Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

Lifehacker has a couple of articles about adding “Send To” shortcuts to Google Reader:

• Convert Google Reader Items to PDFs
• More Google Reader “Send To” Tricks

Evernote also published a “how to” of their own today, and I showed DZone readers how to push items to DZone’s queue yesterday.

Here’s how you can send stories to DotNetKicks or DotNetShoutout…

Open Google Reader and click on Settings (upper right), select the ‘Send To’ tab. Then just click the ‘Create a Custom Link’ button and enter this info:

Name: DotNetKicks
Url: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/submit/?url=${url}&title=${title}
Icon: http://www.dotnetkicks.com/favicon.ico

Name: DotNetShoutout
Url: http://dotnetshoutout.com/Submit?url=${url}&title=${title}
Icon: http://dotnetshoutout.com/Assets/Images/fav.ico

Enjoy!

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The MSDN Developer Conference series has been making its way around the country over the last several weeks. The conference takes the best of PDC08 and boils it down to a one day event at a reasonable price – $99. On Friday, Washington, DC area developers got their opportunity to experience the event in Reston, VA. Since there is no Philadelphia event, I decided to drive south to Reston rather than north to New York City.

There was a Developer Dinner the evening before the conference featuring a Silverlight line-of-business presentation by Marc Schweigert and Pete Brown. Marc showed some tricks for data retrieval with the current feature set available in Silverlight, and then Pete took over and showed how future improvements in Silverlight are going to streamline the code necessary to perform data access. Pete and Marc did a great job, and the pizza wasn’t bad either. 

I was really looking forward to the conference, and I must say it did not disappoint. My biggest problem was deciding which sessions to sit in on. There were interesting topics and engaging speakers throughout the day. Ultimately, I decided on a language futures session with Kevin Hazzard, a Windows Azure session with G. Andrew Duthie, a VSTS 2010 session with Steve Andrews and an ASP.NET 4.0 session with Rachel Appel.

After lunch, I sat down and chatted with Kevin Hazzard about how he approached his talk, which was a meld of three PDC sessions on the .NET languages. I agree with his observation that when watching Anders Hejlsberg’s session on The Future of C#, you could feel his passion for the language. Kevin wanted to harness that energy in his talk, and I think he did a very good job of it. I also learned that he is working on a book about scripting languages & .NET due out later this year. Stay tuned for more details…

I was able to finally meet some other bloggers & tweeters like Jeff Fritz, Justin Etheredge and Christopher Steen. It’s nice to associate an actual face with the tiny icons in the interwebs.

I want to give special thanks to Lindsay Rutter, Dani Diaz, G. Andrew Duthie, Pete Brown, Kevin Hazzard, Bob Familiar, Rob Keiser, John McClelland (founder of Partner Huddle on Facebook), and many others for all their efforts. They all had their hands full with this event and also took some time during the day to chat with me a bit. I had a great time on Friday and picked up a few tips and tricks along the way.

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I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7, and it appears to be a successful upgrade. Please contact me if you see any issues with the site.

Thanks!

Alvin

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This post is in response to Jeff Blankenburg’s post about the contents of his Quick Launch bar.

Nothing. Mine is turned off. Here’s what my start menu looks like though. I have turned off the display of my recently opened programs, and I dragged these shortcuts out there. (This is my work notebook.)

Internet Explorer 8 – I use it mainly to see what’s new in IE8 and when Firefox doesn’t render something correctly (hardly ever).

Firefox 3 – My primary web browser. The plug-in support is the difference-maker for me.

Outlook 2007 – Used for my work email. I also use the Outlook Connector to access one of my Hotmail accounts.

Windows Live Mail – I use this to access my other Hotmail account. I could put them both in Outlook, but I like to keep my hands in Live Mail too.

visionapp Remote Desktop 2008 – A fantastic remote desktop management tool with a very low price tag.

Visual Studio 2005 – Still some existing development work in VS2005.

Visual Studio 2008 – For all new development. Also, for playing around with new stuff out on CodePlex.

SQL Server Management Studio - ‘nuff said.

Visual SourceSafe – All of our old releases are still in VSS.    -cringe-

Command Prompt – Launches as Administrator.

FileZilla – For all my FTP client needs, mostly for uploading files to my blog.

Windows Live Writer Beta – The best blogging client for Windows.

Word 2007 – Because it’s MS Word.

Paint.NET – My favorite image editing tool… and it’s free!

Zune – My current media player, but MediaMonkey is still the default on my home PC and my favorite.

Services – Because sometime you just have to stop some services.

Event Viewer – A developer’s friend.

Programs and Features – This is here because I’m always installing and uninstalling stuff from CodePlex and MS Downloads.

Windows Update – I want to be the first one to get my Windows Defender definition updates!

So, that’s my list. What’s in your Quick Launch bar and/or Start Menu and/or Launcher of choice?

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It certainly sounds to me like David Treadwell is equating Live Mesh to Windows in the cloud. Listen carefully and let me know what you think.

Countdown to PDC2008: What the heck are Microsoft’s Live Platform Services? Treadwell Tells All!

PDC 2008 Keynote in 3 weeks. We’ll know soon enough.

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