben, Urs, Martin, José and myself.

My assumption is that the "blogging virus" is spread by spending time around blogging people, rather than by just reading other blogs on the web.

Another interesting fact is that no one in our team considered using a hosted blogging service. Everyone is hosting their own domain on their own little server, running one or the other blogging software.

So, if you absolutely don't want to start a blog, consider not spending too much time in our team :)

<Update>
Added the actual link that I am talking about more prominently. Think-when-you-blog(tm)
</Update>

Yesterdays blogger meeting was a great event and we had great dinner and a very lively conversation. It all culminated in a very philosophical discussion on NGSCB and security. Thanks to Alma, Ben, Dani, Ingo, Irmgard and Martin for coming!!!

Ingo and I had a chance to give the upcoming DevDays another thought, regarding speeches, organization and the party - organizing this event now fills up quite a portion of my daily work-time.

The pictures that I took of the meeting are unfortunately beyond hope or repair, so I can only refer you to Ben's set of photos.

Today we decided to host another blogger meeting here in Zurich, taking place tomorrow, September 11, 2003. Sorry (again) for the short notice, but these things seem to happen quite spontaneously around here :)

People that will be there include Ingo (who had the original idea), Ben, Martin, 12 o'Clock Flasher Girl and myself.

We have (so far) reserved 12 seats in the "12 Apostel" and if you decide to join in, please send a quick note to Ben who is organizing the reservations.

Location: 12 Apostel in Zurich, Switzerland
Time: 7pm on Thu, 9/11/2003
Location info: http://www.12apostel.ch

12 chairs inside the 12 Apostel for 12 bloggers...

While I am setting up the new server (this box rocks!), my old system is producing daily outages. I have trouble booting it and the event log is filling up with error messages of the unit trying to find it's failing hardware components. I am sorry if you have been trying to contact my domain in vain.

It's about time to switch.

I have decided not to migrate my domain but to re-create everything from scratch in order to get rid of all the "legacy". I was playing a lot with group policy settings earlier and stupid me hasn't always commented what I was doing.

From now on, I will keep an exact log of every step I have done to configure the new server so I have some documentation about it.

My general quietness results from my current workload. First, the recording of the web casts on Monday was great. We changed the current setup from monologue style to a moderated discussion. It makes the whole thing much more lively! Watch out for these new web casts to be published on 00001001.ch later this month!

Right now I am matching speakers and speeches for the upcoming DevDays 2003. I have lots of inquiries from great people who would like to have a speech at our humble event - I am overwhelmed! I hope I can accommodate as many of them as possible to create a broad diversity.

Then, I learned that UPS is ready to ship my new server to finally replace my failing, heat-damaged, old systems - I wish I could start setting it up tonight!

Here are the specs:

• Easy-access server chassis
• ServerWorks GC-SL chipset
• 1 Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz Processor with 512KB L2 Cache (Support for Dual Intel Xeon processors with Hyper-Threading technology)
• 1GB ECC DDR SDRAM (2x512Mb 266MHz DIMMs) (Max. 4GB)
• Raid CERC ATA-100 IDE Controller (Raid 0,1 and 5)
• 3 * 120GB EIDE 7200 rpm, hard disk
• Integrated Intel Gigabit 10/100/1000T PCI Ethernet network chip
• Second NIC: Intel PRO/100S
• 2 redundant power supplies
• 6 PCI slots: 2x64bit/100MHz (PCI-X), 2x64/66 & 2x32/33
• DVD-ROM 16x EIDE

Thanks to Ben's initiative to create a list of all Microsoft bloggers as OPML file, I was able to update my MSFT blogroll again. This definitely is a elaborate task that calls for centralization (not to impose that Ben has to do it).

I admit that I have deliberately copied a good idea. :) I feel guilty.

I have taken the "PDC 2003 - we'll be there" button-idea and created the "DevDays 2003 Switzerland - we'll be there" version.

So here are my two versions, feel free to use them if you like (please be good to my bandwidth and copy them to your server - thanks!).

Currently there is no event-site to link it to, but I'll post updates as soon as one becomes available.

Steph is creating a solution to aggregate the web logs in Switzerland. I am helping her by translating the text to German (the least I can do). Steph has a cool blog herself and an amazing drive!

