Minh T. Nguyen

Yesterday, I had lunch with “Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists” author Sebastien St-Laurent. In case you haven't heard yet, he is forming his own publishing company as he is dissatisfied with the process of publishing through a traditional publisher. All self-publishers should keep a good eye on his development. Looks like he has put some serious thought and research into this for quite some time and I am looking forward to see how well Paradoxal Press will do. If I write a book again, I will definitely look into this.

 

As I recently self-published Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks, I have learned that the biggest hurdle to self-publishing is marketing. Your book can be superb, but does not sell if you don’t invest a lot of time and money into marketing, because people simply don’t know about it. In the busy life of mine, I unfortunately don’t have the time to invest in marketing myself. Even researching on a third-party company to take care of marketing by itself can be a full-time job. Getting book reviews in magazines and other websites or blogs is even tougher than you think. There are websites that are solely dedicated to reviewing books about .NET, but even sending them free books does not guarantee placement or even mentioning. Marketing just takes a lot of effort, work, follow-up and one just have to be persuasive and diligent.

 

PS: My offer still holds: I'll be happy to send anyone a free copy of my book as long as you write a review about it on your website/blog/amazon/bn.com afterwards.

In installing Longhorn and Avalon CTP on Virtual PC 2004, I've learned some lessons that I'd like to share with you:

- Don't use differencing virtual hard disks for something you project to be rather big. I have a "base" Windows XP SP2 virtual machine and hard disk, so that whenever I want to try out some new (and possibly instable) program, I create a new temporary virtual machine with a differencing virtual hard disk off the base WindowsXP one. This is fine for temporary and small programs, but when I installed Avalon CTP + Whidbey, the differencing hard disk was about 3.6 GB big, which is almost the same size as the Windows XP base and the guest OS ran really slow. Instead, just make a physical copy of the base virtual machine and hard disk, rename them if needed, and then take it from there. After doing that, my WindowsXP + Avalon CTP + Whidbey was "only" 4.2 GB big and ran significantly faster.

- Shut down the guest OS when you transfer the OS to another machine. The other day, I copied my running 4 GB Longhorn OS from my work computer to my personal laptop over the internet using VPN. After spending an entire day for the VPN copy to complete, I couldn't start the Longhorn instance on my laptop because I didn't have enough virtual memory there. Unfortunately, you can't change the memory allocation while the guest OS is still running. I even tried changing the memory allocation in the .vhd file (since it's really just an XML file), but I was still not able to start the instance (not to mention how the guest OS is going to like that). Anyhow, I end up going back to my work computer to shut down the Longhorn OS and then transfer it again.

- Install Virtual Machine Additions ASAP. I was aware that installing Virtual Machine Additions will make the guest OS run much faster and support the mouse much better. However, I was not aware that it is also the requirement to run Longhorn 4074 in color. When I first installed Longhorn on my Virtual PC, I was not able to have it run in color. I tried to fixed this problem first, before I installed anything else, so I tried installing various graphics drivers on Longhorn and playing with the display settings to no avail. Only after installing the Virtual Machine Additions, Longhorn would start in color.

- The eraser trick on Robert Memoir's great Virtual PC website doesn't do it for me. After doing all that work, my virtual hard disk would be even bigger than it was before. Don't know if I am doing something wrong, but maybe you guys have more luck than me. I'll have to try the pre-compactor tool when I get a chance.

- Ben Armstrong has a great tip on how to use Virtual PC for computer migration

If you are leading a .NET user group or write book reviews for websites/magazines/blogs, send me an email (nguyentriminh@yahoo.com). I'll be happy to send out free copies of my book Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks to you.

Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks explains how to use VS.NET efficiently. Organized into short and easy-to-grasp sections, and containing tips and tricks on everything from editing and compiling to debugging and navigating within the VS.NET IDE, this book is a must-read for all .NET developers, regardless of expertise and whether they program in C#, VB.NET, or any other .NET language. This book covers the Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, and 2005 Beta 1 releases.

