Sounds like TechEd 2005 has been offically annouced and registration is open.  This year it’s going to be in Orlando, which is where it was the first time I went!  I’d really like to check out TechEd again this year but I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do that.  I won’t have enough vacation time and it doesn’t seem too likely that I’d be able to get down there on the company this year (although I’m still going to ask!).

Looks like they have brought back the Cabana sections this year, which were just awesome.  It was great having small discussions and classes with some of the Microsoft experts.  Hopefully this year the room will be a little better at absorbing noise since last year it was so hard to hear in the cabanas.

Of course, there’s going to be a Professional Developers Conference this year as well.  Perhaps that would be more interesting to attend this year…

 

I wasn’t aware of this until someone asked me tonight, but did you know that VB6’s MessageBox (MsgBox) has a limit to the length of the prompt?

Well, it does.  Turns out that the prompt limit is actually 1023 characters.  You can’t have a prompt that is longer than that using the standard VB6 MsgBox function.  What’s the best way to get around this problem?  Simple, just call the MessageBoxA function from user32.

Private Declare Function MessageBox Lib "user32" Alias "MessageBoxA" (ByVal _
    hWnd As Long, ByVal lpText As String, ByVal lpCaption As String, _
    ByVal wType As Long) As Long

The only real difference between this function and the built in one (aside from the much larger limit you get now) is that it requires the parent window handle.  This is easy to get through the Form.hWnd property.  So an example of this would be:

MessageBox Me.hWnd, x, "", vbExclamation

That’s really all there is to it.  I doubt many people are having this problem these days, but someone I know was so while I was investigating it I figured I’d mention to to the rest of the world.

I haven’t heard too much about this in the media just yet, but I’m really excited about it.  Microsoft Office Outlook Live is an exciting new product from MSN and the Office team that provides full Outlook functionally with a specially designed version of Outlook (more about this in a second) that integrates with MSN or Hotmail.  Outlook Live provides the full Outlook experience, integrating e-mail, contacts, and calendar into your MSN or Hotmail account.

Other cool features include 2GB of storage space on the server, 20MB attachment limit, server side e-mail virus scanning, and free upgrades (as long as you’re a subscriber).  That free upgrades means as long as you keep up your subscription you get new versions of Outlook as they are released.

Since it’s a full version of Outlook you can still link it up to other e-mail accounts using POP3 or IMAP or whatever other Outlook capable e-mail service you’re using.  All that, and it’s only $59.95 a year.

As for the specially designed version of Outlook, it’s really just a special build of Outlook that is 1/3 the size of the standard Outlook distribution to make it easier for someone to download over the Internet.  I’m not really sure what was dropped to provide this decrease in size, but apparently it doesn’t affect the Outlook experience significantly.  It also sounds like if you have already purchased Office and have Outlook you can install the connector into your existing installation and not have to work about breaking the Office installation.

Ok.. so that sounds a lot like a marketing pitch, but I just think it’s a great service.  I’ve got my own Exchange server running my e-mail so that I can have services like e-mail web access and have my full Outlook data easily replicated between my desktop, laptop, and whatever other PCs I’m using.  It sounds like this would be a much cheaper and easier way to accomplish the same goal!

I wonder if MSN or Hotmail could let you host your own domain through their e-mail service without resorting to some sort of forwarding system.

What an interesting idea!  PostSecret asks people to submit their secret regrets, fears, betrayals, desires, feelings, or anything else you've kept secret throughout your life.  Not only is it interesting to see what secrets people have been keeping, but the way they go about expressing their secrets!

Certainly a project I'll have to check into from time to time.  (Discovered on Fury.com)

One week down!  It was exactly a week ago today that I started working at Microsoft.  What an adventurous week it’s been!  Considering that I didn’t come out to the Seattle/Redmond area until the Friday before I started, it’s been a pretty big switch over for me.

I absolutely love my job!  I’m now a Program Manager (PM) on the Outlook team.  For those of you who aren’t aware with the Microsoft job descriptions, a PM is one of the three core technical jobs.  As a PM I’m responsible for feature planning and specs, which means that I get to take some new feature or aspect of a larger feature and write up all the functionality and ensure that all of the usage scenarios have been well designed.  It’s up to the PM to really get the feature figured out and planned out well enough that the developers and testers know what needs to get done to actually implement the feature.

On the first day they use the phrase "drinking from a firehose" to explain what it's going to feel like your first weeks at Microsoft.  They couldn't be more right.  There's a lot of catching up to do to ensure that you understand the processes and know what's going on with the product development.  Even with the background knowledge I had going into this job about Microsoft, participating in various betas and everything, I still had a ton to learn.  I can only imagine how much harder it would be without that background.  However I find that type of an environment very stimulating.

