Get you code game on!
A good friend of mine, who works at Microsoft, pointed my to fun new add-on for Visual Studio 2010 – the Visual Studio Achievements Extension.
It reminds me of what Microsoft did for the Ribbons in Office with Ribbon Hero and Ribbon Hero 2.
The idea is a little cheesy, but fun never the less – and they do know how to sell the idea:
“Software engineer's glory so often goes unnoticed. Attention seems to come either when there are bugs or when the final project ships. But rarely is a developer appreciated for all the nuances and subtleties of a piece of code -- and all the heroics it took to write it.
Until now.
With the Visual Studio Achievements Extension, various achievements are unlocked based on your activity. When you unlock an achievement, Visual Studio lets you know visually with a pop-up. In addition, your Channel 9 profile is updated with any achievements you earn, recalculating your position on the leaderboard. Now, all that hard work won’t go unnoticed! Download it today!”
The list of achievements is not that long, but is still a beta release at this point. I think it would be cool to se the list extended, to allow new VS users to explore some of the more advanced features. It would also be cool to see support for achievements in 3rd party add-on.
Go ahead and give it a try :-)
http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio
Check-Out Check-In
I couldn't sleep so I decided to get up and check-in, 36 hours in advance.
Here one might think that perhaps it was a bit too early, but no. One of the benefits of an early check-in (preferably online) is, in addition to skipping the queue at the airport, is that you have greater influence on where you are seated on the plane. And on the long trips getting a seat with extra legroom, a piece from toilets and preferably by the window, makes all the difference. This is where SeatGuru comes into the picture.
On SeatGuru you can search for the routes of different airlines, and see what type of aircraft used and how it is configured - different companies can have different configurations for the same type of aircraft. You can see which seats are good, which have some disadvantages or which should be avoided.
So who knows - maybe my insomnia will actually give me a chance to sleep :-)
Adding CAPTCHA validation to BlogEngine.Net
A few months after starting my blog, I found myself having to deal with an increasing number of spam comments. I decided you try to reduce the amount of spam comments and did a bit of googling on the subject.
After a while I came across a blog post by Michael Ceranski called How to Block Spam Comments in BlogEngine.NET. It contained a step-by-step guide for adding a captcha validation to BlogEngine.net.
Following Michaels guide, I’ve added captcha to my blog and are eager to see (or rather NOT see?) the result. Hopefully this will keep my blog safe from anything, short of a monkey with a typewriter :-)
If you use BlogEngine.NET, you should definitely have a look at Michaels post.
SharePoint Saturday sessions available
The recorded sessions from SharePoint Saturday EMEA are now available.
SharePoint Saturday EMEA was an online event held on January 23rd 2010, with sessions on a variety if SharePoint topics. If you didn’t have a chance to attend the live sessions, then you can now watch the recordings on EndUserSharePoint.com.