See http://www.enderminh.com/minh/vsnet_tt.aspx for more info.

My book "Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks" is now available on amazon.com as well as barnesandnoble.com. For a complete listing of all available online retailers, please check out addall.com. The cheapest place to buy my book, however, is on Lulu.com where it's currently on sale for $13.95.

About the Book: Visual Studio .NET is one of the most versatile and extensible programming tools released by Microsoft. The number of features and shortcuts available in VS.NET is truly immense, and it grows tremendously with each release. Developers who are unaware of these timesaving features surely miss out on opportunities to increase their programming productivity and effectiveness.

Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks explains how to use VS.NET efficiently. Organized into short and easy-to-grasp sections, and containing tips and tricks on everything from editing and compiling to debugging and navigating within the VS.NET IDE, this book is a must-read for all .NET developers, regardless of expertise and whether they program in C#, VB.NET, or any other .NET language. This book covers the Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, and 2005 Beta 1 releases.

In this book you'll find the following:

• More than 120 tips for editing and writing your code, navigating within the IDE, and compiling, debugging, and deploying your application
• Section dedicated to VS.NET 2005
• Keyboard shortcuts for the majority of tips
• More than 90 figures and screenshots

About the Author: Minh T. Nguyen is a website development engineer with Expedia.com. He has worked with Visual Studio .NET since its beta stages and regularly gives workshops and writes articles for the .NET community.

---

• ISBN: 1-4116-1396-1
• Suggested Retail Price: $15.95
• Format: Paperback, 124 pages
• Publisher: Lulu Press, Inc.; 1 edition (September 2004)
• Preview: vsnet_tt.pdf

---

Buy it for $13.95 on lulu.com

Buy it for $14.35 on barnesandnoble.com

Buy it for $15.95 on amazon.com

About the Book: Visual Studio .NET is one of the most versatile and extensible programming tools released by Microsoft. The number of features and shortcuts available in VS.NET is truly immense, and it grows tremendously with each release. Developers who are unaware of these timesaving features surely miss out on opportunities to increase their programming productivity and effectiveness.

Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks explains how to use VS.NET efficiently. Organized into short and easy-to-grasp sections, and containing tips and tricks on everything from editing and compiling to debugging and navigating within the VS.NET IDE, this book is a must-read for all .NET developers, regardless of expertise and whether they program in C#, VB.NET, or any other .NET language. This book covers the Visual Studio .NET 2002, 2003, and 2005 Beta 1 releases.

In this book you'll find the following:

• More than 120 tips for editing and writing your code, navigating within the IDE, and compiling, debugging, and deploying your application
• Section dedicated to VS.NET 2005
• Keyboard shortcuts for the majority of tips
• More than 90 figures and screenshots

About the Author: Minh T. Nguyen is a website development engineer with Expedia.com. He has worked with Visual Studio .NET since its beta stages and regularly gives workshops and writes articles for the .NET community.

---

• ISBN: 1-4116-1396-1
• Suggested Retail Price: $15.95
• Format: Paperback, 124 pages
• Publisher: Lulu Press, Inc.; 1 edition (September 2004)
• Website: http://www.enderminh.com/minh/vsnet_tt.aspx
• Preview: vsnet_tt.pdf

---

Buy it for $14.95 on lulu.com

Buy it for $15.95 on amazon.com

This doesn't have much to do with .NET, but since I am the co-conference chair on this conference, and since there are a lot of Vietnamese people who use my Vietnamese Conversions XML web service, I can't help but spam my own blog with this ad. In terms of technical stuff, I am excited to announce that Paul Baranowski, the founder of the internet anti-censorship program Peek-A-Booty will be speaking about Vietnam's firewall.