I’m working on the extensibility team, which means I’m working on the object model for Outlook along side Randy Byrne (one of the big names in the world of Outlook extensibility). There’s a lot of great new things coming out in the Office12 time frame (of course none of which I can talk about right now), and I’m excited to be a part of that work.

I’m having a great time!  Washington is absolutely beautiful.  I’ve found a new apartment to live in for the next year, and will be moving into that here in a week or two.  I’m looking forward to getting out of temporary housing and into my new home.

I think the real shame is that I still haven't made it into Seattle yet!  I need to get on that before I end up spending all my time out here in Redmond.

I've gone back and reposted some articles I had previously published on my DotText blog but that weren't copied over using the DotText2DasBlog program I found for doing the conversion.

For now I'm going to stick to using DasBlog.  I'm still not happy with the XML based storage system that DasBlog uses.  I know it's great for people who don't host their own servers or don't have access to an MS-SQL database for content storage, but frankly I think it's less secure and harder to work with if I need to do a mass update (for instance, enable comments on everything again).

I've also noticed that it's missing a lot of options, like the ability to back-date an entry.  I haven't gotten post via e-mail working yet either.  Oh well, it's better than nothing at this point.  I do also like the template engine that DasBlog uses.  It's much easier to work with and modify the template than it was in DotText, and it feels a lot like the way MovableType works.  If only there was a .NET based version of MovableType (or at least supported all the same functionality as MT).  I'd run MT here instead of using a .NET based solution except that it just hammers my server badly running all those Perl scripts.

Hang in there while I keep playing these blog-dance games.  I'll setting into an engine I really want to use here sooner or later, and I've got it setup to redirect the RSS feed from the previous URL to the new URL so anyone subscribed via RSS will automatically get moved over.  I promise I'll find something soon and stick with it (I don't expect to do any real updates to the website's engine until I find one I'm really happy with.  In the mean time I think DasBlog will let me keep comments enabled and keep comment spammers away (or so I hope).

Took on the task of capturing and decoding the internal management protocol used by Serv-U FTP Server 3.0 or later. Although the documentation is incomplete, and has not been updated for the most recent release, it gives a good starting point for future decoding of the management protocol by others. Since working on this project, I have developed a COM Server that allows access to the complete Serv-U management interface through any programming language that can support COM.

Using a friend's computer I provide instructions on the process for upgrading the RAM, disk drive, and operating system of one of eMachine's best ideas that has fallen to the wayside.

As you may have noticed (at least if you're linking to my website or reading the HTML version) I've switched from DotText to dasBlog.  For a while now I've felt that DotText development was going no where, and with a CommunityServer release in what seems like the distance future, I decided to find something else to run my website with.

I've been looking at dasBlog for a while now, and while I'm not pleased with using a local XML store, no one seems to be having major issues with it and at least the development team behind it is actually producing updates on a regular basis.  I'm hoping that dasBlog proves to be more useful to me than DotText has been.  I also hope that I can use some of the built in functionality to reduce the amount of comment spam I receive.

Unfortunately at this point there isn't any easy way for me to bring over the comments from my old blog.  The permalinks will all change as well, which isn't so great, so I'm sorry about that.  I've been trying to think of a good way to recover the permalinks from the old website but until I come up with one (or since I probably won't) existing links will be broken.  I have however created redirections for the RSS feed to ensure that anyone subscribed to my feed will be getting updates.

Hang with me... I've got lots of new information I want to blog about soon!

Looks like LiveJournal had some power problems today that caused all their servers to go down. I just got this message when trying to access my friends list:

Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We're currently dealing with bringing our 100+ servers back online. Not fun. We're not happy about this. Sorry... :-/ More details later.

How exciting! I'm sure they're pulling there hair out right now trying to get everything back online. I hope none of the servers fail to start up right or that any large amounts of data were lost.

Sorry guys, but I had no choice. Right now I don't have time to go through and delete all the new blog spam comments that are hitting my site every day. Hopefully something new with CommunityServer or dasBlog will have a good answer for the blog spam problem (at least some sort of an answer to make this easier).

In the mean time, if you have feedback about a post or a comment, just use the comment feature to e-mail it to me. I'll post anything interesting that comes in that way as a seperate article with trackback to the original. Hopefully I'll be able to enable comments again as soon as possible.

I've made it to Redmond by the way. I'm currently living in some Microsoft-arranged temporary housing until I can find an apartment out here and get all settled in. This weekend will involve lots of apartment shopping and attempting to figure out Redmond. I know it's not that complicated of a city, but when you've never really spent any time here it sure seems like a big place!

