Yup, its me again! And, as you can see from the recent photo above right, I'm outfitted handsomely for Aunt Jeanne. She can huff, and she can puff, but she's no match for the hot air expelled daily by yours truly.

Cool Stuff Department

Product Feedback Center

The new MIcrosoft Product Feedback Center is definitely worth a visit. In case you haven't been there, this is MS's new way of communicating directly with the users and early adopters of their products, Much of what you enter here actually goes into the various product groups "real bug database", so do pay a visit. You can also get early warning of similar problems and info on the suggested fixes.

While you are at it, swing on over to Channel Nine for some very interesting forums, posts and videos from Microsoft people.

Sprint Now Offering SmartPhone

Nice to see that new providers are hoppping online.

Reflection and Web Form binding?

John Dyer, author of the excellent FreeTextBox editing control, has a new piece on MSDN about using reflection to do two-way binding from a business object to the controls on a WebForm. It could be a little better fleshed out IMHO, but its got some good sample code. One of the things Dr. Dotnetsky really gets annoyed at is when they have these MSI installers with LOOOOONG default installation paths (to the point of being ridiculous, as this one is) that only install a single class file, and a EULA!

IE Scripted Automation Interface

Alex Furman has put out SWExplorerAutomation, a visual interface to the Internet Explorer DOM.

Your Own Behind Department

Dr. Dotnetsky didn't become a .NET Guru by accident. It took time and effort, and the help of people who were willing to act as mentors. And the best mentor "teaches a man to fish", rather than just dishing out the answer every time. That means, when you ask a dumb question, or one where the answer can be easily found, you are instructed to RTFM. So if you see old Dr. Dotnetsky answering forum posts with snide remarks, please try to understand that he doesn't always do it just to be a smartass. He does it because he knows that by teaching people to use their own resources to get their own answers, they will become better developers in the long run. F1 is your friend. So is Google. Its your behind.

Political BS Department

I'm Dr. Dexter Dotnetsky, and I approve this message.

I got a few fan emails related to my last rant about having "made up my mind" about the November election, and they were uniformly of the same thread - basically, non-independent thinking, left -leaning people who felt compelled for some reason to spout mindless quote after quote in some sort of attempt to get me to become a Liberal. What are these people thinking? Hey, you wanna be a Liberal? Great! Knock yourself out! As I made perfectly clear, there are times in history when certain types of hard decisions need to be made, and unfortunately, this is one of them. "Liberal" simply does not fit into the picture in this particular election cycle, thank you. Maybe next time around. So, save your breath. Or, you might try sending your resume to CBS news . . .

Or, you can study the monkeys who have learned to hack the voting machines that will be used in over 30 states. Dr. Dotnetsky doesn't feel inclined to lend support to a candidate whose platform consists mainly of bashing the incumbent rather than providing concrete alternatives. And, as they say, "First impression's the last one" - an 18 year voting record of "first impressions" doesn't give me much confidence either.

We had a lot of this kind of mindless bashing when .NET first came out. Legions of anti-Microsoft morons claiming it was vaporware, etc. etc. Strange, but I don't hear any of them now. If you are so blinded by hatred or a desire to "get even" that you can't even think logically to the point where your sole motivation for going to the voting booth is to get rid of somebody, rather than to elect somebody who is clearly a better choice, that doesn't compute for me. There are a lot of smart, strategic thinkers in the Democratic party that I would vote for. Unfortunately, none of them made it to candidate status.

Snippets of Wisdom

Have you heard about the object-oriented way to become wealthy?"
- "No..."
- "Inheritance."

Well, I gotta cut this one short, since the winds have been howling and I dunno how long the power will stay on. They say bad programming is like the sound of transformers exploding down the street. You can't smell the code. They also say the number one cause of bugs in programs is programmer memory loss. Uh, what was I saying?

Cheers,

- - Dexter