Jeff Atwood for president! I completely agree with his Programmer's Bill of Rights and I wish I worked in a place they were respected. Let's see how "compliant" I am: Every programmer shall have two monitors: I wish! Then again; I cannot complain as I am one of the lucky few with a 17 inch monitor on my laptop. Every programmer shall have a fast PC. It was fast 2 years ago… Having a fast PC is a must though. Waiting wastes the clients time and causes frustration (especially if you're not lucky enough to have a permanent place to make your home so you have toys to play with. Hm... If it was safe to leave anything more valuable than a chewing gum on the desk ...

Finally a tool from Microsoft that gives better control over database development. Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals addresses common problems with database development today: The new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of your choice Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change A ...

Time flies. It has been two years since the first post on /egilh; Selecting a random record from SQL I have not always been able to make a post a day but the statistics are not bad: 1002 posts 450 comments 6791 comments caught by the comment spam filter The development posts get the majority of the comments and requests for help; Fixing ASP.NET debug error 0x8013134b (67) How to get COM+ call times from VB and VBScript (40) COM+ Call Timers: the unofficial way (24) Keep the comments coming and let me know if you have any tips, suggestions or questions. P.S. There are "only" 248 posts on /egilh, the other posts are on Cool Or What?, Crap And Crapability ...

It looks like the postman just came back from vacation as I got no less than 3 packages today :-) I cannot wait to see what I can make the Lego Mindstorms NXT do with Microsoft Robotics Studio Books from Amazon.com (I'm reading a couple of development books but I need a break once in a while :-) Harlan Coben: Gone for Good, Harlan Coben: The Final Detail, David Baldacci: Split Second, David Baldacci: Last Man Standing I bought some of the things I will sell in the Coolissimo store on cafepress as I wanted to check the quality and get some "Don't break balls" mouse pads for my colleagues.

Sydney is getting bigger and stronger each. He's more than 70 cm to the shoulder blades and getting close to 40 kg. No fat, all muscles and energy. Plenty of energy. I used to bike holding his chain in my hand on the handlebar but that was getting impossible. He is still (one big) puppy so he has zero impulse control. When he sees something he likes he stops dead in his tracks and you can image how that feels when he his attached to the handlebars of a bike. An accident waiting to happen in other words. I found the Springer on the internet and I have been looking for local animal shops that carry it, or something similar, but I didn't have any luck. Until I went to ...

A reader asked me how to force Internet Explorer to display the file download dialog. The how to force the download dialog box to appear post explains how to do it on the server side but the reader wanted to change the behavior of Internet Explorer. Adobe Acrobat is one program that opens its files inside Internet Explorer by default and I don't like it either. It is a frequent cause of crashes in Internet Explorer and the PDFs ends up in the temp directory. Some programs, like Adobe Acrobat, turn on this behavior by default, other times the user clicks the "Always ask before opening this type of file" check box by mistake. These are the steps to change the behavior ...

Microsoft has announced XNA Game Studio Express. A free set of tools based on the XNA platform to enable anyone to easily create games for both Windows and the Xbox 360 console. The free Express version lets you create commercial games for the Windows platform but you have to wait for the Professional edition next spring to create commercial titles for the Xbox 360. It is not entirely free to develop for the Xbox 360 though. You must buy a XNA Creator's Club subscription ($99 for a year, $49 for 4 months) on Xbox Live Marketplace to develop, debug and/or play games developed for the Xbox 360. The XNA FAQ has more information on which features are available in the upcoming beta.

The city of Milano has created a rich program for kids that spend August/September in town. There are activities every day and my kids had a ball when they went earlier this week to some activities organized at Castello Sforzesco More information on the E…state con noi site (Italian only).

Microsoft bought Winternals and SysInternals and hired both Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell while I was on vacation. It is good news for the future of Windows as Mark will be working on the core of the Windows platform: I’m joining Microsoft as a technical fellow in the Platform and Services Division, which is the division that includes the Core Operating Systems Division, Windows Client and Windows Live, and Windows Server and Tools. I’ll therefore be working on challenging projects that span the entire Windows product line and directly influence subsequent generations of the most important operating system on the planet. From security to virtualization ...

The only bad thing about it; it is over :-( I came back this weekend after 3 weeks camping around Europe. Total relax and "back to basics" with no work, blogs, e-mail, TV, mobile coverage or electricity. Had lovely weather until the end of the vacation which is great. Coming back to a "fresh" Milano is just fantastic as it can be boiling at this time of year sometimes. Most of the first week was spent camping on the way up through Europe on the way to Røros. The first major stop was Euro Disney. It was a fairytale like most Disney cartoons. Very well kept and organized. We also stopped in Hunderfossen to spend a day with my cousin which has kids that are the ...