Watch this and then never believe anything you see on TV

It seems that nothing is real, even the really real looking stuff.

Hello Bulgaria

I’m giving a couple of sessions at MSDays in Sofia in Bulgaria at the end of March. You can find out more and even book your place at the conference (assuming you are Bulgarian) here:

http://www.msbgregistration.com/

There is also a Facebook group:

http://www.facebook.com/MSDays

I’ve even had a write up in couple of Tech News web sites in Bulgaria:

http://technews.bg/article-20532.html

http://news.expert.bg/n331344/

This is part of one of them…..

Специален гост в сесията за разработка на игри ще е и Роб Майлс, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). Той е лектор в Hull University във Великобритания. Преподава програмиране, софтуерен инженеринг и вградени системи. На „Дни на Майкрософт” ще говори за Windows Phone и платформата за разработка на игри XNA.

If anyone can read this, I’d love to know what it says. I hope it is nice. It looks like Rob Miles in Bulgarian is Роб Майлс. Whatever. I’m very impressed that I could just cut and paste the text off the web site and into the blog and it all just works. You’ve gotta love UNICODE.

Anyway, I’m really looking forward to travelling out to Sofia and giving a couple of sessions, one on Windows Phone development and another on the .NET Microframework.  Should be fun.

Platform Expos 2011 is coming

A date for your diaries folks. Sunday the 27th March 2011. That’s the day that Platform Expos 2011 is running. We had a meeting today about what we are going to do as part of the expo and it looks like it is going to be a really good gig. With 8 platforms on show, from Business through Culture to Education, there is a whole lot happening. We are going to be running another 24 hour mad game development to coincide with the event, and I’m going to be giving a session on Windows Phone game development. We will also be showing off the latest developments on Microsoft Kinect and home 3D technology.

You can find out more here:

http://platformexpos.com/index.html

The meeting was down at the World Trade Centre in Hull,  which has a fantastic view of the Humber Estuary and The Deep just outside.

 

The weather was a bit grey, but I did my best.

SyncToy and Drive Letter Setting Fun

At the end of the year I have to go through my marathon photo tidying up session. I keep all my writings and other important stuff on SkyDrive, Live Mesh and DropBox but there is just not room in the cloud for all the pictures that I take. And so this is the time when I go through the pictures directories of all my various machines and pull them all together to make a final, definitive set of all my photos that I can copy across a bunch of hard disks.

And when I’m doing this I find SyncToy very useful. I can use it to bring together files from lots of different disks and also make sure that two disks hold exactly the same set of files. It doesn’t seem to mind being pointed at directories that hold many gigglebytes of files and I can just leave it to get on with the work.

Oh, and when I’m using external drives I find it very useful to be able to make sure that when I plug the drive in it gets exactly the same drive letter each time. You can do this using the Disk Management tool. Open up Control Panel and then for “Disk Management” Then open the scary “Create and format hard disk partitions” option to bring up the Disk Manager tool:

Select the drive that you want in the list of volumes and right click it. Then select “Change Drive Letter and Paths..” to bring up the Change dialog box.

Then click Change and nominate the letter that you want to use in the combo box on the right:

Once you have done this you just click OK down all the menus and, presto, your drive has the letter you chose. And even better, the letter is remembered for next time you plug the drive in. Great stuff.

Dilbert Déjà Vu

Got a new Dilbert calendar on Saturday. Now, I’m quite keen on recycling in general, but less impressed when it extends to the cartoons….