Scott created his podcast with the idea of not wasting his listeners’ time and he’s done it. HanselMinutes is the only podcast I listen to. In fact, I prepared for a long car drive by filling my phone w/ episodes I hadn’t hear yet and listened all the way (except when I called Scott to complain about one of them : ).

Not only does Scott have a fabulous list of topics for the Windows developer, but the way he explains them is wonderful, too. I don’t know where the guy finds the time to do all the stuff he talks about; I’m jealous!

In fact, I’m so enamored of his show, I’ve been trying to horn my way onto an episode (and not just ’cuz he had very nice things to say about me recently [19:53 - 21:12]). I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but either way, if you only listen to one podcaster this year, it should be Scott.

About 18 months ago, I asked for an intern and boy did I get one. He doesn’t want to be mentioned, but he’s done some pretty cool stuff with the site in his spare time (he’s also a very busy web development consultant):

1. Dug into what it would take to rebuild sb.com from scratch in ASP.NET 2.0 (although we differ on the moral implications of the license on Community Server 2.0)
2. Updated 404 page that tracks usage on dead/non-existent links, even missing URL #frags
3. Server-side link and client-side #frag forwarding
4. tinysells.com implementation (e.g. www.tinysells.com/4) and administration console (i.e. book co-authors)

#4 was very cool, because it enables me to put links into my writing that are easy for the reader to type and that are easy for me to update when the real URL changes (none of the other URL redirection sites allow administration post-facto as far as I can tell).

#3 is also cool, because of the primitive site authoring tools I use (FrontPage), so when I move spout/index.htm (the content of spout/default.aspx) to spout/archive.htm (the content of spout/archive.aspx), all of the links that folks have put into their own content are broken. Now, we’ve got a means for tracking when those links are broken and for forwarding them, even using my silly client-side name #frags. That even means that when folks form their URLs incorrectly (this one was never right and should always have been this) can be caught and corrected on my side.

Anyway, I wish I could tell you about this guy ’cuz he does great work and he deserves move business. Hopefully this post will shame him into it. : )

It’s easy to think that if you’re already got a high page rank in google, that you’ll get more than your far share of traffic, polarizing the internet into a small number of sites that get all the hits. Luckily, according to “Topical interests and the mitigation of search engine bias,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that’s not the case:

“Our result has relevant conceptual and practical consequences; it suggests that, contrary to intuition and prior hypotheses, the use of search engines contributes to a more level playing field in which new sites have a greater chance of being discovered and thus of acquiring links and popularity, as long as they are about specific topics that match the interests of users as expressed through their search queries.”

In other words, if you’ve got something relevant to say, the folks that care will find it. Yet again, letting the internet decide yields the best result.

Source: Is there a googlearchy?

The nice folks at Bookpool are running a special on Windows Forms 2.0 Programming: only $33! Enjoy.

I’m a big Ted Pattison fan in general (you have *got* to hear the story where the cowboy shows up at the door in buttless leather chaps), but he’s at his best when he’s singing (or holding Don’s hand). Of course, Carl Franklin’s no slouch at singing either (I don’t know how he his at holding hands or whether his chaps have a butt or not), so you’ll want to hear them singing “Why Did Shipping Vista Turn Out to be so Hard” sttto “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard,” by Paul Simon. Enjoy.

I’m an avid 24 watcher and one of my favorite parts of the show (offsetting the fact that Jack never so much as cracks a smile let alone giving us a nice “Wahoo! I did it! I rock!“) is when one of the technies “sends her screen” to another computer. Man! I want that! It’s so often the case that I’ve got a bunch of morning news sites and documents I’m reading through that I get onto one computer in my house and want to send to another computer for reading (maybe it’s the computer downstairs or the Tablet), but there’s no way to do that. I want a little glyph next to the Minimize button called Send that lets me pick a computer to send the screen to.

And what does that have to do with the Comic Books Archive, which was archiving digital images of almost 3000 comic books at last count? These are folks that have figured out how to digitize a specific media and provide a specialized format (the Comic Book Reader format) and provide a specialized reader (cdisplay), which would make an excellent thing to send to a Tablet PC, along with PDFs, Word docs, web sites, 18,000 books from Project Gutenberg, and anything else that you’d like to share between your own computers or those of your friends and colleagues.

In April of 2005, Paul Thurrott mentioned something called “application sharing” that would enable sharing of individual apps via terminal services instead of entire winstations. I don’t know if we’re actually building such a thing, but I in addition to being able to reach from one computer to another to grab an app, I’d also like to send one.

Wouldn’t that make Jack proud?

MikeDub has a nice summary to get you started down the road to WPF ClickOnce deployment, both for stand-alone apps and browser-based apps (XBAPs). Enjoy.

Even though the 1st printing was just in May of this year, Windows Forms 2.0 Programming just entered the 2nd printing. Thanks for reading!