It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… It has been an incredible adventure and a great experience… Hm…There is no easy or soft way to say this, so let me make a long story short. After almost 12 years working for Iris Technologies, IrisCube, IrisCube Reply, Sytel Reply I am leaving the company to learn something new. I cannot wait to get started in my new job as I have a lot to learn at 10100 To my colleagues that read this: I have one wish for a personal goodbye gift from you. I would really love it if you can send me your Outlook Contact card with your picture/avatar and whatever other info you want to share like phone number, ...

The Vodafone Betavine site is a open community website created and managed by Vodafone Group R&D with the mission to ...support the wider development community in stimulating ideas, developing, testing and launching great new applications for mobile and Internet communications. Interesting. Vodafone is huge, so they should have the power to make device manufacturers adhere to the (few) mobile browsing and applications standards that exists. If you are not familiar with developing for mobile devices, you can compare it with the problems we had a decade ago developing for Mozilla and Internet Explorer. But imagine a headache hundreds of times worse as each device ...

It is several years since I last reinstalled my PC and it shows. I used to keep the setup program for the downloaded software in a download directory but I do not do it anymore as: it wastes space it only takes a few seconds/minutes to download the latest version from the web. But installing from a "temporary" directory causes one problem: some programs cannot be uninstalled as they are unable to find the original setup so they return "Error 1714: The older version of … cannot be removed". :-( This is bad design if you ask me. If you need something from the original setup, either you copy the stuff you need to your application directory or you tell me that ...

I got this "new" exception when I was consuming one RSS feed: System.FormatException was unhandled Message="The DateTime represented by the string is not supported in calendar System.Globalization.GregorianCalendar." Source="mscorlib" StackTrace: at System.DateTimeParse.Parse(String s, DateTimeFormatInfo dtfi, DateTimeStyles styles) at System.DateTime.Parse(String s) System.DateTime.Parse chocked on this input date 2007-09-13T24:28:51Z Forcing the current culture to System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture did not help so I ended up with this ugly hack: dateString = dateString.Replace("T24:", "T00:") Let me know if you find a cleaner solution.

Believe it or not, I downgraded from SQL Server 2005 Express to MSDE and got a drastic performance improvement: 6.0 seconds average call time with SQL Server 2005 Express 15/10 1.9 seconds average call time with MSDE 18/10 The DB is identical in terms of data and indexes. The only difference is the SQL engine. I am still not 110% sure why, but as far as I can tell it is due to the different ways MSDE and SQL Server 2005 Express limits performance on my particular hardware. Or rather, lack of hardware, as I am hosting everything on a Virtual Server. Until January this year I hosted my mail and blogs at home on a PC. It has been a valuable experience as I have learned ...

For the poGmail program I needed a way to display a semi transparent alert window in the corner of the screen that was on top of all the other windows without giving it focus. .NET supports transparent windows but the forms are always brought to the front and given the input focus when you call .Show(). This is not nice when you are working, as whatever you write goes to the alert window instead of the current window. The class below uses interop to modify the form so it does not get activated when you show it. You can call it from the constructor of the form like this: WindowUtils.SetWindowTopMostWithoutFocus(this); using System; using System.Windows.Forms; using ...

This is the first time I am releasing a beta with some known issues... I have decided to do it to cover as wide a range of Pocket PC/Windows Mobile devices as possible. I am using it on my Windows Mobile 5.0 Phone Edition device but I am sure there are problems with other versions and I would like to find and fix them. You can download the latest version at the poGmail home page. Installation instructions: Install .NET Compact Framework 2.0 if you don't have it already Copy the .CAB file to your device (via Active Sync or a memory card) Run the .CAB. Run poGmail and configure accounts and the download schedule The setup program installs: The Gmail client ...