Fun with Visual Studio 2010 Tech Days in London

Which door would you choose?

Went down to London today to give a session as part of tech-days Visual Studio Developer Days. It was great fun, even though just about everything broke at some point during the talk. Richard from Black Marble was on before me and did a very impressive talk about the new testing features in Team Foundation Server.

Doesn’t Richard look like Bill Gates?

When my turn came my laptop had gone to sleep and forgotten to produce any video output. Then I had all kinds of finger trouble typing in programs and my microphone broke and fell off twice. But it was all good…

A blurry version of me, which is how I felt at the time…

Some of the audience, all of whom were absolutely great.

The whole thing took place in a cinema, so I had the biggest screen I’ve ever used in my life.  You can find the presentation here and the demo code here.

As part of the day I was interviewed for Underbelly, a new Microsoft website for developers. you can find my interview here. If you really want to…

Imagine Cup UK Finals

Matthew came to see me today, he is a member one of our Imagine Cup teams who are travelling to Microsoft UK on Thursday for the UK finals. Of the six top teams Hull have two, which is nice. Both of our teams are limbering up for the event and have some nice demonstrations and stories to tell.

Update on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 02:31PM by Rob

I’ve asked the teams to take a bunch of pictures, and I’ve also told them to take some business cards to dish out to Microsoft people and the judges.  For me the competition is as much about the contacts and friendships that you make and the experience of taking part as it is about the prizes. Just one day now...

Exploding Images with Photoshop Elements

Every now and then I fall over hilarious bugs that really shouldn’t be out there. It kind of cheers me up. I’ve never written software with holes like these, and they are selling theirs as product.

I’ve found a truly smashing one in Photoshop Elements. I have a love-hate relationship with this program. I stick with it because it does what I want eventually and I can’t be bothered to learn another program. I have the feeling that it could do pretty much anything, although I also have the feeling that I’ll never figure out how to use it.

Anyhoo, the bug/feature has to do with bulk processing of images. I’ve started reducing the size of my pictures before I send them to Flickr so that they don’t take too long to transfer. I make them 1500 pixels in width, which seems to work OK. I did one batch, and then tried to do another.

And my machine stopped. For quite a while. Eventually I killed the Photoshop export and tried to figure out what had happened. Turns out that the program remembers the number that you enter to resize your picture, but not the units. The program was busily creating a bunch of images 1500 cms wide. Or around 450 feet. This begs several questions.

• Why does it just remember the number?
• Has anyone ever really needed to produce a picture that big?
• Did anyone ever test this?

Oh well.

Clash of the Titans Movie Review

 
Looks a bit too much like Wayne Rooney for me. And no, I don’t mean the one with the snakey hair.

We saw the first Clash of the Titans movie (the one with the clockwork owl) on our honeymoon many years ago. The new one has moved things on a bit. The clockwork owl has been replaced by Gemma Atherton (something of a step up I reckon, although number one wife was less convinced) and we now have a lot of CGI. The story remains broadly the same, and is none the worse for that. 

There is plenty of derring-do from the good guys and Ralph Fiennes, who seems to be cleaning up in ultimate bad guy roles, does a very nice “Voldermort with better hair” kind of act as Hades. The funniest bits are when we are at home with the gods, whose exploration of aluminium foil based clothing has to be seen to be believed.

If you want to see a big dumb action deity powered movie, a sort of “Transformers with Myths” then you will not be disappointed. I wasn’t.

Dalby Forest Friday

Final day of the holiday today. I’ve been very good, and done hardly any proper work. I’ve even done some gardening, which is most unlike me.  Today we went off to Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire. One of the best places in the universe.

One day I’d like to stay here for a while.

We especially like the Bridestone walk. These are massive rock formations along the side of the valley.

Some of the paths can be quite steep, but always look good.