Author: Ben Hall

TechNet magazine is now free! in the UK and US

Personally, I have been waiting this for a long time.  US have had free TechNet for a while, but we in the UK have been missing out.  Now, we too can have free TechNet magazines.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/subscribe.aspx

I have subscribed, also renewed my subscription to MSDN Magazine.  Why TechNet? While my heart is with Development, I do have a keen interest in everything Microsoft/Software related, and so this is just another way to keep me updated.  Plus I find networks and administration really cool and interesting.

I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I thought I would post an update on what’s going on.

• Finished reading GTD. Interesting book, with a lot of points I wish I knew earlier. I am following some of his ideas and approaches but difficult as I don’t actually have that much to do at the moment apart from Read and Code (the difficult life of a student! ()
• Reading Craig Larman’s Applying UML and Patterns book at the moment.  Very good read, some I already knew, some of it is new to me.  Giving me a nice firm foundation for next year which is good.  I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about OO design.  Check out Computer Manuals if you want to purchase it (like at the side).
• Been doing some work with the TFS Verison Tree Browser over at CodePlex recently ( http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=TFSVTreeBrowse ) which has been interesting.  Coming from a Visual SourceSafe source control, this is new to me, but one I am looking forward to getting started in.
• I have also been having a chat this morning with Andrew Stopford (seems a very nice guy, his blog is http://weblogs.asp.net/astopford) from the MBUnit team about helping with the development of the software.  Downloaded the source code this morning, so will definitely have a look at that this afternoon.  In case you don’t mind, MBUnit is a testing framework like NUnit with more bells and whistles, a topic I have a keen interested in at the moment.
• Girlfriend came to see me for a few days, loved seeing her again (meet at Uni, she lives in London – I don’t). Had a really nice few days, went to see Cars which was cool (nice work Mr S. Jobs), the visual effects where amazing.
• Finally, WWDC 2006 is almost here!!  This is the Apple Developer conference, keynote is on Monday. I can’t wait to see what is coming up, I love apple, their ideas and products. Personally I am hoping they are going to announce the MacBook Pro Core Duo 2, think I would buy it straight away (get student discount) with 2Gb of ram, and dual boot with Windows for development.  Girlfriend would kill me, and so would my bank balance, but they are such a cool machine!

Can’t think of anything else to write at the moment. Cool dudes!

Just finished my first read of GTD.  Very interesting, identified a lot of areas which related to me (some didn’t), any ways I know it will help me.  Got a lot of ideas now, one thing I didn’t do is actually follow what it was saying – wanted to get a good overview of the concepts first.  So now, I am going to read (quickly) over it again and actually do everything and get all the ideas on paper (using paper because I haven’t found any good software just yet).

If anyone knows of any good software – then please let me know.

I will let you know how I get on after the second read…

I came across this article today, it’s a shame more managers don’t pay attention and read articles like this (or maybe they do, comments welcome).

Top 10 ways to motivate geeks
http://www.retrospector.com/2006/06/21/top-10-ways-to-motivate-geeks/

Classic!

http://c9park.wordpress.com/2006/07/03/9-patrol/

My first project has appeared on codeplex!!  If you don’t know, codeplex is a project setup by Microsoft for people to host their own open source projects and get feedback from the community.  Very cool idea and a site I really like.  Plus it’s all run off Team Foundation Server!

Read all about it here.

http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=ASPnetDeploy

I will post more in the next few days.

So today I am going to start GTD (Getting Things Done).

Found this link which talks about the approach from a student point of view.
http://www.studenttabletpc.com/gtd/

Not sure how well it will work – but I will give it a go. Might solve all my problems, or might be a week wasted reading the book.

I think it could be important at this point to set out some objectives, or things I would like to solve by trying this approach.

• Not get so distracted by what I have to do
• Not get so distracted by tangents
• No more down time – this morning I have spent 2 hours trying decide on what to do. This happens a lot and I hate wasting the time.
• Have some time off to watch DVDs (still haven’t watched 24 Season 2) without feeling like I should be doing some work
• When reading a book, not to stop half way and move onto another completely different topic (Design Patterns > C++ coding)
• Have a system in place for when I return to University so things don’t get forgotten and mismanaged and I have time to successfully do all the work required.

Think I should point out that I am not doing GTD to help me study, but to allow me to study without being distracted (procrastinating http://www.43things.com/things/view/225 & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastinate), to allow me to read all the books required, develop applications, spend time with the girlfriend and basically work on everything I want (the list is endless).

Even if I don’t follow GTD to the book, I am hoping I will be able to take some tips from it.  Just a shame I didn’t start this time last year.

Blog from Word 2003

So Word 2007 works just great once I saved the FTP user/pass into the website.

This post is using the add-on for Word 2003. This has the nice ability to Open previous posts.

First one posted fine onto blogger but didn’t make its way onto my website via FTP.  

Edit: This one worked
    

Blogging from Word 2007.

 

So this is just a test to see how well word performs as a blogging tool. Already found one problem I think – I don’t save my FTP details in blogger and there isn’t an option to enter this within word