---

The Vietnamese Professional Society is a worldwide non-profit organization composed of Vietnamese professionals from various fields. Some of the goals of VPS are to facilitate the exchange of professional information, provide the opportunity for students, professionals, and the public to learn about the current conditions in Vietnam and to contribute toward the advancement of the welfare of the Vietnamese people both in Vietnam as well as overseas. Since its inception in January 1990, VPS has grown to 25 chapters throughout North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.

Besides the many local events that each chapter organizes, VPS as a whole also organizes regular conferences in North America, Europe and Australia. Previous North American Conferences were held in Hawaii, Southern California, Washington, Houston and Dallas. This year, the North American conference will return to heart of the Vietnamese community in Southern California.

The bilingual, 2-day conference will take place at the Doubletree Hotel Santa Ana/Orange County Airport on October 23rd and 24th 2004. The conference's theme is "Roles of Vietnamese Professionals - Global and Local Perspectives" and the conference program will include a number of well-known Vietnamese professionals, many workshops, discussions and sessions. More than 250 conference attendees from all of the United States and Canada are expected to participate in this event.

While VPS Southern California is honored to be the host of this event, this conference is organized by all North American chapters. We welcome ideas and suggestions and hope that you will not only attend the conference, but also take active part in shaping it.

For more information or to register, please visit http://www.vps.org/bm2004

After working on this for more than a year, my book Visual Studio .NET Tips and Tricks is finally coming to its final stages. Last month, it went through copyediting and currently is going through indexing. This book has been delayed for many months now. However, I wouldn't post this blog entry, if I am not certain that the book will appear on the market soon. To my best estimate, you will be able to order it on lulu.com by mid-October (if not earlier) and pre-order it on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com by November.

Let's cross our fingers. I'll post more in the coming weeks....

I found a bug in my Vietnamese Conversions utility. During the conversion from Unicode to ASCII (removing any Vietnamese accents), the Ð-sign was under some circumstances not properly replaced with D.

The bug is now fixed. The .NET XML web service has also been updated.

Minh T. Nguyen.

I've updated the Vietnamese Conversions Web Service yesterday. I've coded and added a feature to remove Vietnamese signs from unicode text altogether.

Before

After

Of course, this has been added to the .NET XML Web Service as well. Enjoy and let me know of any bugs.

 

I went to the exhibition at TechEd 2004 today. Below are some pictures I have taken.

TechEd 2004 Sign in the hall

Aahh.. wireless internet....

Live network status of the entire place

Exhibition Hall

Some of the exhibitors

Microsoft Booth in the exhibition hall

I also saw Rory Blyth and Carl Franklin from .NET Rocks, but didn't talk to them. They seemed pretty busy. As always, a lot of freebies and information, but I guess the CD I valued most was the Visual Studio .NET 2005 Technology Preview (yeah, I am one of the few people left on this earth who doesn't have a MSDN subscription).

I've updated the Vietnamese Conversions XML Web Service today. There was a bug in the UTF8->Unicode conversion. Well, it's not really a bug, but here's the scenario:

If you convert Vietnamese unicode into UTF-8 and then send the verbatim UTF-8 escape sequences over email, all daggers (byte value 160) are converted into single spaces (byte value 32). To the “naked eye”, daggers look like spaces, but they do have different byte values, so if you convert them back into Unicode, it will be messed up. I have been told that this applies to nearly all conversion utilities such as VPSKeys, VNI, VietPad, etc. But don't blame these software, because they do the conversion right. It's the email gateways that we need to blame to convert daggers into spaces.

In the Vietnamese unicode set, there are only four characters that when converted contain daggers:

Unicode	UTF-8 sequence	Byte values
à	Ã	195 160
Ạ	áº	225 186 160
Ơ	Æ	198 160
Ỡ	á»	225 187 160

At any rate, I've added some code to convert those daggers back into spaces when it meets one of these four scenarios. I've also send the code to some of the creators of the other software utilities and hope they can update their software as well if they think it's necessary.

Again, it's not a bug per se, so consider this an enhancement to make the conversion a bit more intelligent.

