Category Archives: Microsoft

Back from the conference

Posted on by
3

<rave>

The conference

Sarah and I have returned safely from the West Wind Web Connection conference. It was really awesome to finally meet so many of the people that I hang out with on the Web Connect forums in person. Web Connection 5.30 is awesome. The wwBusiness Objects and JSON handling is very powerful and something that will take me awhile to learn, but will totally be worth the time.

I gave a short show and tell about my work with jQuery and Visual Foxpro/WC. There were a lot of questions and I think people were very interested in what I was doing. I’ll try to resurrect my examples page here soon to share with everyone. jQuery got a lot of attention too. I brought the books that Packt Publishing sent me with me. They were passed around most of the afternoon and several people took note of their ISBN numbers to order them from Amazon. jQuery may well soon be part of Web Connection. The excellent Date Picker from Marc Garbanski has already been added and I’m sure there is more to come.
</rave>

<rant>

The hotel

The Arizona golf resort and conference center is a very beautiful place, but for us that was about the only thing going for it. They managed to leave my wife at the mall for almost two hours because somebody at the front desk repeatedly dropped the ball on calling the driver to come pick her up. We were without power for the better part of a day because an underground line got cut. Room service likes to barge in without knocking. Wi-Fi is $9.95 per day and connections are inconsistent. The front desk staff like to use foul language. I’ll define our experience with simply, They Suck!

Update!: Rick Strahl has blogged about his experience and made some very good points about the two way street that is customer service as has my latest addition, Eric.Weblog() , to Google Reader.

</rant>

Top ten reasons Vista needs to be thrown off a cliff

Posted on by
2

This is mostly knee jerk, sarcasm, and my pessimism with Windows showing through. Take it with a grain of salt.

I don’t like Vista. That system has been a headache for me since day one. I normally build my own systems, but a local reseller had a really good deal on a system that came with Vista. I thought I’d give it a shot. I’m going to have to learn it eventually, right? Two weeks later I went back to XP. Continue reading →

Vista Survey

Posted on by
Reply

I received an email today inviting me to share my thoughts on Microsoft Vista. I recently called them and tried to move my Vista install over to another machine and they wouldn’t let me. Fine, I’ll fill out your damn survey while I seeth about your EULA.

Vista Survey Example 1

The survey took forever to load, but once it did, I filled it out to my satisfaction and clicked ‘submit’.

Vista Survey Example 2

Well that figures. Works about as well as Vista huh? Nice…

Vista UAC not for security?

Posted on by
Reply

So if UAC is not a security boundry, then its purpose is to annoy the hell out of me, right?

It should be clear then, that neither UAC elevations nor Protected Mode IE define new Windows security boundaries. -Mark Russinovich on his blog.

I grew immune to the UAC prompt after only a few hours. I didn’t even care anymore. I have a great respect for Mark. Before he was a “Technical Fellow” at Microsoft, he developed the very cool (albeit useful) SysInternals tools. Yet I get tired of the MS chant of “UAC uber alles” and posts like his.