In the meantime, Batiste notices that I am a Microsoft addict and asks  in my comments, if I use any OSS at all. After thinking for a moment I come up with the relieving answer: this blog is OSS and as a Redhat Certified Engineer, I always keep a running Linux PC nearby to keep an eye on the latest builds of mono:: That should make for some megabytes of genuine OSS. :)

Batiste by the way has a very beautifully designed web log. Eye-candy!

Brush up your French btw. Seems like many interesting bloggers in Switzerland write in French.

Congratulations, Luke!

I however would never have thought that this works for me too...!

Sascha: 8
Corti: 2

Christian today pointed me to the new URL of his weblog (HTML / XML). "This time", he said, "it's for real!".

Irmgard has switched over to English for weblogging as she had feedback telling her that some of her readers had no clue what she was posting when writing in German :)

Yesterday I showed her what RSS is good for and how to use aggregators. Today I will show her why linking to other blogs when she sees interesting entries can be good (when done in reasonable quantities).

I have returned from a great conference week in New Orleans - working on a hell of a jet lag and a huge backlog in email and RSS. I find I am not very efficient at doing email or weblogging while on the road.

• I still find it very hard to get online abroad. I don't like dial-up internet and wireless or wired internet are far from broadly available in public places or hotels. But I have now found a few hot-spots here at the conference.
• Blogging from an internal company conference is a tough thing. Many of the very interesting things I am hearing are all NDA and I just can't take the risk of violating that.

Internal conferences are a blogger's horror. There are tons of interesting things you hear and want to share - but you just can't. Ack.

Via Robert: Users of BlogX should point their RSS readers to Dare for he agreed to take over the project from ChrisAn who himself is drowning in work.

Hobart (no blog, I think) from MindJet sends me email, telling me that he read on Joshua's blog [added link] that I am using MindManager 2002 for Tablet PC and he asks me for feedback. Well, all the feedback I got right now is that the longer I use it, the more I like it. It's one of my favorite 3rd party products for the Tablet PC that really makes use of the digital ink. The only thing that I would change is to stop it from automatically collapsing all branches of a mind map when a new main branch is created - but maybe that's just a configuration setting that I missed somewhere...

He also tells me that MindManager was originally created in Munich, Germany. Cool! That's quite close to Zurich, Switzerland, where I live.

Hey, I feel honored that someone from that company contacts me and takes personal interested in my feedback! I think we should be doing the same too more often!

Via Urs, I have tried FeedDemon 1.0 Beta 1a. This RSS aggregator looks amazingly promising, yet it seems to have some trouble reading my (and some other) RSS feed(s).

Only the <description> but not the <body> tag is shown in the reading pane. I have noticed that in their RSS feeds, many bloggers post the whole weblog entry twice, inside the <description> and the <body> tags. I always try to pick a <description> that summarizes my weblog entry in one sentence but still I would like to be able to read the whole weblog entry in the beautifully designed reading-pane of the RSS aggregator.

After closely following the RSS feed generated by TechEdBloggers.net - an aggregation of conference-related weblog entries written by attendees of TechEd in Dallas - I have now added myself to the list of bloggers at TechEd in Barcelona. I am looking forward to an interesting conference and hope that I will find enough time to post to my weblog while I am there.

Do you think there should be a weblogger roundtable / meeting during the conference or is this topic already too "main-stream"? I certainly would like to hear the makers of TechEdBloggers.net speak about this particularly interesting way of using / aggregating weblogs.

PS: I am pleased to read that Urs Bertschy will be there as well.

He describes their platform as follows: "leider webmässig mit colfusion aber im hintergrund drehen zuverlässige .net zahnrädchen als daemons."

I'm glad I met him online and am looking forward to reading his weblog!

Credits for all the great features BlogX offers have to go to ChrisAn and the folks working on the project over at GotDotNet workspaces. I merely tweaked the code a little to suit my needs... (Probably I was too excited today once my changes worked)

He also writes that he doesn't like the way BlogX stores all data in separate XML files on the hard disk - he totally favors the use of a database system for such tasks. I personally like both ways of storing data, as long as the performance of reading files from disk and parsing the XML contained within is OK.

Studying my referrers I found out that the Google query ["Office 2003" download iso full] leads to my weblog! Ahhh! I am innocent! :)

This tells me that all the weblogs with all their interconnections really confuse search engines. Urs and I were discussing today if one should implement a special page that recognizes incoming crawlers and automatically presents them a more spider-compatible page (i.e. just a list of all permalinks).

