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Wow, thanks Michael, much appreciated. I will give it all a good read and hopefully produce better solutions from it 
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Christopher Duncan wrote:
"I always knew that somewhere deep inside that likable, Save the Whales kinda guy there lurked the heart of a troublemaker..."
Crikey! ain't life grand?
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Paul Watson wrote:
Wow, thanks Michael, much appreciated.
No problem. There is very little point me keeping all these links in my favourites or in my RSS reader, if I can't share them.
One day I'll get around to putting them onto my personal website, if I ever get organised.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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If you want I can set you up as an author/contributor of quickies. It's really just my link dump but I would be very happy to have someone like you dumping into it too.
TypePad lets me setup multiple authors for a blog (and it tags each post as "posted by XYZ"). It is then simple enough to post to it with your browser.
Totally understand if you would rather do your own, and better, thing
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Christopher Duncan wrote:
"I always knew that somewhere deep inside that likable, Save the Whales kinda guy there lurked the heart of a troublemaker..."
Crikey! ain't life grand?
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Hmm, seems they pulled it from the MS download site but you can still get it from Lookout's site.
Thanks for the heads up. I guess MS has reacted to various outspoken individuals (including Joel) who slated them for what they did when they bought Lookout.
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Ian Darling wrote:
"and our loonies usually end up doing things like Monty Python."
Crikey! ain't life grand?
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Joel On Software[^]
I know a lot of people like Joel's articles and I know a lot of people think he talks out of his arse. I like a lot of the stuff he writes, especially Painless Functional Specifications[^], The Joel Test[^] and Painless Software Schedules[^]. All three of which have influnced my own internal software development process.
I'll certainly be buying a copy of the book as it will make for a great resource and it will be something to give to each employee I hire, so they can get a better understanding on the ways I like to do business.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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>a lot of people like Joel's articles and I know a lot of people think he talks out of his arse
Both. He has good stuff to say, I just don't enjoy how he says it.
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Ian Darling wrote:
"and our loonies usually end up doing things like Monty Python."
Crikey! ain't life grand?
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Whilst MyXaml makes development so much easier and streamlined, it can be a bitch to debug object creation and trying to find out why properties aren't being set.
Marc has posted a great tip on adding breakpoints via mark-up. Have a read at Markup Breakpoints[^]
I'm sure this will give my development productivity a boost.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I'm working at a client's site this week.
Whilst they aren't the most technically literate people, they sure have a locked down internet connection.
No MSN Messenger 
No CVS
I'll do a Shields Up[^] test tomorrow and see if they are blocking any of the dangerous ports too.
Still it is refreshing to see a small company taking their internet security seriously.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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RealDevs.net[^]
Always nice to see a new swing on the developer website playground.
Whilst I'm not overly keen on DotNetPuke forums, both Marc and Anders have a good pedigree as developers so it will be interesting to watch the site grow and mature.
Good luck with the site, at least I've got somewhere else to hang out whilst waiting for my code to compile.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I'm a big Lucas fan, however THX 1138 is one movie I never managed to get my head around. I only saw it once on late night television which might have contributed to the head f*** feeling. So I think I'll get myself a copy of the new directors cut DVD release[^]. The American Zoetrope documentary sounds interesting too.
Carrying on the Lucas theme, a new series of Clone Wars[^] cartoons is scheduled for next year. The first two series were very well done, even if some of the Jedi did seem a little too powerful for my tastes. Still, they did fit well within the Star Wars universe, certainly better than the 80's cartoons Ewoks and Droids.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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Star Wars Action Figure Archive[^]
Wow. What a collection! I can't believe they still make so many Star Wars toys. I do hope children are still buying them to play with and that the figures aren't being snapped up by collectors who just leave them in their packaging and look at them.
I still have most of my original toys, that were bought for me between 1978 and 1984. Not many of them are in good condition. A few were chewed by my dog, and a couple of Stormtroopers got a little damaged when they visited Hoth on a very snowy day in my back garden.
