If you follow the link to the subtext demo that Preston Bannister mentions, you’ll see my idea of hell, i.e. manipulating code primarily with a mouse. Have you ever seen those guys — you know who I mean — those guys that want to copy a chunk of code and reach for the mouse, almost select the text, almost select the text again, finally select the text they want, go to the Edit menu, choose Copy, click on the place near where they want the code to be, click again, finally click in the right place, go to the Edit menu and choose Paste and by that time, you’ve died of old age? It’s all I can do not to tackle these people so I can use the combinations of Ctrl, Shift, Alt and the arrows to select the text and move the cursor to the spot where it belongs, using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, never touching the mouse, like BillG intended.

So, watching the subtext demo, which was nearly all copy and paste using the mouse made me want to tackle the guy doing the demo, especially since I couldn’t run it at a higher speed (my very favorite WMP feature).

On the other hand, I loved the idea of the code always being executed with live, example data to show me instant code coverage and I loved the idea of the code always being executable. If I could get a structured editor that let me copy and link using the keyboard (and it used some language I could actually ship, at least in some transformation mode), I’d use it in a heartbeat.

Jim Hubbard gives Thinstall a ringing endorsement:

“This solution will take your executable (.Net, VB or C++) and all of its dependencies and wrap them all into a single executable. The neat thing is that it even includes the portions of the .Net framework needed to run your executable inside the executable it creates. So, there’s no need to distribute the whole .Net framework.”

Has anyone else tried it?

Mathew Nolton has posted a GUI front-end to my XmlSerializerPreCompiler that you might find useful. Thanks, Matt!

According to Rich Salz’s reading of the WSDL 2.0 spec (Rich makes a living selling hardware to make XML smoke, so I think he knows), the following is legal WSDL 2.0:

#include "wsdl.h"
extern void hello_world(const char* text);

It’s hisjudgmentt that this is not a step forward and I’m having a hard time finding fault with his argument. : )

I’ve been wanting an easy way to capture screen demos and audio for a while and after stumbling across Jon Udell’s post on Movies of Software, I thought I’d give Windows Media Encoder a try. Here’s what I learned:

• I really like giving short little vignettes imagining an audience; I didn’t think I would
• The preparation for recording a screen demo is the same as a real demo, i.e. I want to make sure I know what I’m going to demo before I do it
• The preparation does not include lighting or another person to run a camera or a microphone, which means that I can do it on a whim at 5am on a Saturday morning
• My built-in mic at normal speaking volume works great
• Capturing a particular screen doesn’t work very well because I’m likely to move between windows without knowing that I will ahead of time. Instead, I should capture a region of the screen, ideally something not too large so that it fits well in a video window
• Medium quality may not be good enough. I did 13 minutes at medium quality, which resulted in a 3MB file and good audio, but the screen itself was nearly unreadable. Maybe the screen itself was too big?
• Stop other apps before capturing a screen, otherwise you’re bound to get slowdowns in the capture, particularly in the audio
• Talking in my kitchen at normal volume for 13 minutes will waken my wife (sorry, sweetie)

So, while I wasn’t happy with the results, I’m very jazzed about the medium. Expect to see more.

Here. Jeff Barr of Amazon has just informed me that Amazon now provides a distributed, shared, always on message queuing service which allows you to create and delete queues, enqueue, read and dequeue messages that can stay put for as long as 30 days. It's free right now and I don't quite know how it will be used for porn and spam, but I have every confidence that you guys will figure it out. : )

I've never really seen anyone use speech recognition for real and after watching Jon Udell use Dragon Naturally Speaking 8.0, I'm flabbergasted. I had no idea working with it could be so natural. Wow.

When I first read about MaxiVista, the thing that really got me interested was that it gave me two things that I really want from my Tablet PC. The 1st is to be able to use a slate-only Tablet as a 2nd monitor for my laptop so that I can continue my addiction to keeping my whole life on a laptop, but still be cool like the other kids (I’ve so far avoided multi-monitor setups because I love my laptop too much and I was afraid of the conflicting addictions).

The 2nd thing I get is a result of the first, i.e. if I’m going to use the Tablet as an adjunct to my laptop, then I shouldn’t worry about a generation sometime in the future where Tablet convertibles can replace my laptop, but just get the best slate I can find and enjoy it as a remote viewer/editor of info via file sharing and terminal services.

If you have a device you’d like to turn into a 2nd monitor and you don’t yet have MaxiVista, Scott Hanselman’s posted a 30% off MaxiVista coupon.