I went to an all day session on Windows Azure today at the Engineering Forum at work. It looks really slick and is pretty much a no brainer for .NET developers to use. I can see a lot of ASP.NET sites moving to it from other hosting companies... if the price is right!

I was at the Staples in Issaquah with my family and we saw a rooster in the parking lot. Apparently it lives in a little house near the drive-up coffee stand there. No, that’s not my truck :)

I found this really cool Visual Studio add-in today that allows you to visually design a set of classes to handle custom configuration sections in .NET config files. It builds the code and even creates an XSD so you get Intellisense when typing in the config file. It saved me a bunch of time. I always forget the ins and outs of the ConfigurationSection classes and this add-in means I won’t have to go look them up every time I want to do some custom configuration.

Configuration Section Designer - Home

Interesting blog post about how Apple is using Windows CE in the Apple Store. jkOnTheRun: iPhone 3G- brought to you by Microsoft

Microsoft should be taking full advantage of this story!

What is it about my inbox that makes Google think I want to meet "Emo Goths"?!?

Screen clipping taken: 5/15/2008, 1:47 PM

Sunny in WA, cloudy in AZ. Don't see that too often...

This week I started my new job at Microsoft. The first day and a half were devoted to New Employee Orientation (NEO as it is called here). I've been through orientation at a few different companies. I can definitely say this was the most informative and attention keeping.

This afternoon I met with my manager and got assigned my desk. My PC was all in pieces stacked up on my desk. I had to set it all up and install the OS and various apps. I think that's a great way to do it. Developers should know enough about PCs to handle doing that. Believe me, I've worked with some developers in the past who would have freaked out if they showed up to work and had to setup their own PC.

I'm pretty excited about what the future holds for me and my family here in Washington and at Microsoft!

Don't have a lot of time to give much of an update, but I got a job at Microsoft and I am leaving tomorrow morning for Washington. I'm driving my truck and I should be there by Sunday morning sometime. I'll be "twittering" while on my trip. More later...

Of course, my iPod dies the day before a 12 hour drive. I keep getting the "sad iPod" image on the display. It was a 40GB 4th generation iPod with the greyscale screen. I've had it for just over 3 years. A few months ago I probably would have replaced it with another iPod, even though I think iTunes is a piece of junk. But with the release of the new Zunes, I figure the best replacement is an Zune 80.

Why a Zune? A few reasons:

Software

iTunes seems to have gotten worse over the years. Plug in your iPod and then try to do something with the software. It is painful. Apparently, the developers haven't heard of multi-threading. Coverflow is kinda cool, but not really that useful. The podcast support is pretty good, I'll give it that.

The Zune software on the other hand does not bog down when you plug in your Zune. It is also nice looking. Omar compared iTunes to a spreadsheet, and I agree. The Zune software still needs some work though. It doesn't have an equivalent for "smart playlists" like iTunes has. The podcast support is decent, but I can't figure out how to get it to automatically remove podcasts I have already listened to. That was one thing I really liked about iTunes (although sometimes it didn't work).

Hardware

The Zune 80 is a really nice MP3 player. The screen is big, the controls are great, and the size of the player is reasonable. I was really sick of swirling my thumb around to navigate a long list of items on the iPod. The "squircle" works well, although sometimes I scroll instead of selecting an item. I figure that will lessen as I use it.

I bought the Zune while I was on vacation, so the drive home was much better than the drive out. I got caught up on a bunch of podcasts.

So I recently switched my email from Google Apps for Your Domain to Windows Live Hotmail. The main reason I did it is because getting mail from Gmail on my Windows Mobile phone was painful. I was trying to use POP3 and it worked for a while, then eventually it stopped. It just wouldn't download the messages. Then when Gmail started offering IMAP access, I tried that too. It downloaded the messages, but most of the time they showed up blank. So, when I saw that Windows Live Hotmail supported Windows Mobile 6 directly, I decided to try it out. It works very well. I receive messages in almost real time.

I installed the Windows Live Mail desktop application. I figured it should work really well with Windows Live Hotmail. It did at first. I was able to move messages to different folders and it mirrored those changes in the web version of my folders. Then that stopped working. I move messages from the inbox to an "archive" folder and they move in the desktop app, but not in the web folders.

Soon after I started having problems moving messages, I stopped receiving mail completely in the desktop app. I now get this error message:

Server Error: 5102
Server Response: timedout to ip 10.1.130.45:2000
Server: 'http://mail.services.live.com/DeltaSync_v2.0.0/Sync.aspx'
Windows Live Mail Error ID: 0x8DE00002

I'm not really sure what to do about this. I was really looking forward to all the integration I was going to get by moving my email and contacts to Windows Live.