Steve Hiner Talks About .Net

It would have been 5 stars but it lost half a star because it doesn't have a cool insert like Lords of Waterdeep does.  It regains 3/10th because they included a bag of ziplock bags (like Agricola does) but then lost another 1/10th because they provide no guidance as to what should be divided out vs. mixed when bagging the pieces.  I think it would be nice for them to tell us which pieces go where, as it is I had to look through the rulebook to figure out that the wood blocks should be divided by color but the little species tiles should all be mixed together.  When I was finished I still had a couple extra bags so I don’t know if I did something wrong or if they are just spares.

That being said, WOW.  This game feels great so far.  Nice build quality and a freakishly large number of pieces for the game.  I think it’s over 600 different pieces if you include the cards and tiles and everything.  The board is gorgeous and the rest of the artwork is very well done.  The manual looks very well put together and with a brief overview looks very much like a game I’ll like. 

I'll be playing it tonight with a friend and my two oldest kids.  I really looking forward to this one.

My experiences spending a Saturday and Sunday evening converting an ASP.net MVC3 site using DevExpress MVC extensions to a straight HTML 5 site using KendoUI.

Found this great, simple walk-through for using debugging tools to dig into kernel memory dumps to find the root cause for a system crash. http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2008/11/01/how-to-debug-kernel-mode-blue-screen-crashes-for-beginners.aspx

StackOverflow.com

It’s a cross between a programming web forum, Wikipedia and Digg.  Basically people ask questions, people answer questions and people vote on the answers to push them higher or lower in the stack.  If more clarity is needed the original question and answers can be edited as needed rather than posting new responses.  Theoretically this means the good answers will float to the top and they will be complete answers so you don’t have to read through dozens of responses to figure out the complete answer.  It also means that old, obsolete questions and answers will tend to sink to the bottom of the stack.  Also, questions and answers can be tagged so you can do more targeted searching.  It’s free too (no Experts Exchange bait and switch tactics).

You can read about the idea behind it here.

The more time I spend on the site the more impressed I am with their ideas.  As you post questions and answers and those posts get voted up or down you gain and lose reputation.  At certain reputation levels you get more power on the site (ability to vote posts up/down, ability to comment, etc).  It really should cut down on the noise since new users can't comment at all and they can't vote the questions/answers up and down until they've spent some time on the site.  That means, hopefully, it will be harder to "game" the site like people try to do with slashdot and digg.

Check it out, it's going to be a killer site.  They should branch out into non-programming sites too.

In order to use the cmdlet first you'll have to grab the Microsoft Visualization Components from Microsoft Research.

If you don't want all the visualization components here is a zip file of just the treemap generator dll.  Unzip it and put TreemapGenerator.DLL in your scripts folder.

Grab this file to get the scripts I demoed at the meeting.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

I'm hoping to do a full writeup for the blog soon.

Edit 1/10/2012: Clearly I never got around to writing a full blog post. I was going to post a screenshot or two but I have found that the treemap generator does not appear to run under Windows 7 64-bit. When I try to run it I get the error:
New-Object : Exception calling ".ctor" with "0" argument(s): "Could not load type 'Microsoft.Research.CommunityTechnologies.Treemap.NodeColor' from assembly 'TreemapGenerator, Version=1.0.1.38, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=3f6121a52ebf7c82' because it contains an object field at offset 0 that is incorrectly aligned or overlapped by a non-object field."
Maybe someday I'll try to resolve this for Win7 but don't hold your breath.

Hi, I thought I'd start my blog by introducing myself.  I'm Steve Hiner.  Christian, father, family man and programmer.

I started writing code back in grade school.  It was in the early 80s so I was about 10-12 years old at the time.  I believe it was on a TRS-80 and I'm sure it was some form of BASIC.  A while back I ran across an old audio cassette tape with one of my first programs on it, a sci-fi text adventure game.  I remember my mom helping me read through a programming book while sitting at our home PC (a Heathkit system my dad built - with 128KB RAM and dual 5-1/4 floppies - at the time that was quite a system).

Fast forward to college where I got a Civil Engineering degree.  While getting the degree I started taking every programming class I could get credit for.  Because of learning in the college of engineering my first serious programming was in FORTRAN77.

After graduation I worked as an engineer for a couple years but got bored with it.  When my current boss offered me a job programming I jumped at the chance.  That was 10 years ago.

Now I'm a Windows developer focusing on .Net technologies.  Most of my time is spent writing the UI to interface with hardware the company develops.  I've worked on everything from a stock trade sorting app to a machine vision app.  As systems integrators we do a little bit of everything so projects are always new and interesting.

I've become something of a PowerShell fanatic lately so I'm always looking for problems I can solve with a bit of PowerShell scripting.  I'm really blown away by Microsoft's new shell - it really is an amazing piece of technology.

Well, that's me.  Who are you?