I have written a simple "mail-back" function for BlogX. If someone posts a comment, all details (author-name, -email, -url, comment and permalink) are sent to the web log owner via email. I was tired of checking my blog to see if someone had posted a comment...

I have already been asked to share this code but was unable to feed it back to BlogX GotDotNet workspaces, as all files are checked out most of the time. Therefore I have copied the necessary files to this zip archive.

Simply extract the files to the ./WeblogX/ folder, merge the last 5 xml-tags in site.config with your existing site.config file located in the ./WeblogX/SiteConfig folder and re-build the solution. site.config can later be removed from the ./WeblogX folder so it only exists (as merged version) in ./WeblogX/SiteConfig.

I will anyhow upload all to the BlogX GotDotNet workspaces as soon as possible...

During a recent dinner of tapas @ Juan Costas' restaurant in Zurich Enge (a great place to eat outside on a hot summer evening, btw.), Irmgard and I spoke about weblogging.

It started out with her asking me what the motivation behind weblogging was and ended with us brainstorming for a name for her to-be weblog: 12 o'Clock Flasher Girl.

The next day when I picked her up from office, she told me: "Why is my web log not online yet? I had tons of idea for posts today!" I heard the call, designed her blog's layout and put it online today. As I am writing, she's getting used to hyperlinks and bulleted lists - writing her own first entry (in the other cool corner of our home).

So what's a 12 o'clock flasher anyway? You'll find the answer to that on her blog.

Do I think she actually is a 12 o'clock flasher? No way. I think she's quite a techie, but as I have taken the red pill and she spends her evenings wading through the computer cabling that I keep putting up left and right, she sometimes at least feels like one.

Apologies to all readers of my blog that are using RSS aggregators.

As I have moved all existing weblog entries from OutBlog to BlogX now and BlogX uses a different GUID / permalink format, RSS readers will show some of the newest posts double...

I am currently migrating my weblog to ChrisAn's BlogX. Quite a few code changes were needed to be fully compatible with my existing weblog (keeping the same URLs and all existing entries).

My apologies in advance for any inconveniences...

Via Robert's posting frenzy: an interesting commercial RSS aggregator with very sleek looks and nice features is in the building: FeedDemon.

He usually has some amazing tricks up his sleeve - type "creative genius". Definitely a blog I'll be watching closely... :)

Tosh tells Microsoft bloggers to blog about what started us blogging in the first place. (Strange sentence!)

As for me, I was confronted with the topic by Ben, the student consultant, working for Microsoft Switzerland. In the Summer of 2002 we both were at TechED Europe in Barcelona. He blogged live from the event (or mostly from his nightly activities) and showed me his page. He later recommended reading the "cluetrain manifesto" and asked me some questions when he wrote an RSS front-end for the IBuySpy portal solutions. That was the time I decided I wanted to know what this is all about...

So I started reading other blogs for awhile, looked at blogging software and RSS aggregators until I decided to start my blog in January 2003. I was amazed of the overall quality of blogged content and learned a lot about technology and about what's going on in the heads of geniuses like Don, Chris, Robert, Ingo and lots of others.

Starting out I had a lot of questions on what to blog, how often to blog and attitude of the blogged content. I for myself have decided to blog "early and often" rather than posting only one quality entry per quarter. On the attitude side I decided against negative posts / rants because for one I don't feel like offending somebody and secondly I am very far from being flawless myself...

That's about it. Homework done :)

Just a little editor's note on the side: This is my weblog entry Nr. 101. This should conclude my time as an absolute weblog newbie, I guess / hope.

It looks like I am going to be at Tech Ed 2003 Europe in Barcelona in July. Are any of the other bloggers going to be there? Would this be an opportunity for a blogger-party? There's at least a few very popular bloggers among the speakers! (Rafal, are you blogging yet?)

I know, my blog doesn't support comments yet, for feedback you'll have to send antique email.

Whenever my schedule gets packed with lots of work, I hardly find time for blogging. Right now I am preparing for my upcoming speech at the Windows Server 2003 and Visual Studio .NET 2003 launch event here in Switzerland, taking place Tuesday April 29 in Lucerne. I will be holding a developer-session focusing on Windows Server 2003 as application platform. With more than 1000 people registered, I feel that I have to prepare VERY well. I have been allocated 50 minutes for my speech and right now I have slide-material for about 40 minutes and demos for about 60 minutes. Consolidation time (especially for the slides :) )!