My first article appeared today on DotNetJunkies.com:

http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/Tutorial/E80EC96F-1C32-4855-85AE-9E30EECF13D7.dcik

I wrote about ASP.NET 2.0's new Client Callback Feature, which allows you to call server-side methods from JavaScript without the need for posting back. As an example, I built a Windows Explorer-lookalike that is all client-script driven although you navigate through the server's file system.

I'd like to thank Adam Kinney and Derrill Dabkoski for proof-reading the article and provide me with suggestions.

Every once in a while Microsoft comes out with great new programming competition to kick-start the development and promotion of the new emerging technology that Microsoft is pushing for. This is a very smart move, because developers get their feet wet with this new technology (and possibly love it and continue developing with them) and Microsoft benefits from the series of new third-party controls and products that they can use as a showcase of this new technology.

This was the case about two years ago, when Microsoft was still pushing the ".NET evolves around XML Web Services" campaign. Do you guys still remember the much-hyped .NET XML Web Services competition that Microsoft organized in the early .NET days? What ever happened to that competition? There was so much promotion regarding that competition, but yet I can't recall seeing any big announcements of the winners. I even remember other developers posting about the lack of announcement. Did we all miss it?

Anyhow, a couple of months ago Microsoft pushed another big competition for the new Tablet PC wave. The winner of the "Does Your Code Think in Ink" competition would win up to $15,000, a car, a fancy trip to Thailand or a home entertainment package. I am sure many developers submitted their Tablet PC user sample, and so did I for the first time.

Yet when the deadline has passed, there was another magical disappearance of a much-hyped competition. In 1984-style, Microsoft takes down the website (http://www.doesyourcodethinkinink.com), erases all mentioning of this competition and fails to announce the winners as it promised too. In addition, PC Magazine never made the winning apps available in its download section as advertised throughout the competition. Maybe I can't find it.

Why the secrecy, I wonder? Wouldn't it be smart to showcase all these applications? I'd love to see them. The competition also mentions that you can send them a self-addressed, stamped envelope to get a list of winners. I did, but to no avail.

After "Does Your Code Think in Ink", Microsoft just started a few weeks ago the "Does Your App Think in Ink" competition (http://www.doesyourappthinkinink.com/). This time, they target vendors, increased the winning price to $100,000 and gave more development time. In that competition, they even refer to the just-released Tablet PC PowerToys (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/downloads/powertoys.asp). Are those PowerToys the winning applications of the previous competition? Why re-do an almost identical competition? Was this all planned all along to use the winning apps of the previous competition to showcase in this competition? Or did the first competition failed to attract enough samples? What's the strategy here?

At any rate, since my application didn't win, I am making it publicly available here:

InkTalk is a PowerToy for the Tablet PC that allows you to chat with another InkTalk client over the internet using your natural handwriting. You can simply write your message and the other InkTalk client will see your message in your original handwriting.

You can copy and paste ink to and from other ink-enabled applications like Windows Journal and also save your messages as a GIF file or as text file provided that operating system has a text-recognition engine (a real Tablet PC does, while the Tablet PC SDK does not).

You can download the executable here:
http://www.enderminh.com/minh/inktalk.aspx

The entire source code here is also available here:
http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=33a09f30-e95e-4e1a-810b-1317308d6e1a

Have fun and let me know if you have any information on the winning applications. Congratulations to the mysterious winners. ;)

For those Vietnamese people among you guys (okay, fine, not too many of you): I've just finished developing a conversion utility that allows you to convert from Vietnamese legacy formats such as VPS, VNI or Vietnet into Unicode. This utility is also helpful in decoding those gibberish emails that resulted from incorrect Vietnamese unicode settings (use the Unicode UTF8 or Unicode HTML source format in this case).

The web-utility is available here:
http://www.enderminh.com/minh/vnconversions.aspx

I also make the .NET XML web service freely available here:
http://www.enderminh.com/webservices/VietnameseConversions.asmx

I just finished coding this, so I can imagine that it's still a bit buggy. Just report those bugs to me, and I'll fix it.

