Paul Lockwood's Blog

Microsoft hiring 20+ consultants in Atlanta y'all

Posted: February 13, 2006 in Atlanta

Today I looked at the Atlanta job boards for the first time in a good while. It
appears even Microsoft is having a hard time finding people in this mini tech-boom,
I say this because they have resorted to public job postings.

Salary is $80->130K + stock/bonuses, which I expect are the ranges for a high GPA,
few years out of college grad, to the 15+ years of IT experience guy. The candidate must
be willing to travel which is why the ceiling about $15K higher than most
others in town.

It does not interest me because of the travel, but I’ll be a good few
Atlanta based readers are interested. If you apply try to ask a local Microsoft
DE/ consultant what the interview may entail – they have a few recurring themes/
questions from what I hear. You might want to ask them how demanding their job is
too

So are you interested in selling your soul to the devil, and forgetting what your
wife and kids look like? I thought so.. Start
by clicking here.

.Net Gotchas by Venkat Subramaniam

Posted: February 12, 2006 in Other

Let’s start by saying that I loved this book. While in a speakers lounge once I picked
it up from the sky-high give-away pile, started reading, got engrossed and well…
it ended up travelling the 500 miles back home with me!

This is a book that would have been very useful when starting my .Net career. It is
‘simply’ a collection of nasty traps that .Net can lead you into. The book contains
75 separate gotchas organized into related sections.

Some gotchas are just that, but others explain tricky areas such as COM interop. Of
particular interest to me was garbage collection and the Dispose()/ Finalize() coverage.
I already knew everything that was written in these chapters but the concise manner
in which they were written helped me collect my disjointed knowledge together. After
reading chapter 5 I can confidently say that I understand garbage collection basics
and the relative merits of dispose and finalize. The COM interop was of particular
interest too. I had done this on a previous project, but was simply copying example
code from newsgroups. This book gave a better idea of what happens with memory beyond
us calling into the .Net RCW.

It is difficult for me to say how much of the book is out of date because of .Net
2.0 because I only have three months 2.0 experience. From what I have seen so far
in 2.0 it looks like most of the gotchas are still valid. A gotcha does not mean that
it was a flaw with the .Net design, just that somethings are tricky/ unexpected such
as exceptions thrown from thread pools are lost. As you can guess I recommend people
at least borrow this book. When (if?) a v2.0 of .Net Gotchas hits the shelves
I recommend checking it out. The only bad thing I will say is that if you are experienced
with .Net do not expect much of this material to be brand new, you will have heard
of most issues before but probably not seen them documented quite so well.

Visual C# 2005 by Jesse Liberty

Posted: February 12, 2006 in Book Review

This book is aimed at developers already experienced with .Net 1.0 and 1.1. It aims to offer a quick introduction to what is new in .Net 2.0 and VS 2005.

The first chapter in the book covers C# 2.0 and the book is very much worth buying for this chapter alone. Features covered by the chapter are as you would expect: Generics, partial types etc. We have been hearing and reading about them in the MSDN magazine for over a year. Still, it was very useful spending a couple of hours reading this chapter and nailing down each topic. It was also great to see the new covariance support for delegates covered, which I imagine is included to keep us hardcore happy.

It was a shame to spot a simple technical error: the book states that static classes cannot have a constructor. How this was not picked up proof-readers I have no idea. Just in case the CLR team has started taking mind altering drugs while designing 2.0,
I knocked up a quick sample with a static class + static constructor and it worked fine.

So on to the rest of the book. Well there are lots and lots of page filling screenshots covering the new Visual Studio, WinForms, WebApps and Data Binding etc. These may be of use to less experienced developers, but I would have preferred simple short
sections covering new features. Walking an experienced developer through how to setup a masked text box (>4 pages!) was not useful to me.

Summary: If you are just about to embark on your first .Net 2.0 project I recommend buying this book first chapter alone. It won’t take long to read, and then you can pass it to another team member. I do expect this to be a book you will use for reference.

How to uninstall IE7 Beta 2

Posted: February 7, 2006 in Other

IE7 looks cool, but I do not recommend using it on your main machine. Since Firefox does not work well on some sites I use all the time, IE 7 had to go. It is not obvious how to remove it, but is documented in Microsoft’s IE 7 Beta 2 FAQ:

How do I uninstall the preview?

To uninstall Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview and return to Internet Explorer 6
on Windows XP

Click “Start,” and then click “Control Panel.”
Click “Add or Remove Programs.”
Check “Show Updates” at the top of the dialog box.
Scroll down the list to “Windows XP – Software Updates,” select “Internet Explorer
7 Beta 2Preview,” and then click “Change/Remove.”

If “Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Preview” does not exist, run %windir%\$NtUninstallie7bet2p$\spuninst\spuninst.exe.
You need to have “view hidden folders” enabled. %windir% is your Windows installation
directory, which is normally ‘C:\Windows’ on most systems.

