Skype is the thing that seems to work best for my Australian phone calls (at least once/week if not more) and I love SkypeOut for when I’m just too damn lazy to walk across the room for the phone. If I could use a SkypeIn phone number for getting/sending faxes as well as placing and receiving calls and taking voicemail, I’d have one of those, too (only $4/month!).

That said, MSN7 seems to have fixed the a/v sharing problems through firewalls, so now I use it for that and MS Communicator is damn cool, too.

These communication devices are pretty important for a remote guy. Just today, I had an hour long video counseling session with my boss (it takes me about a year to feel like I’m actually capable of any new job I take) and another hour-long IM with one of the architects on my team arguing about what the hell we’re building anyway. The counseling session would’ve happened no matter where I lived, but even if I lived next door to him in Redmond, I wasn’t going to be sitting in the architect’s living room from 12:30am - 1:30am chatting with him; new comm was the enabler.

Whenever anyone hears that I program Avalon, the first thing they think is, “Oh, good, let’s get Chris to create a cool looking UI for us!” They also tend to lump in data visualization expertise and user experience into that mix as well. On the “beginning to experienced” scaled, I’d rate myself in the following way on these tasks:

• Avalon programming: beginner to intermediate, depending on the bit of Avalon you’re taking about
• Visualization expertise: interested beginner (I’ve attended a 8-hour Edward Tufte seminar, skimmed 3 of his books and wished for something more than the DataGrid)
• User Experience design: intermediate in the realm of standard Windows applications but beginner when those limitations are removed, i.e. what Avalon enables
• Graphic art: untalented hack

Seriously, I can’t draw myself out of a paper bag (or in one, for that matter). I hired all of the art done for my web site and I almost never draw pictures for my books. Instead, I write programs and take screen shots or make Mike draw the pictures for me.

Being able to program Avalon doesn’t make me a graphics artist any more than being able to program my financial calculator (which I can’t do anyway) would make me Warren Buffet. In fact, I’m closer to being Warren Buffett than I am to being a graphics artist, which should give you some indication about the gap we’re talking about here…

That’s not to say that some enterprising 3rd party couldn’t create tools to help artistic yarn heads like me produce useful Avalon graphics. If my experience is any indication, there are going to be a lot of developers moving to Avalon that are expected to create wonderful things w/o an artistic bone in their bodies. Somebody help!

It wasn't perfect, e.g. lots of the fun bits were gone and at least one sub-plot never got resolved, but I liked the new stuff, e.g. the motivation for the end of the movie and the romance. Bottom line: I laughed a lot. We did have a pretty decent local geek turn-out, so that made it even more fun, but it was a completely watchable movie and I'd definitely see it again.

There is huge value in Robert Scoble publicly criticizing his employer’s CEO. The value is this: when the GM of VSTS says “ask me anything you want” concerning a recent pricing controversy, you can have confidence that Robert is going to ask the hard questions and push out the results as unedited as MS PR will let him get away with (I detected no edits in this piece). The world may not like the answers he digs out, but because Robert is risk-his-job honest, you have a high degree of confidence that what he says is the truth as he finds it.

Robert Scoble has become the Geraldo Rivera of technology reporting. Even if MS took away Robert’s camcorder, I expect O’Reilly, Fawcette, CNET, ServerSide, CodeProject or any of a number of other technology eyeball companies to hand it right back to him.

More people than you’d expect have been asking, so here’s an update on ATL Internals 2e.

This effort actually started in 2003, when Kirk Fertita updated the first 9 chapters to ATL7 as provided in VS 2002. Then he had to go work on his start-up, which represented his only income stream and would’ve gone belly up w/o him (selfish bastard! : ).

Then George Shepherd did a little work, writing bits of two new chapters on ATL Server before he had to bale.

Now, finally, we have an author that’s going to see this book to the finish line: Chris Tavares. I’ve written with him before and he’s excellent. He’s already ported chapters 1-4 to ATL8 as provided in VS 2005 and is on schedule to bring my and Brent’s work on ATL3, Kirk and George’s work on ATL7 and his own new work into a cohesive ATL8 book to hit the shelves 3-4 months after VS05 has hit RTM.

Jose “heard” that I’m working on an update for the first edition of Windows Forms Programming in C# for Windows Forms 2.0 (we’re not updating the VB.NET version due to poor sales for VB.NET-related titles in general). I didn’t mean to keep it a secret; it’s been listed at the top of my writing page for a year or more. : )

While we’ve been working closely together on the update, the bulk of the writing work is being done by Micheal Weinhardt, my main writing partner for the last coupla years or so. He’s got 90% of the book updated for VS05b1 already and is in the process of updating the whole thing to b2. After that, we pass it back and forth between ourselves for review-edit ’til we’re both happy. By the end of May, hopefully the whole thing will be out for review. After that, we apply reviewer comments and update at each successive beta/release candidate until the Whidbey team decides they’re done, at which point we send it to the publisher and 3-4 months later, it hits the shelves.

In addition to updating the existing material for WF2, we’ve made the following changes:

• Split a Layout chapter out of the Forms chapter due to all of the extra WF2 layout functionality
• Refactored the existing design-time and controls chapters and the standard components & controls appendix into the following chapters: components, controls, design-time 1 and design-time 2 (includes smart tags)
• Split the applications & settings chapters into 2
• Added a Document Management chapter for MFC folks finding themselves in the app framework-free environment of Windows Forms
• Dropped the data access chapter as covered better in other sources
• Re-wrote the data binding chapter from scratch with a story I always wanted to tell in WF1, but isn’t supported nicely ’til WF2 (object-centric binding instead of relational database-centric)
• Refactored the drag ‘n’ drop material into it’s own appendix
• Added a “What’s New in Windows Forms 2.0” appendix for those already familiar with Windows Forms 1.x
• Dropped the delegates bedtime story in favor of beefed up coverage in chapter 1 (and a more general knowledge of delegates in the universe as a whole). Don’t get my wrong, I love that story, but it doesn’t fit into the overall theme of the rest of the book. I knew this when I first edition shipped, but I just didn’t take the time to update the book properly to live w/o it

I have to say that working with Mike on this process has been fabulous. An ordinary author faced with updating to a new version of a technology might just update the material and leave the story alone, even if it needs update. Instead, Mike took the time to reexamine the book from first principles, fixing the problems in the story that always nagged at me in the 1st edition and proposing improvements to stuff I was pretty proud of. In general, even without the update to the new technology, the book is better than the 1st edition.

I was using one of my computers this morning, surfing around, reading my email, getting started with the day, etc. After a bit of fooling about, I went looking for the work I wanted to continue from yesterday. I couldn’t find it. Then I went looking for the program I was using to work on the file. I couldn’t find it.

Just before I was about to reinstall things, I realized — I was running a VPC image, not the computer’s native image. I couldn’t freakin’ tell the difference! Nice…

If you read the April 10th, 2005 review of my WinForms book, it has one feature that most of the other reviews don't have (and I don't mean pegging me as a "from the VB world" : ); Roger has placed his email address on the review! If everyone did that, I wouldn't spam the 5s, but I would follow up with the 1s, 2s and 3s to see what I could've done to improve the next edition. When I followed up with Roger, he had a bunch of specifics he'd have liked to see me fix. I don't agree with all of them, but you better believe he's on the list of reviewers for the second edition. Thanks, Roger!