I wonder if these new toys stand up a little better than the old ones used to. We used to have stick blue-tac on their feet to stop them toppling over.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I'm playing around with a new RSS Feed Reader called Sauce Reader[^]
So far it's looking pretty good. I've had a few crashes, but I think I'll probably using it from now on rather than SharpReader. It's certainly the best I've used so far, plus it's free for personal use.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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Thanks for the link. I've just downloaded it and it looks good, if a little slow. (Well, my whole machine is running slow, so anything that takes slightly longer than normal is painful)
"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." --Zig Ziglar
The Second EuroCPian Event will be in Brussels on the 4th of September
Can't manage to P/Invoke that Win32 API in .NET? Why not do interop the wiki way!
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A new blog that seems like it may be worth reading, Visual Studio 2005 Team System[^]
I think the most interesting part of the first entry is
Now, with Visual Studio Team System, we are seriously asking, “With automation, how can we re-engineer our core IT processes? How can we remove the overhead from following good process? How can we make all these different roles individually more productive while integrating them as a high-performance team?”
This is something I've been pondering myself for a while. It's good to see somebody inside Microsoft is asking the same questions.
In this age of outsourcing development to the allegedly cheaper overseas options, I need to be able to write and build software in a more efficient manner. Any tool that can automate my development processes can only help me in my goal.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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>Richard Herring - English Comedian and Writer[^]
 What a hoot, thanks for that link.
And the Sells brothers is a good one too.
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Christopher Duncan quoted:
"...that would require my explaining Einstein's Fear of Relatives"
Crikey! ain't life grand?
XmlTransformer, my latest CP article.
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My neighbours from hell are moving. Well, they've got their "For Sale" sign up. Yay! No more crap thrown into my yard from the kids bedroom window. No more knocking on my door asking for something to drink/eat. No more dog barking through the day when I'm trying to work. No more screaming matches when the mother tries to control her kids.
Things are on the up. Hopefully whoever moves in will be an old married couple about 75years old, with no kids/grandkids or pets.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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Michael P Butler wrote:
My neighbours from hell are moving. Well, they've got their "For Sale" sign up
How's that going? Have you got new neighbours yet. If the housing market near you is anything like it is up here in the Scottish Central belt you could have new neighbours move in a couple of weeks ago.
Michael P Butler wrote:
No more crap thrown into my yard from the kids bedroom window
 I'm lucky the most I get chucked in my garden from the kids next door is an occasional football, and they are always quite polite when they ask for it back - And if I don't answer the door quickly enough they run into the go into the garden anyway to retrieve it, but if I appear they run out quickly as if they'd been increadibly naughty. It kind of reminds me as a kid when I had to ask for stuff back from the neighbours if I'd done something similar.
Michael P Butler wrote:
No more screaming matches when the mother tries to control her kids
That would drive me mad. My ex was the expert at screaming matches. The only thing was she was the only one doing the screaming.
Michael P Butler wrote:
Things are on the up
Best of luck with the new neighbours.
"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." --Zig Ziglar
The Second EuroCPian Event will be in Brussels on the 4th of September
Can't manage to P/Invoke that Win32 API in .NET? Why not do interop the wiki way!
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Meant to post these on May the fourth, but forgot. Still, I can't wait till next year so I'll post them anyway.
Two fun Star Wars games that put you in the two of the classic trilogy battles.
The Battle of Endor[^]
The Battle of Yavin[^]
Just goes to show what you can do with a 3d-engine and a copy of Visual Basic.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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I've been working on a RSS reader recently, but got sidetracked when I realised that there wasn't an HTML display control as standard in the Windows Forms library. This was a bit of a disappointment because I'm trying to build apps that don't need to do any Interop with Win32.
Still it looks like WinForms 2.0 [^]will have a native control.
For the moment I guess I'll have to wrap the shdocvw.dll and borrow a few ideas from here[^]
Although, first I'll do some research and see if a Mozilla control exists.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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