I haven’t been able to hang out at the Portland Nerd Dinners in forever, but it’s on my calendar for 11/10 and my topic is “what does model-driven development mean to you?” I’ve been doing a ton of experimentation lately and I’m especially interested in how folks deal with a client-model, e.g. data binding, linq, etc, that expects client-server and a middle tier that exposes a service endpoint.

What’s the best way to implement the following semantic (feel free to change the signature)?

bool ConvertFromStringToT(string in, ref T out) {…}

I’d like to be able to call it like so:

int x = 452;
double y = 77.7;

ConvertFromStringToT(“123”, ref x); // x is now 123
ConvertFromStringToT(“abc”, ref y); // y remains 77.7

I came up with a solution that relies more than I’d like on run-time behavior rather than compile-time behavior, which is why I’m asking.

Casey Chesnum has put together what is probably the first real WinFX app: a Media Center “light” app that looks damn cool. Check it out.

Sloth of bears.

Army of ants.

Murder of crows.

Tribe of monkeys.

Embarrassment of richest.

What about geeks? Conference? Shy? Intelligence? Slather?

P.S. this site on collective nouns has a bunch of fun ones. I think I like “smack of jellyfish” best…

Pay no attention to the may behind the curtain…

If you read the ReadMe.htm from the Visual Studio 2005 setup, you’ll see a detailed list of up to 23 things to uninstall in the right order (plus 2 notes if you have trouble).

To solve this problem, Dan Fernandez posts about a VS05 uninstall tool that worked wonderfully for me.

Soma says it all.

I just had the most amazing consumer experience and I just had to share it.

I was looking for the local Mom & Pop computer store in my area and I stumbled across www.puzzlecomputers.com. His site doesn’t mention a store, but I left him a message asking if he could upgrade my computer or point me at the local Mom & Pop. Not only does he do that kind of work, but he came to my house, picked up the two computers I wanted to use as parts, e.g. case, RW-DVD, HD, etc, recommended and purchased the new motherboard, CPU, memory and quiet power supply, put them all together (including modifying my old proprietary Dell case to fit), brought the whole thing back to my house and then spent another hour installing another HD I had lying around. The specs on the parts were 1GB of RAM (upgradeable to 2GB), 2.8GHz AMD processor and ABIT motherboard with all the trimmings.

The whole thing, parts, labor, delivery, etc. cost $400. Plus, he hauled away the extra parts so I don’t have to look at them. And when the drivers didn’t install right away, he was available for phone support.

Highly recommended. I wish all my consumer experiences were like this one!