Microsoft has shaken my belief system! Every sense I started to think of my self as a Software Engineer as defined by Steve McConnell I had believed was that Microsoft was making delivering software solutions easier without a care as to the crappiness of the solutions. Well it was a good plan the more solutions on a platform the more of that platform you will sell but if the solutions make the platform unstable whose fault is it? Look at Lunix and Mac OS, there is a much longer learning curve to do any type of solution development that will weed out the yahoos that should not be developing and any one who is developing there will have to have learned some about the system. With Visual Basic versions 1-6 all you needed to do was to fallow some wizards and not drool on the keyboard too much and you were now a solution developer.

Now I come up through VB and loved it the whole time but I focused on the overall platform and tried to fallow some standards that helped me to avoid most of the pitfalls of VB wizard development. So now again I ask whose fault was it that a bad solution made the platform unstable? Well I think it was Microsoft's fault for making a great tool that would allow anyone responsible to deliver great solutions is far less time but would also let a manager make a mess in no time.

Well .NET goes a long way to correct this, no they do not stop bad code or bad solutions but they protect the system better and that is good but now they have gone the next step and created a Patterns & Practices group (was PAG) and they have published some great stuff to help the person who wants to be a responsible developer.

OK if you have not used or looked in to WMI then you need to! The problem with wain if the documentation sucks! Well Microsoft has a great tool the WMI Administrative Tools this tools lets you explore what great information is available with the WMI interface.

I get a tone of questions every class about the differences between VB.NET and C# and there are some crazy people who want to know about managed C++. I buddy showed me two good articles that may help to answer some of the questions. Language Equivalents is a MSDN topic that covers common programming concepts with side-by-side examples for Visual Basic, C#, Visual J#, C, C++, and the Managed Extensions for C++, JScript, Visual FoxPro. And Microsoft Programming Languages is a MSDN article that covers the Microsoft postioning of Visual Basic .NET, Visual C++ .NET, Visual C# .NET, Visual J# .NET.

My IE install some how got messed up I could not get "Find" to work. IE would say that some GUID was not registered, it really sucked. I finally found this article How do I reinstall Internet Explorer 6.0 on my XP machine? up on MCSEworld this is the second problem I had that I have found the answer on that site.

At the new place I am working at for the next few months they use Netmeeting to share applications I went to install it on my Windows 2003 system and guess what... It will not install! So I figured I was SOL but I did some digging on the web and found an article that tells you how to get it running. Turns out it is on Windows 2003 it's just not made available you just have to run conf.exe that is in C:\Program Files\NetMeeting yes I felt lame when I saw that and bam! your metmeetinging!

I found this cool little article of how to make .Text skins. It's simple and easy, I know my skin is not to customized but I know I could do it if I wanted to ;)

I am now back to my blog 100% I just got w.bloggar working with the newest version of .Text so now I have a rich client to do my blog entry in. I did not see or understand that the new version of .Text dose not have it's old mataWeblog api service it now is handled in the rss\xml "stuff". I need to step through some code to see why but it's cool that it still works. I am still amazed at how cool of a tool .Text is.

After a long hiatus I finally have my blog back online and upgraded to the new .Text.

I am having trouble getting my favorite blog editor (w.bloggar) to download but once I get that up and running I will be fully back in business.

Just to review don't look here for much stimulation or intellectual content, I use this place more as a place to keep notes and information that I find useful. I have no idea if anyone else looks at this and I don't care. If you are still reading then get a life but I do hope you can find something here that you can use.