The deterioration of the MVP-program

Posted: February 7, 2006 in Other

Wally commented on this today and it is the first I had heard of the controversy:

http://www.dicks-blog.com/archives/2006/02/01/the-deterioration-of-the-mvp-program/

My .05 cents is that anyone who puts in 20 hours/week of unpaid time to
the Microsoft cause deserves to be rewarded by Microsoft. Just do the math: 46 weeks
x 20 hours x <insert hourly bill rate here> = an awful lot per year. They
really deserve it!

Us part-time players just love to pad our resume by doing a few presentations a year,
but the hard core participants really need rewarding!

Excellent Tips on creating a Podcast

Posted: January 25, 2006 in Other, Podcasts

It appears Craig Shoemaker’s Polymorphic Podcast is a year old this month. As a side-effect
of running through his year as a podcaster Craig gives out some great tips on how
to start, grow and publicize your own podcast.

This special show is under 15 minutes long and I recommend everyone listen to it. If
you are interesting in achieving a ‘fame goal’; MVP, Podcaster, CEO
of Disney or whatever than take tips from Craig and get yourself noticed:

http://polymorphicpodcast.com/podcast/files/PolymorphicPodcast-2006-01-11.mp3

http://polymorphicpodcast.com/shows/anniversary1/

Note: Craig did mention this blog in this show, but I had already decided to
make this post. Hearing my name on a Podcast is always a big deal to this shy
geek – thanks Craig!

Pixel Perfect Plasma TV + PC

Posted: January 23, 2006 in HDTV, Other

There is a lot of bad advice going around about hooking up a PC to a Plasma TV + I have seen several people driving their Plasma TV at 800×600 from their PC. Last week I bought an ED Maxent Plasma ($1200) so can finally comment:

What I knew people were missing is that most modern video cards allow you to set a custom resolution which matches exactly that of your Plasma TV. I took several screen shots when using my year old GForce 4000MX
with the latest NVIDIA common driver, but don’t have time to make a decent post and decided to just blog the basics:

If you have a regular ED Plasma set the resolution to 852×480 (16:9 480p) and preferably connect via DVI/hdmi which is 100% digital from your video card to the TV so there is no need to buy those expensive ‘monster’ cables unless the distance is more than a few meters. Note that HDMI is backwards compatible with DVI and adapters are cheap. If you get it connected and the picture is not perfect try 854×480 or lookup the exact resolution of your TV; when you hit the right numbers you will know as the result will pixel perfect.

My Plasma has 2 component, 2 s-video, one DVI and one RGB input that I could use with the PC. DVI is perfect. RGB is very good, but not all pixels are crisp, s-video was not so good and I don’t have an adapter to try the component. Just use DVI/ HDMI and demote the PVR to component video as TV. Hopefully it won’t be too long before TVs have at least three hdmi inputs.

Other randon Geek AV Tips:

Running out of digital amplifier inputs like I was? New amps are expensive so just use TosLink splitters/ combiners which are cheap. I ordered a whole bunch of 3′ and 6′ toslinks cables for next to nothing at the same time. Obviously only one device can be on at once or the optical signals collide. Oh yeah many people don’t realize that their laptop probably outputs a digital signal too; if bought the standard Phillips $16 toslink cable then you already have a 3.5mm toslink adapter. Look for a red light in your laptops 3.5mm outputs – that’ll be the digital signal.

Are you now planning to run DVI cables through your walls to the media-server closet? Use hdmi and adapters instead because the connectors are much smaller and you’ll get a much neater looking faceplate + be more future-proof; I am doing this soon and will have two video cards in the same media PC to drive a TV in the family room
and one in the media room. I use Powermids to control the PC via infra-red keyboards and it works great. Powermids will also be used when I finally get a decent entertainment center to hide the front speakers + ugly PVR, amp, xbox etc (look for optional mesh door fronts to hide speakers behind if you are in the market; Haverty’s are good value). When the xbox-360 is hackable each room will get a 360 and the PC will become a real server; until then it is needed to view content like h.264 as the old xbox with xbmc does not have the horsepower to play higher bitrates.

NVidia is the card I recommend mainly because some buddies from my first Masters degree are kicking ass for them right now. Other cards should let you set a custom resolution, but I am no expert in video cards. Unless you play PC games I recommend just buying the cheapest Nvidia based card that supports DVI out and I’ll bet it will support custom resolution.

Finally, why did I buy a cheap Maxent? Well it was $500 cheaper than the Panasonic ED I really wanted + it whatever I buy today will be replaced when 1080p 50″ Plasma’s are affordable, which I estimate will be a reality in about two years. For fellow cheapskates the Maxent is a very good TV; not quite as crisp as the Panasonic ED, but when viewing from 13 feet away you will barely notice the difference. The Maxent has removable speakers too which was must-have along with the stack of video inputs. Real geeks buy LCDs for the true 1080p, but unless you play games from a few away you are better off looking at 42″ Plasma for TV viewing today (Jan 2006). LCD prices are dropping very quickly so you can maybe bur the true 1080p 42″ screen later in the year for under $1000?