Visual Studio 2005 up on MSDN...

No more Beta; this is the real deal! It is now time to blow away all the Beta stuff and get ready for the final product install. Haven't seen any specific instructions on uninstalling Beta 2; however, I followed the Beta 1 uninstall as below:

1. Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional" or other related IDE installs such as (Visual Studio Professional/Standard/Enterprise Architect/Team Suite, etc.)
2. Remove "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition"
3. Remove "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Tools Express Edition"
4. Remove "Microsoft SQL Native Client"
5. Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio 64bit Prerequisites Beta"
6. Remove "Microsoft MSDN Express Library 2005 Beta"
7. Remove "Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office System 2005 Runtime Beta"
8. Remove "Microsoft Device Emulator 1.0 Beta"
9. Remove "Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 2.0 Beta"
10. Remove "Microsoft SQL Mobile 2005 Development Tools"
11. Remove "Microsoft Visual J# Redistributable Package 2.0 Beta".
12. Remove "Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta".

Everything seemed to uninstall correctly. Now just awaiting the download to complete to perform install - fingers crossed ;-)

Update: There is also this uninstall tool from Microsoft; I ran this and it found another component to delete - nice one!

A seven bike family...

This is ridiculous, we are now a family with seven bikes! Time for a garage sale or ebay me thinks :-)

Both of our boys had their birthdays this month, and being the really nice dad that I am I decided it was time to upgrade their bikes. I got them Mountain Bikes versus BMX style so that we could do some off-road riding together. Finally the bike manufacturers are beginning to sell decent bikes for kids, which have gears, front suspension, decent brakes, aren’t made from solid steel and don’t weigh more than my car. I have always found it puzzling that a kids bike weighed more than the average adults bike – no wonder they struggle riding them up hills.

In the end I went with Trek; and so far I have been really impressed. They are really well made, have good components (SRAM and Shimano), v-brakes, and they look great (boys love the flame graphics). The bikes are the Mt. Track 220 and Mt. Track 60.

Aussie politics...

Fabian posted a questionnaire to find out what party most aligns to your views. Was quite an interesting exercise, turns out I am "Family First" - probably not that surprising given I have a young-ish family. I guess I now need to become an Australian Citizen so that I can vote!

MSN Search is boring...

Scoble linked to a post about the search engine of choice for teenagers, being well, duh, Google – surely this is not a surprise to anyone. For teenagers it is all about what is cool, what has the best branding – image is everything. I have just asked my two young boys (5 and 8) and they both know Google and have never heard of MSN Search.

Look at the iPod! A lot of this has to do with the branding/naming of the product; the iPod Nano would not be so successful if it was named by Microsoft, as it would probably be something along the lines of “Apple Music Player 2005 Really Diminutive Edition”. Same with search, MSN Search, it just sounds boring, it sounds so corporate!

Why doesn’t Microsoft (or any search provider) provide additional entry points, branding, etc., over the same search engine? So you have MSN Search for the corporate stiffs, and some other “cool” site targeted at the various demographics – sometimes one size does not fit all.

So why not have a kiddies site, a teenagers, adults, oldies site, where the look and feel are targeted to the age group and the search is contextual. If my 8 year old is looking for “Disneyland” then he should get results more fun oriented, links to games or the characters, age appropriate movies; for an adult this might contain links to the site for opening hours, cost, hotels, flights, etc; for a teenager it would be perhaps to the roller coaster rides, music, movies, etc.

Just a thought?!?

.NET CF Performance counters...

Here is a post that describes how to turn on performance counters so you can see how your application is performing on the device - didn't even know such a feature existed. I wish I had known about this a number of months ago when I had a bad performing application; as it took a lot of trial and error to resolve the problems. It does require a registry update, so be careful out there.

Time for a mini rant – the registry?!? Why oh why did Microsoft decide to bring that bloody thing over to the device. Given that the mobile platform was new surely that would have been a perfect time to ditch that nasty Win95 legacy. When will Microsoft see the light and really support xcopy deployment and do away with that #$@%&*! registry?

Kitty litter-robot...

This can be filed under the category of unbelievably sad: an automated cat poo self cleaning robotic toilet thingy – all this for a stupid cat!