Dot Net Monkey

Just because you're a nerd doesn't mean you shouldn't be expected to do a presentation every now and again. I personally feel that presentations are one of the best ways of delivering the information in your head to the hungry hoards. 

Here are a bunch of links to tips about giving presentations and using powerpoint effectively:

• Chris Campbell over at particletree has a great list of links to useful presentation resources.
• Scott Hanselman has a bunch of presentation tips geared towards the developer.  Some of this stuff is a little Microsoft centered, but full of good information.  He has also provided a presentation about presenting.
• Scott Hanselman also has a list of tools he uses during presentations.
• Over on Venkatarangan's Blog there are some great Tips for doing effective Presentations

I love seeing interesting site designs and this one called typorganism caught my eye.  As the name hints, it's got a definite "under the microscope" feel to it.  Basically it's a bunch of UI experiments done in flash, according to the site:

Typeorganism is a series of communication experiments exploring Computation Interaction Design and Interactive Kinetic Typography, based on the Metaphorical Notion of Typography, "Type is a lifeform", which Lives on the Net, Responds to User's Stimulus, Evolves through Time, has Intelligence powered by Computation Algorithm. So, this is the showcase for the manifest: Type is an Organism.

Personally, I think they might be giving fonts a bit too much street-cred, but I sure do like the site design.  And they've got a funky Picture to ASCII applet.

One of the people at my office had a most unusual problem with his computer.  His hard drive was completely full -- not unusual you say -- and you'd be correct, but the problem he had was even if he deleted some stuff it would automatically fill back up again.  Unusual, no?

So I got out the trusty FileMon tool from SysInternals and started poking around and sure enough WinLogon and Explorer were going mental writing files to C:\Windows\CSC.  It turns out that this directory is used for Offline File Storage and somehow a network share had inadvertantly been set to offline. So his machine was madly trying to copy then entire server to his local hard drive. Note: C:\Windows\CSC is pretty well hidden so you may not see it under normal operating conditions

So the resolution?

1. Open Explorer
2. From the Tools menu select Folder Options
3. In the dialog that appears go to the Offline Files tab
4. Turn off Enable Offline Files.
5. Click OK
6. Now type in the address C:\Windows\CSC in your address bar of explorer
7. You should find a whole bunch of weirdly named files
8. Go ahead, delete them all.  (NOTE: I take no responsibility for what will happen -- but nothing bad happened on my workmates PC

Easy!

The good folks at the Windows Forms site have released some demo applications to mimic classic Windows applications (outlook, money, messenger and that sort of thing).  Great learning opportunities for all.

Andrew Kirillov has written a pretty cool article over at The Code Project that talks about different algorithms to do Motion Detection on a video stream. Definitely worth a look if you want to do this kind of thing.

Okay, if you haven't seen the Creating Passionate Users blog yet you should get yourself over there immediatly and check it out.  It really is a great resource for well, err, creating passionate users of your software.

Take for example, this entry which applies basic dating rules to provide guideliness for how your software should behave on its first date with users.

So whether you need dating tips or want to make your software better, follow these basic rules:

• Look your best.
• Be fun. Don't be negative. Be the one others want to be around.
• Be trustworthy and consistent.
• Don't be fake.
• Be polite, be helpful.
• Be forgiving.
• Be sensitive, be a good listener.
• Don't assume I'm an expert.
• Be fun.
• Don't assume there's no competition.
• Married people really DO have more sex.

I thought I'd keep a list of articles I 've come across and want to add to my reading list for all those times I'm sitting around with nothing to do. Yeah right!.  To stop this list from dropping off the bottom of my blog I'm going to add it to the navigation bar so I'll always have it at hand.

.NET Development

• A low-level look at the ASP.NET Architecture - This online article looks at how Web requests flow through the ASP.NET framework from a very low level perspective, from Web Server, through ISAPI all the way up the request handler and your code. See what happens behind the scenes and stop thinking of ASP.NET as a black box.
• Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idionms, and Patters for Reusable .NET Libraries - This book seems to have had some great reviews and looks like it could be a one of those books that really helps teach some new valuable techniques.
• Practical .Net2 and C#2: Harness the Platform, the Language, the Framework - It's quite a title, huh?!? It's been getting some fairly good reviews and may be a good reference for me to move up to the v2 world.
• Visual C# 2005 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach - Another book that has gotten good reviews... looks doubtful if it covers v2 in great detail.

Agile Development

• The Art of Agile Development - "Our aim is to make an intensely practical book that shows mainstream development teams how to adopt, use, and ultimately master the art of agile software development."

How cool is this!?! 

LEGO has a thing called LEGO Factory which is a bit of software that allows you to design your own custom LEGO kits.  It appears to be a 3d modelling package using virtual LEGO bricks, but even better than that, you can share them with other people and order your own custom made kits online. 

Now all I need to do is write a little bit of software that converts 3D Studio Max models into Lego Bricks and I can get a LEGO kit of my own head. Yippee! BTW, I hope they are moderating the models people are going to share with the community.

Thought I would start keeping a collection of links to places where design impaired developers (like myself) can get hold of graphics, icons and textures to spiff up their applications.

Photography:

• MyDeskCity - Collection of beautiful large images.  Seems to be a bunch of different stuff in here but they all seem high quality.
• stock.xchng - Very good site with many quality royalty-free images.
• jupiterimages - Another great location of royalty-free images; site is also developed in .NET :)
• inmagine - Very large source of royalty-free!
• photolibrary - A little bit slow to load, but another good source of royalty-free.
• Public domain image resources - A wikipedia page of public domain image resources

Icons:

• Pixelgirl Presents - This very attractive site provides icons, desktop images and tutorials
• Foood's Icons - Great site with some very lovely icons... one of my favourites
• Glyfx - This site provides a limited range of free icons for tooblars, however, they promise to provide more.  Having said that, if you are willing to pay some dollars they have some nice lookng Icons.
• Miranda Instant Messenger - If you are looking for small IM icons then this may very well be your place.
• FamFamFam - Stacks of free icons. Looks like they are mainly useful for toolbar icons as they tend to be on the small side (16x16)... but pretty none-the-less.
• JoeJoe.Org - Some neato photoshop tutorials and also has libraries of vista icons
• IcoFX - IcoFX is an award winning freeware icon editor designed to work with XP and Vista icons.
• OpenClipArt.org - collection of icons

Textures:

• SquidFingers - Quite a collection of bachground textures.  Lots of florals and ye olde looking designs.  Very distinguished

Desktops/Wallpapers:

• Veer - Beautifully designed pages.

Fonts:

• TypeNow - Collection of free themed fonts.  Lots of brands, movies, etc.
• MyDeskCity - Large collection of free fonts
• 25 Best Free Quality Fonts - Vitality Friedman has a list of 25 beatiful fonts
• Geek Fonts - Over 9,500 free fonts for the everyday geek

Developer Resources:

• Adding and using 32 bit alpha blended images and icons to the imagelist control - This article on The Code Project tells you how to get alpha blending to work with .NET apps
• Access multiple icons in a single icon file - A nice article about how to work with .ico files that contain multiple icons.