Very interesting read on an abstraction layer approach to accessing data.

IntelliSense Code Snippets are reusable, task-oriented blocks of code. Visual Studio 2005 includes code snippets covering tasks ranging from creating a custom exception, to sending an e-mail message, to drawing a circle. A set of Visual Basic and Visual C# Code Snippets are included in the Visual Studio 2005 box – additional Code Snippets can be found here.

Disclaimer: The following is not official Microsoft positioning, strategy, or technical thinking/direction. It is nothing more than the musings of Jeff Brand, mushroom, and in no way reflects real, imaginary or paranormal persons, places, or things.

I read this InfoWorld article discussing some of the thinking behind Windows Live and the Microsoft's move to some form of ad-sponsored software and it got me thinking (dangerous territory I know). What about an ad-sponsored version of Vista? Hmmmmm... could be interesting for the home market? Nothing horrible mind you, but probably something tied into the Sidebar to periodically show you high-resolution, multimedia ads with tha ability to drill in for even more high-value targeted advertising. A tweaked IE experience that included integrated ad window. A permanent "window" embedded in the desktop that played a new ad every day or maybe advert screen savers? The possibliities for unobtrusive advertising are pretty big. So why do it?

I can think of a few reasons.

1. Nominal charge for customers to upgrade: Could you sell a Vista upgrade for $10 bucks if you knew you would generate $300 in ad revenue over the life of the user?
2. Cheaper Vista PCs: You could drop any charge to the OEM for a ad-supported version of Vista, thereby dropping the cost of new Vista PCs and making the idea of buying a new "Vista ready" PC more appealing.
3. Media Center Sponsorships: Prime target in my opinion. Deliver advertising in an uber-Tivo style via Media Center downloads. Collect click back info, provide links to ecommerce sites for impulse buys (with an appropriate cut to Microsoft), etc.
4. Ongoing revenue: Microsoft's been looking for a way to get subscription software off the ground for some time and maybe advertising is the "subscription backdoor" that is needed. Why get a lump sum of money once when I can get nickles forever?

Those are just a few reasons. Maybe the biggest, but I haven't thought this through to any great degree. Would I take a free Vista upgrade if there was some background advertising going on? It would all depend on how "mandatory" the viewing of the ads were. If it was mostly like a lot of advertisting on the web today, I ignore most of it so it wouldn't be a problem for me in Vista. Now, if it was "forced to watch before you actually get to do something" advertising then I would say "No way". But there is some serious dollars in simple advertising that would do little to impact the usability or experience of Vista IMHO.

So, would it work? Link or comment away and let me know.

Check out Scott Guthrie's blog entry on a great collection of videos on using ASP.NET 2.0. Its using the Web Developer tool, but everything you learn is equally applicable to VS.NET.

Ok... I hate to admit this, but I have been using Outlook forever and a day, and until today I did not know this trick.

If you are like me, you get a ton of email sent to you. Inside Microsoft, there are all kinds of internal distribution lists ranging from .NET internals to blogging. I don't subscribe to a lot of them, but the ones I do are fairly high traffic. Add to that that 100 or so emails that end up directly in my Inbox, along with my aversion to deleting things in a timely manner, and I often find myself bumping up against the storage limit for our Exchange mailboxes. It is a once a month event that I get the "You are a Bad Boy" email from the Exchange system telling me I need to clean up my mailbox.

Now, I really don't want to clean up my inbox, there could be important stuff in there. And my Deleted Items folder may also contain some item I will need to go back and look at when someone says "Did you read the email from so and so?" (Which I deleted before even reading because I didn't think the email applied to me). So what I really want to do is go into the folders the store the email from the distribution lists and delete the thousands of emails that have accumlated over time. Easy enough, except that simply deleting them just moves them to my already "overly full" Deleted Items folder.

For quite sometime I have wondered how to just permanently delete a mail message in Outlook without it going to your Deleted Items folder. I searched help, I looked online - nothing. Today, however, I went to send an email and Outlook told me I could no longer send email because I was over my storage limit. This time, I actually read the entire pop-up message. And lo and behold...

SHIFT-DELETE was the answer to my problem and it was right there in the "bad bad person" message. WOW! Thougth I would pass that along just in case someone else has struggled with this problem for as long as I have (more in hopes that I am not the only clueless Outlook user).

