The Windows Mobile team has published a Fun Facts, behind the scenes, look at the making of Windows Mobile 5.0 (PDF). Some key statistics: 47 1-pound bags of peanut butter M&Ms dispensed from a gumball machine Average amount of weight gained per team member since September because of missed workouts: 15 lbs. On average, $2,000 "saved" in rent per developer by living in the office 37 cell phones were harmed in the making of this product 6 brand new 4-letter words added to the English language 23% increase in nail-biting across the development staff On average, 5 boxes of Band-Aids used for thumb blisters per manual device tester Build lab generated close ...

Disney will buy Pixar for $7.4 billion. Is it the end of great movies like The Incredibles or is it the start of something even greater? Steve Jobs gets a seat on Disney's Board of Directors and other important Pixar employees get key positions which promises well; Pixar Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs will be appointed to Disney's Board of Directors as a non-independent member, according to the agreement reached between the companies. Pixar President Ed Catmull will serve as President of the new Pixar and Disney animation studios, reporting to Iger and Dick Cook, Chairman of The Walt Disney Studios. In addition, Pixar Executive Vice President John Lasseter will be ...

The Visual Basic 2005 Starter Kits site has several interesting project templates: Card Game Starter Kit Shareware Starter Kit Web Log Analyzer Starter Kit Amazon-Enabled Movie Collection Starter Kit Personal Website Starter Kit Time Tracker Starter Kit Club Website Starter Kit eBay Selling Starter Kit Get your own 15 minutes of fame by creating and sharing your own starter kit.

I have looked into getting a SSL certificate for my site in the past but I always ended up deciding it cost to much. Why should I pay hundreds of dollars for a simple certificate that is used for encrypting data? I am not interested in a super-duper publisher certificate that certificates who I am. I just want to encrypt my http traffic so I can use forms login, transfer "sensitive" data like logs etc. The developer in me always said “make one yourself“; install and configure a Certificate Authority on a PC and use it to issue certificates. I never did, and was very happy when I found StartCom last year. The online wizard is simple to follow and allows to ...

There are many PDF Toolkits on the market that can merge PDF files. Most of them are expensive systems like ActivePDF but in the end I found several free alternatives that allows me to merge PDF files on the fly in ASP.NET. The first tool I found was PDF Merge. It is a Bash command line script that uses GhostScript. I never looked into the solution in detail as I found the great pdftk toolkit. Pdftk is a standalone executable file that you call with different command line arguments. No installation or registration, just copy the file somewhere and call it. A DLL would have been simpler, but calling pdftk from ASP.NET only takes a few lines of code. It is a command ...

Of Kings and Cabbage discovered the a feature I did not know about: several .net utility classes are registered in com so you can use them from clients like vbscript, javascript, asp, vb, … Some of the classes accessible from COM are: System.Collections.Queue System.Collections.Stack System.Collections.ArrayList System.Collections.SortedList System.Collections.Hashtable System.IO.StringWriter System.IO.MemoryStream System.Text.StringBuilder System.Random Good to know the next time I have to put together a quick script or asp page. Imagine using System.Text.StringBuilder.AppendFormat() instead of formatting the strings by hand! Marvels of COM ...

Why search the online PDC 2005 presentation archive when you can download them all in in .zip format using a tool like HTTrack or GetRight? Don't try via dial up unless you want to go broke or die of old age as 200+ files with an average size of more than 100MB takes a while to download... Get yours while the supplies last :-) More info on the magic behind the service on eXtensible Mind Lounge.