I talked to Daniel last weekend at DDD 4 and he asked me whether I’d ever posted to the MSDN forums. I think I’ve been there once or twice and possibly I also posted, but mainly I’ve always preferred my news reader and access to the MS newsgroups to the forums. Lots of general reasons for that and I’m not going to go into it here… Now I thought I’d have another look at the forums and try to see how they might work for a similar purpose. I see that they have a lot of interesting functionality, …

So, as some of you may know, I’m not a native English speaker. I’m certainly no native American speaker, even less than English. Today’s Dilbert leaves me bewildered — I was pretty sure I knew what the expression “a little bit pregnant” meant. There’s a similar expression in (my native language) German, and a Google search for “a little bit pregnant” doesn’t reveal anything I wouldn’t have expected. But that comic strip doesn’t make the least bit of sense to me… anybody care to explain? …

One of my sessions has been selected for DDD 4, that much I’ve known for a few weeks. Problem was, I thought I’d lost the original notification email in a server crash, so for a while I couldn’t be 100% sure what that session was, given that I had submitted several sessions to the voting. Talking to a number of people, I passed on what I was pretty sure was the correct information, that the session in question was titled “Object/Relational Mapping in real-world applications”. Turns out several …

Scott Hanselman recently blogged about speech recognition in Windows Vista and so I went to try it myself.  In general, the results are good.  Throughout the process, I had a number of problems and so I’m not yet sure that I can dictate faster than I can type.

• In  the initial configuration wizzard, there was a problem with the volume of my microphone.  Windows thought it could not understand me and showed the following funny window:

{file …

So I installed two of the three VPNs I need on my Vista machine. First: isn’t there a proper UI somewhere to connect to networks? I hate that stupid “Connect to a network” window… The UI is horrible. I have to scroll up and down like crazy to get past the list of available wireless networks alone, while each of the entries takes up far too much place. Sure, I can switch over to “Dial-up and VPN”, but that setting isn’t remembered, so I have to switch over again each time I open the window …

I have previously written about the fact that OneCare killed the connectivity with my Windows Mobile device. Now I got a OneCare update installed yesterday (I think it was yesterday) (oh yes, and I loved that “OneCare is going to reboot your system in 4 hours” dialog… WTF? What if wasn’t there over the weekend or something? Can you spell “loss of data”, Microsoft?) and so I thought today I’d just try whether the issue had maybe been fixed.

Previously I had just disabled the firewall whil …

Some will probably say I’ve been under a rock, but I hadn’t heard of this before. jk pointed me to OpenPandora today and so I had a look at the underlying Pandora service and I totally love it! On a different note, I wouldn’t be surprised if that OpenPandora project had some problems coming, as it gets rid of all the ad sponsoring that the free service normally brings. Definitely worth a look if you like listening to music on your computer. And they also interface with the Squeezebox… …

A weird thing… I was working on a WCF sample program today and I was creating my ServiceHost instance from code, like this:

Uri baseAddress = new Uri("net.tcp://localhost:7465/");

singleton = new HelloWorldClassServerProxy(new HelloWorldClass());
ServiceHost serviceHost = new ServiceHost(singleton, baseAddress);

Binding binding = new NetTcpBinding( );
serviceHost.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IHelloWorldContract), binding, "HelloWorld");

serviceHost.Open( );

The code I was te …