The Coding4Fun columns are a nice reminder that software development can be fun, and not just saving and display data from a database ;).
Some feedback that we are interesting in gathering from the second DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Day is whether people would like more participant involved sessions, whether a LoadFest (where people install and play with the latest beta bits) or play the XP planning plan or Coding Challenge competition - would people give up two hours of tutorial sessions to join in?
It would be great to see what teams could produce using some robotic gadgets and some C# code.
Could they build a fully dancing robot transformer?
Simon would be too modest to blog this himself, UK Consultant Simon Thorneycroft shares his experiences starting out with Visual Studio 2005 column in the latest MSDN UK Visual Studio 2005 beta newsletter.
Don't forget you can now register for the Visual Studio 2005 Launch events, where rumour has it all attendees will get a free, unrestricted version of Visual Studio 2005 Professional and Sql Server 2005 Standard.
As mentioned by Robert Scoble, Orb is a software solution for viewing your photos, music and video on another PC. I remember wanting to try this a while ago but it subscription service and you had to be in the US, that has now be lifted and it is free to use.
You install a client piece on your home computer and then you can login from another Internet connected PC and select your content to view/stream.
I had a little play, just sharing my music collection and listening to it during the day from the offic; it just works and sound quality was great. However I wasn't so keen on the number of ports the client service opens, but I'll look at that if I decide to continue using it.
Shouldn't this be part of the operating system? Come on Microsoft, people want a file synchronisation piece that just works, I'm regularly working on the same files across my work pc, home pc and laptop. They have tried before with briefcase, etc. and little utilities like the Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager and SyncToy but let's have something proper with compression and delta changes. I'd also like to sync' what RSS feeds I have read across machines. Will the Windows Vista Sync Center application provide a universal service for all applications to use or just My Documents?
There are a number of commercial tools that provide similar functionality today, have you any recommendations?