Well, I am finally back from MIX. The last day and a half were interesting. Some good sessions, with the WPF/E (with the E standing for everywhere) probably being the coolest. They demoed WPF/E running in IE, Firefox, and then in Safari on Mac OS X. It was very cool though I never got a clear idea of what the meaning of "subset" is when saying the WPF/E is a subset of WPF. I imagine it includes 3D stuff and .NET cod-behind support, but still not entirely sure on what else there may or may not be in there.

Otherwise, some interesting stuff but nothing that has stuck with me enough to make worth recalling here. All in all, I would say MIX was like a PDC-light. Not exactly the intention or the billing of MIX, I think, but it was a good conference in a heck of a lot better venue than other dev focused Microsoft events like PDC and TechEd. Especially good if you all you do is web stuff and dont feel like paying the higher PDC fees.

Speaking of venue, I am happy to report that I did indeed recover from my poker losses last night and ended up finishing the trip up close to $200 for the trip. The one thing that I am most certain of is that when in Vegas, the tag line should be "here fishy fishy fishy" when it comes to the poker tables. It was worth paying the higher-than-online rake just due to the games being so soft. Plus, there is a lot to be said for playing live poker.

Good opening keynote today. It was a lot of eye candy focusing on the beyond the browser scenario. Some very cool WPF applications where shown to demonstrate the value of rich client experiences in a Internet context. The main thrust was with creating magazine-like content that could be both interactive and offline for portability. Some cool immersive advertising stuff that was not obtrusive but was very engaging if you looked at it.

Some stuff on mobile devices but nothing earth shattering there. More of what MSFT has demoed recently. They did spend a lot of time on Media Center PCs and on XBOX/Media Extenders. Didnt realize it, but 60%+ of PCs now sold at retail (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) are Media Center PCs. They showed delivering custom 10ft UIs to Media Center PCs that were very cool. Comedy Central was one called MotherLoad (also as a web client) that was pretty cool.

They also talked briefly on futures and how things are going to get much better with Vista. Direct HD cable TV support (no more cable box hassles) and for me, more importantly, the deal with DirecTV so integrate with Media Center capabilities. I cant wait to get more details on that since I am pissed a bit over the whole Tivo 250 HD future MPEG4 support fiasco but dont want to give up my DirecTV and go to Comcast which has yet to add ABC HD to the local lineup. Unreal!

I know, complaining about an opening reception party. But hey, if I was just a regular attendee I would have been very disappointed (assuming opening reception parties were my thing). The event was held at TAO, a restraunt/night club at the Venetian. Very cool place - from the 4 square inches of decor that I could see through the mass of humanity!

TAO is about twice the size of your neighborhood Applebee's - or at least the part of TAO that Microsoft was hosting the reception in. Now imagine trying to stuff 1700 attendees into that super-sized Applebees. A fun and entertaining environment it is not. Feeling like a dull rave party, it was just oppressive in the see of bodies. Lines at the bar were six to seven people deep, food line even worse, and no where to sit. Add to that that it was close to pitch black in most of the place and needless to say it was disappointing.

The conditions were the norm for a lot of nightclubs in Vegas which go by the mantra of "we save on heating costs by the oppressive build of body heat and BO". So maybe the event organizers just blindly followed the advice of the Venetian event planners when they said "sure, we can accomdate you at the Venetian" which was code for "time to play stuff the bus".

The good news was that I quickly bailed and headed to the Mirage for some much deserved poker time. Bad news was that despite sitting at a table with near morons (that is money you are playing with, buddy) I could not catch cards or a break and ended down for the evening. Hopefully that will be corrected tonight.

The best session of the day so far. Showed some tremendous demos that really showed off what WPF is all about. Covered the My Yahoo example in more detail (which apparently had been cut short on the fly due to time issues - bummer). Some very cool examples of visually stunning UIs that were created in very little time. Also covered WPF/e which, for those of you that don't know, is how MSFT will bring a subset of WPF/e functionality to non-Microsoft browsers and platforms.

It uses the Netscape plug-in model to provide WPF functionality on various platforms. It can also be direclty integrated into devices, but not a ton of detail there and I really didn't care. They demoed some cool 3D and 2D WPF animations running inside Firefox and in Safari (yes, WPF on the Mac my friends). They did not cover what the differences between WPF and WPF/e were, but I think one thing will be the inability to tie .NET code to the WPF interface so things beyond animation or simple databinding probably are out of scope. But it was incredibly easy to take something from a rich desktop UI and turn it into a cross-platform widget (as in, point and click in the UI and you are done!). Very cool stuff. CTPs coming later this year.