This is one of the best music videos I have ever seen!

What do you get when Pat Helland is on vocals, Don Box is on guitar and David Chappell is on piano? 

You get a hilarious song direct from TechEd Europe. 

Pat sings his version of Don McClean's American Pie.  The lyrics were written by Pat with inspiration from Nicholas G Carr's book Does IT Matter?

Bye Bye Mr CIO Guy..

Watch the Video

[Via Channel9 Forums]

All regular sessions that were given at TechEd in San Diego are available in video and power point slides from http://microsoft.sitestream.com/teched2004/. I have watched\listened to a few sessions so far the two are standouts:

• ASP.NET: Best Practices for Managing and Operating IIS 6.0 and ASP.NET Solutions
• .NET Framework: Exploring What's New in the CLR 2.0

I will post any more that I see that are standouts.

Better yet Microsoft as announced a whole new line of Express Products.

Microsoft has announced that there will be a version of Visual Studio 2005 targeted at just web development and the beta is now available get it here. As part if this my company created a Guided Tour for it at http://beta.asp.net/guidedtour/. I had nothing to do with the Guided Tour but it is still cool.

It is well know that the next version of Visual Studio will have all types of new tools to do code refactoring. I have used VS 2005 a little and I thought I liked how it worked but then I saw ReSharper and now I don't think I like the new stuff as much. One big thing I liked in VS 05 is the way it will show where a variable is used so instead of the current Go To Deceleration or Go To Reference you see all the places it is use and the place it is declared. Great that is wonderful but the version of this that ReSharper has implemented is much nicer.

This is the VS 2005 Find All References Window:

This is the ReSharper Find Usages Window:

And by the way I found a much better RSS reader called Rss Bandit it's way better looking and much more feature rich then SharpReader and it's all open source c# code.

I recently got interested in RSS feeds as I had bloged about earlier but this has now become a problem. I found that Microsoft has started a blog for MSDN and wow is the material good up there. There is a lot of discussions on features, methodology etc. If you want more knowledge of what is going on in MS start reading but hold on!

OK I will never clam to be a infrastructure guy but I have been having to learn way too much about it. I can't believe that people can't keep up with the technology that they are supposed to be experts of. I great example is this article ISA Firewall Fairy Tales Once I read this (it's a dam long read to) I then did circles around a network "expert" on a conference call.

I know this sounds crazy but the article makes the point extremely well! Ho and by the way I was on the last beta and release cycle of Microsofts Macro Assambler!

Some time back there was a cool little application that would run in your systray and would start to blink if there were any new news stories up on some web site. This app was cool because it kept me in touch with the real word as I clicked way in my little virtual world. Well for some reason it was killed off and I have been keeping my eyes open for another app like it and I think I may have found it! It's called SharpReader it will check RSS feeds and shows "notification" when a new item is downloaded and changes the systray icon. I wish the source was available for this I would make a few small changes but even as is it's quite nice.

I found out that the current MSDN magazine has a list of tools available on the web. I have yet to see the copy so I don't know what all is on the list but I will be getting a copy at lunch.They list the Snippet Compiler and Regulator and others I will continue to list the ones I like. Regulator is a regular expressions testing and learning tool and wow is all I can say. I had used Expresso but Regulator is much better if for nothing else then its integrated searching for regular expressions. Have fun!

A good buddy of mine David McCarter turned me on to a cool tool for playing with .NET code called Snippet Compiler, it is just what the name would lead you to believe.