I'm on dial up right now (and dying!). Hopefully I'll be able to get a high speed internet connection in my apartment soon, otherwise I'll be spending a lot of time around a Starbucks or any other wifi hot zone I can locate.

Hang in there with me, and hopefully I'll get all this comment spam pulled off the site ASAP and find a way to enable comments without dealing with the spam.

Wow, blog spam sure is becoming a big deal.  I know lots of other places have been talking about it for a while now, but it really hadn't started to affect me until recently.

Because I'm super busy getting myself packed up and moved across country I haven't had a chance to look and see if there are any good tools to allow DotText to handle this problem better.  So I'm hoping if any one out there reading my blog is using DotText and has a solution to this problem worked out they can pass that information along my way.

If not, I may have to switch to another blogging engine or disable comments in the short term while I look around for a solution.

I’ve got some exciting news that I can now make official.  I’ve been sitting on this one for a while just to make sure that all of the paperwork and everything would go through smoothly, and now that it’s done I’m happy to announce that I’ve been hired by Microsoft as a Program Manager on the Microsoft Outlook team.

Next week I’ll be moving up to the Redmond area.  I don’t have a place to live yet but I’ve got a rather long list of places to check out as soon as I get up there.  It’s going to be a pretty big change from the smaller town world of Lawrence, KS.  I’m certainly going to miss everyone at Wheatland Systems, my previous employer, as well as the great community that exists here in Lawrence.  However, I’m ready for a change and this is going to be a great one.

I imagine I’m going to be rather busy over the course of the next couple of weeks getting settled in and everything, but I’ll try to resume my “normal posting activities” on here as soon as I can.  Actually I’m going to try and post more often than I have recently.  I’ve got all sorts of things I want to post about what the actual interview process with Microsoft is like for a Program Manager position since there doesn’t seem to be a lot about that out there on the web.  You can bet I’ll be posting details about what my job is like, anything I learn during the transition to Washington, and my experiences during the move in the short term.  Long term perhaps I can become one of those great Microsoft bloggers that I hear so much about, but only time will tell!  Now I just need to add one of those disclaimers that states everything expressed here is my opinion and not related to my employer!

Of course, I’ll still be just as big of a geek and a techie out there in Redmond as I will be here, I’ll just be with a bunch of people like me!  You can still expect to hear me talking about whatever new gizmo or gadget that’s caught my eye along with whatever other irrelevant things I happen to post that give you insight into who I really am. 

I’m super excited to have this opportunity to work with the great people working on Outlook and related technologies and I’m thrilled to be joining Microsoft.  I know that they are going to change the world again, and I can’t wait to be a part of making that happen.

Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to check this out, because it’s pretty sweet.  This week Microsoft released the first public beta of their new AntiSpyware tool which it acquired from GIANT Company.

I’m very impressed with this new tool.  It already seems to do a lot more than most of the current generation tools out there have managed to do.  For instance, I noticed that it is usually intelligent enough to locate registry keys associated with spyware files installed on the computer.  If it locates some sort of add-in DLL then it also locates the registry keys that load that file, and all can be removed nicely.

One of my favorite features is the Browser Hijack restore, which lets you look at all of the URLs that IE uses for various purposes and restore them to their default values if something has overridden them.

The real time monitoring tools are pretty nice as well.  I’ve already see it in play a couple of times when programs on my system (like Money 2005) tried to add a URL to the Safe Sites list.  It popped up immediately and asked me if I wanted to allow it.  I was impressed, and didn’t even know something like that was going on until it warned me!

I can’t wait to see how this product continues to evolve and how they go about marketing it and distributing it.  It looks as though it’s going to be a subscription based service, so I hope it is priced right and easy for home users to install on multiple machines without making it overly expensive.

It seems that after only a year operating on the web-based publishing framework that Rory Petty and I designed for the University of Kansas School of Journalism, they have decided to go with a new option.  I don’t know any details about what they are planning, but it appears that Kansan.com has reverted to their old design with a note about being updated over winter break.

I hope that they get what they expect to get out of the new interface and framework.  The old system was designed pretty decently by students at the University (which is always a plus I think).  In addition it was open and integrated with their existing publishing technology for their print editions allowing content to easily flow between web and print versions of the Kansan paper.  It also provided RSS feeds which allowed content syndication on the student portal and other websites interested in the news of the University of Kansas.

You can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see where they go and what they end up with.  I just hope it’s a lot better than what they’re showing now.  I’d hate to loose my RSS feed for the Kansan just as I’m set to move out of the area!