Following Yole's recommendedation - I switched to SharpReader today. Nice piece of software - I do still like Syndirella as well though. And switching RSS aggregators shows the real benefit of OPML. Yeah!

In case you haven't seen this yet (I picked it up reading the blogs of Chris, Don and Oliver): MSDN now has RSS news feeds for information in the following categories:

• Recently published on all of MSDN
• Visual C# .NET
• Visual C++ .NET
• Visual Studio .NET
• .NET Framework
• XML Web Services

Robert got me the idea of upgrading from my static xml file and parsing .ascx control to Blogrolling.com for - blogrolling :)

Nice tech! I wonder when RecipRoll is coming back online.

I am always very interested in how other people organize their life. Toady’s entry in ChrisAn’s blog caught my attention. It looks like he starts his day with a fixed time reading a book. Great idea! I have been looking for “my” best fixed time to read books but was unable to find one. I usually read in the evenings but I don’t have that fixed timeslot where I do nothing else but read. There are too many distractions (TV or stuff like Freelancer) or nights when I simply return home too late. My mornings are already filled with 30 minutes of ZEN meditation. If I add another hour here, I will have to get up before 6am... Sigh.

Here is what I would like to do on a daily basis in fixed timeslots:

• ZEN meditation
• Reading books
• Reading tech-articles online
• Weblogging
• Learning a new language (human, not computer)

Conclusion: The days are too short :)

Stephanie writes me that yesterday's blogger meeting was on way too short notice for her to attend. Sorry about that! We only found out everyone was in town one day before we met. Next time we will announce things earlier.

Steph also points to her wiki-based, growing list of Swiss blogs. Interesting stuff! I will certainly keep an eye on this :)

PS: having lots of fun browsing the SPV picture dump!

I am probably the last to write about it but my day was filled with meetings (cheap excuse). So here goes: Yesterday’s Blogger meeting in Zurich was a cool little event. Certainly something to repeat. First, we had no problems recognizing each other in meatspace. Kudos to the bar in which we met – Wings Airline Bar and Lounge. Nice location, interior design and free WiFi internet access.

So that’s us:

 
Ingo, Ben and Gregor...

 
...Irmgard (not yet blogging, I am working on it) and myself (silly as usual).

Later that evening I managed (despite the silly look...) to get us into the speaker dinner of the local software architect forum held by Microsoft where we met yet another blogger, Clemens among other interesting people like Rafal (who is not blogging yet but would be yet another great read). Thank you team for inviting us!

l was thinking about the possibilities of publishing hand-writing biog-entries from my Tablet PC... Having the entries in digital ink on the server would make the blog really personal but (for the sake of the RSS feed) the blog software would have to be aware of the background-recognized text. So the database would effectively store my handwriting as an image (or as digital ink) and the recognized text in a separate field. Trouble: The recognized text would need to be proofread each time before posting as my Tablet only likes about 90% of what I write. But the human factor counts too, or

I don't think so :)

2 new Microsofties have started their weblog yesterday after serious evangelization efforts from my side -> Welcome to the world of blogging, Chritian & Urs. Btw, the solution they are using is rather interesting - a local managed .NET framework application monitors a folder for word-docs, opens them (in Word 11), saves them as XML and uploads them to the server. Offline editing included. VERY neat. Great coding job, Urs. I am currently working on something similar, but I want a managed Winforms blog-entry-editing app that runs on .NET FW and .NET Compact Framework and uploads data to my webserver via XML web service.

This does amaze me! Obviously blogging is blowing the boundries of being a pure geek's mood / hobby! MSDN links to blogs by people working on XML web service technology. Awesome! (Hey, I work with XML Web service technology too!  :)

Greg Reinacker has released an amazing tool. NewsGator, allowing you to aggregate RSS news feeds in Outlook - all based on the beloved .NET Framework!!! This tool and OutBlog make Outlook and Exchange become all the blogging tools one ever needs (Given the fact that you get hold of an Exchange-License)...

This entry concludes my first day of weblogging and leaves me to wonder who on earth...

...should read this. You never know...

And what about OutBlog and Office11 Beta1?

I did hope this works, but as Office11 Beta1 nicely killed my Compaq TabletPC yesterday (yes, "killed" like in "it doesn't even remenber that it used to be a TabletPC." All inking components are gone..!)

...

But this seems to work fine! This entry is written using the mentioned O11B1.! Good news :)

Thanks, Ben and Ingo!