You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Friday, Apr 23, 2004, 8:39 AM in .NET
.NET Evangelists on .NET Rocks Today @ 9am PST
I work closely with Vic and Steve on the strategy for Longhorn content and activies, so I'm planning to tune it to today's .NET Rocks.
Wednesday, Apr 21, 2004, 3:56 PM in The Spout
What's New in Windows Forms 2.0
Mike and I write our first cut and what's new and cool in Windows Forms 2.0 in this month's MSDN Magazine.
Monday, Apr 19, 2004, 7:32 PM in Tools
PInvoke.NET: Interop the Wiki Way
Here. Whoever put this site together had the right idea. I was hoping to work my magic to get MS to publish a giant interop DB, but instead of waiting, Adam Nathan (of .NET and COM: The Complete Interoperability Guide fame) put up a wiki to collect all of the P/Invoke signatures that the community already knows about. Yeah, baby! This could finally be a wiki I can get behind! (Sorry, Ward, but I've just never found a wiki that makes me want to hang out there...)
Monday, Apr 19, 2004, 11:58 AM in Fun
I Shall Wear My Grammar Godhood With Humility
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!
brought to you by Quizilla
[ed: I took out all the links in this post because apparently there are links on this site that dump adware on your machine and some of my readers have been bitten. My apologies. If you must go to the site, here's the link, but on your head be it: http://quizilla.com/users/BaalObsidian/quizzes/How%20grammatically%20sound%20are%20you?/]
Sunday, Apr 18, 2004, 3:38 PM in Fun
Chris's Friends on the Web
If you're looking for my wife, Melissa, her email address is msells@sellsbrothers.com. Her email is pretty reliable now, so send her some! It makes her so happy...
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Joel and Beth Howie are online again. Drop them a line.
Another friend of mine since grade school, Pete Clark, is just coming off his hiatus recovering from a dot-bomb and spending time with his new child. He is now the principle in pclark.net Consulting, LLC.
If you live in Portland, OR and you'd like to get together for breakfast with a group of "congenial nerds," check out the Nerd Breakfast Home Page. I like to get there myself when I'm not traveling (or sleeping in : ).
This just in! Matt Pietrek's wife took this pic of (left to right), Don Box, me and Matt Pietrek. Sorry about the lack of a smile. I was having a lot of fun hanging out at Matt's house that day, but can never manage to smile for the camera. BTW, ask me to tell you how all of us spent hours debugging a screensaver that day...
Friday, Apr 16, 2004, 4:31 PM
sellsbrothers.com in Top 152K Sites in the World
According to Amazon's Alexa project, sellsbrothers.com is the 151,443rd ranked site by traffic in the world and is in the 48th percentile speed-wise. That sounds pretty crappy, but considering how many sites there are, I don't think that's too bad (although I admit to not being able to think of many sites to try that turned out to be lower ranked than mine... : ).
Of course, Yahoo!, MSN and Google are 1st, 2nd and 3rd.
Friday, Apr 16, 2004, 1:40 PM in The Spout
The X in XP Stands for "Wow"
I had coffee with Arlo Belshee today. He's done years of successful XP programming and when I say "successful," I mean increased and predicable output. In fact, the techniques he described for XP programming, he also applied to sales/marketing and got the same level of improvements. He's got an idea for the culture of a product team, including all levels of management, that makes me drool. If you get a chance to hear Arlo speak on this topic, you should do it. He's downright inspiring.
Friday, Apr 16, 2004, 9:36 AM
Thin Media Clients and Home Servers
Charlie's description of the next big thing to come to home entertainment nails it. I can't wait to be able to plug in a media server with a giant hard drive for my burned DVDs and CDs and my cached TV and radio programs to be made available, along with live TV and live Internet/AM/FM/XM radio, at any PC or TV in my house. I've already begun preparing.
Friday, Apr 16, 2004, 9:26 AM
My First ActiveWin Link
Here. I've been reading ActiveWin for years to pick up various Windows news tids and bits, but have never been mentioned 'til the MSDN Tour. On the other hand, I'm not sure how my boss is going to feel when he learns that all I do (when I'm not giving tours) is blog and collect information about the Microsoft interview process... : )
Friday, Apr 16, 2004, 8:38 AM
The Hallowed Halls of MSDN Quiz
Matt Powell has posted a quiz about MSDN based on the video tour Channel9 posted yesterday. These questions were kind of embarrassing:
"1. According to Chris, what does PAG stand for?
"2. What does PAG really stand for?
"Extra Credit: Of the 100 people that make up MSDN, how many of those people are part of PAG?"
I knew that the odds of me getting the PAG acronym right were small, but I think I got the *spirit* of it right... I haven't been this sheepish since Sara, the Matriarch of MSDN, had to remind me that I was a Content *Strategist* not a Content *Specialist* after my first public posting. : )
Thursday, Apr 15, 2004, 7:37 PM in .NET
Another Step Down the Longhorn Road
In the 2nd installment of my series rebuilding Solitaire using Longhorn technologies, I dive into 2 of the 5 Avalon families, specifically controls and panels, and build something that is at least approaching how Sol is supposed to look.
Thursday, Apr 15, 2004, 4:15 PM
Touring the Hallowed Halls of MSDN
If you're interested in what the deepest, darkest jungle of MSDN looks like, take a gander. I was only able to explore a few of our hallowed halls, but did manage to sit in Sara's chair and pretend to run the place. : )
Thursday, Apr 15, 2004, 8:53 AM
Chat w/ MS Research Sr. VP Today @ 9am PST
Here.
This seems a nice change from the tedium of paying taxes to the man:
"Rick Rashid, a senior vice president at Microsoft, will be online to take questions about innovation at Microsoft and the company's research and development efforts. ... Join Rashid online on April 15 from 12 to 1 p.m. ET for a discussion on Microsoft and its current research plans, goals and challenges."
It looks like you can submit your questions in advance and that this is the same place where the chat will happen, but it's darn hard to tell.
Wednesday, Apr 14, 2004, 11:01 PM in The Spout
More On The Quest To Kill Code
Here.
The one where I find a half-way point between where we are in our development environments today and self-writing, self-maintaining, self-fixing super programs.
P.S. Just to set your expectations, this style of description for Spout entries isn't going to stop after the last episode of Friends. : )
Wednesday, Apr 14, 2004, 1:06 PM in .NET
I'm on Channel9 Talking About Longhorn + Solitaire
Robert Scoble and I walked around MSDN last week with a camera and here's the first snippet where I talk about my experiences building Solitaire for Longhorn. Watching it now, it seems to me that I need to chill a bit and maybe take a breath now and again. : )