Microsoft gave me free Ice Cream

I dont really know why everyone bashes Microsoft so, I mean after all, they gave me a free lunch, and free ice cream! Oh, and all the free stuff in this picture. Well, apart from the book on LINQ and C# 3, but then I did get those at 40% off retail. Which is pretty reasonable when you think about it.

Wait, maybe I need to backtrack and explain exactly WHY I got free ice cream. I went to the MSDN Roadshow, its basically a tour where they give presentations on four key topics to do with MSDN, and generally Microsoft software development. The bill was pretty interesting today, the line up was something like:

  • ADO.NET
  • ASP.NET
  • Silverlight
  • Team Foundation Server
Lets talk about them in the order of interesting, since I am le tired and I'll probably be bored of typing by the time I get to the end of this paragraph. Silverlight is probably the most interesting by a mile. Not so much the fact that you can embed .NET code straight in to your browser, but the fact that it forces the use of XAML. XAML is great. Its like XML, but for describing the layout of your interface. It compiles in to form code exactly as the same as code inside Visual Studio does, and its easy, simple and clean to code. No more messing about managing instances of Form or Button.
ASP.NET is the next entry down the list, its not really much of an improvement over .NET 2 really, apart from this stupidly lame attempt at creating an MVC. I mean, once you get in to it, I'm sure its great, but I just really can't get in to it.
ADO.NET and TFS don't really deserve any kind of words at all. They are interesting if you love your data modeling (actually its quite neat, but it just doesn't excite me), or if you love unit testing your databases, but its not for me.
Oh, and this post *is* a week old, but being as lazy as I am, I totally forgot to finish or publish it. So there you go.

Date: April 29th, 2008 Time: 12:51 pm 1 comment filed
Tagged with Free Ice Cream, Keima, Life, Programming, Work

So its been a while.

Here we are, nearly a year since the last update.

Wait, where is the last update?

Well I am not entirely sure where it went, but my Wordpress fell apart, so here we are, fresh install (must say I am rather impressed with the whole Wordpress 2.5 thing, its certainly a setup up from 2.2).

Anyway, moving swiftly onwards...

I've got to say, things have been fucking boring since the last update. However, my interest in taking my camera around and taking copious amounts of photos has somewhat increased (although the corresponding increase in quality of the photos is somewhat debatable).

My latest addition to the set of camera accessories is the much-loved Sigma 10-20mm, which I picked up from Jessops on Monday (OK, so I can get it a lot cheaper online, but after various experiences with online shopping I don't really trust this anymore, but I'll see when we get to the next planned (my first piece of L glass, the 70-200mm f/4, but not until I get paid). For my first HSM motored lense, I must say the focus is much quicker and quieter than my other Sigma glass (the 24-70 f/2.8, not that it is that slow, but it is fucking loud).

So, without further ado, heres a few shots I took down the bay with OJ on Monday.

OJ on Bike

OJ on the water

Thats all for now really.

Date: April 15th, 2008 Time: 3:43 pm 0 comments filed
Tagged with Life, Photography