Ahh, I fondly remember the days of all-nighters.

I found this great interview, done in September '05, where Max (co-founder of PayPal) discusses the virtues of entrepreneurship and late-night hacking.

I miss those days. Oh, how I miss them.

This white-paper is the best overview I've ever seen on COM threading models, ranging from apartments to CoWaitForMultipleHandles to synchronization-contexts:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dncomser/html/comthread.asp

Read it and weep. (For those that still program in COM, that is. Haha.)

I wanted to increase the GoogleRank for Aaron's article:
http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/12/16/504906.aspx

My machine's Visual Studio 2005 installation has been partially hosed since somewhere around Beta2. Various tasks would regularly fail with "Package Load Failure" error messages. I could compile and perform basic functions with it, but was forced to use cmd-line for a lot of stuff. Like editing project files. This was caused by the multiple betas, CTPs, and hand-built CLRs that I've had installed over the past year; it seems some cruft had built up inside of the native-cache.

I followed his steps, and now it works like a charm. Sweet.

Charles, dude, I still read Programming Windows from beginning to comatose. Frequently.

Maybe I'm a dying breed.

Will anybody actually read my book from beginning to comatose? I hope so.

A wise man once said a picture is worth a thousand words.

Alas, for those authors hoping to fill pages of text with fluffy pictures I bear sad news: A sufficiently fluffy 4" tall illustration takes up only a measly 239 words worth of space.

Perhaps a picture is worth 239 words is more accurate. (Or alternatively, 4.18 pictures are worth a thousand words.)

Classic.

If you're bored, read any of these papers. I wish I were smart too.

Friday at around 2am in Las Vegas...

I'm sitting at the Black Jack table at the Luxor with $600 in chips, up about $500 from 3 hours prior, which was down a lot more than a few hours before that. What happened next is a tad ugly... ;)

Plop down $100 on the next hand. Dealt a 12 with the dealer showing a face card. Hit and Bust.
(Think to self: Damn! Gotta win that back quickly.)

Plop down another $100 on the next hand. Stand at 18, and lose to the dealer's 21.
(Think to self: Wow, kindof unlucky. Can't be unlucky that many times in a row. It's my turn!)

Plop down $150 on the next hand. Dealer has a Black Jack.
(Think to self: Down to $250? That went quickly!)

Scale back to $50, and double up on an 11. And I get dealt a 3. Lose the $100 to the dealer's 20.

About 10 minutes later, a few $50 bets, some wins, some losses, I hit $0.

Briefly considered cashing in more $$$ for chips, but I remember that I have a 7am flight to catch. I decide to head back to the hotel room to get some sleep, reeking of booze and cigar smoke, and feeling like crap.

Viva Las Vegas!

My younger brother Sean, who incidentally is not a programmer, has supplied the first review of my book. It sounds so sincere!

"Outstanding outlook on the advanced programmers Guide to Framework Networking 2.0. Joe portrays the style and language needed for an everyday programmer to grasp. Excellent work!"

It's for both advanced and everyday programmers! Reserve your copy in advance today! :)

Many people forget that, regardless of n-tiers of process, it's all just code.

Shipping software is about ensuring the right code gets written at the right time, that it does something amazing, and that it works when it's supposed to.

In the end, that's really all that matters. Don't forget it.

Contrary to popular belief, I am still alive.

Is it me or has the whole blogsphere gone quiet over the past few weeks? Guess everybody I subscribe to is heads down shipping Whidbey.

I'm coming up on my 1yr anniversary with Microsoft. This is damned amazing, it really feels like only a few months. (Doesn't everybody say that?) It's been fun thus far, and I think it's only going to get better.

I can't come up with anything intelligent to say right now, so I'm just going go byte-byte (sic).

Byte-byte.