VPS

Vietnet

Converted into Unicode

Have fun!

Several months ago, I was conducting a 7-week class about Microsoft .NET for the Vietnamese Professionals Society - Southern California chapter. It was a not-for-profit class with good reviews and I really had a blast teaching .NET to migraters. I just love it when I show these new cool features and get people amazed by how powerful .NET is.

Anyhow, I am making the complete PowerPoint presentations available here. However, my class was primarily filled with hands-on demos, so these PowerPoint files don't have much textual content. Nevertheless, I believe that the animations that I have created can be very helpful for you if you teach the CLR, ADO.NET, ASP.NET architecture and XML web services concepts. Feel free to use these slides for non-commercial educational purposes.

Complete PowerPoint: www.enderminh.com/minh/binary/vps_dot_net.zip
Just the Animations: www.enderminh.com/minh/binary/vps_dot_net_animations.zip

Have fun!

I've updated the .NET Developers Blog today. For one, all time stamps are now based on Pacific Standard Time (Los Angeles, GMT-8). The time stamps do not reflect the time of when the author originally created the new post, but when it was indexed by my aggregator bot. This is more dependable than using the author's post date in the rss feed.

Secondly, I've added an OPML and an RSS feed to the blog. The RSS feed looks a little bit different from the one that .Text generates, but it should still abide to the RSS 2.0 specifications. Let me know if it doesn't work.

Happy blogging!

While I was reading through some of the blogs on the internet, I stumbled over several posts of people who mentioned that they think that weblogs.asp.net and so on is getting too overcrowded. They wanted to have a non-Microsoft list, and I felt the same way. Well, it's not that I don't like to read Microsoft blogs--I just wanted to see what the non-MS community blogs about as well.

Another thing that I don't like about most of the big blog portals is that they only list blogs on their own domain. So, where do people like me go who don't host on the big guys? Well, what started as an idea over lunch, ended after some 6 hours of non-stop coding with this new website:

.NET Developers Blog

An aggregated blog of non-Microsoft .NET developers

The website is located at http://www.enderminh.com/netdev. The website doesn't have anything fancy and has a very crude design, but I believe that visitors don't care about that too much. Given that I have just coded this within this day, I am sure that there are bugs that I will have to iron out over the next days, so bear with me.

I am very curious as to how popular this website will be, but we'll see.

Happy blogging,

I just finished reading "A First Look at ASP.NET v.2.0", which is a great book I recommend everyone who wants to seriously read up on upcoming Whidbey stuff and are just simply tired of seeing the same high-level slides we see to much at Microsoft events. It's a rather expensive book ($40), but definately dives into detail into all new features of this I-wish-I-can-have-this-now release. It's extremely excited about all these new functionalities and controls I can work with.

Forget about master/content pages, generics, partial classes and SQL Server cache dependencies, here are the other great new things that Whidbey will bring that is being overlooked:
   
The MultiView control
  
The ASP.NET MultiView Control is a control consisting of different Views, in which you can define sections of HTML and ASP.NET code that you can turn on and off. Only one View can be active at any given time. What I have done in the past with many ASP:Panels, this single control will have a unified model for me to do this. The MultiView control can be used to generate wizards for instance, but wait... there is a new
   
Wizard Control!!
   
Yippieee, the new Wizard Control allows you to define each WizardStep declaratively and has built-in function to navigate back and forth in the wizard and control the next/previous/finish button appearance. The beauty of this is that the Wizard control allows you to generate wizards without the need of multiple pages. It's all postback on a single page!
   
The Literal Control
   
Ahh, the Literal Control now has an LiteralMode=LiteralMode.Encode attribute that will automatically HtmlEncode all its content. Very neat idea. I was about to write my own Label control that does that and then I stumbled on this. Can we say Bye-Bye to cross-site scripting attacks? No, not entirely, but it definately helps out a lot, don't you think?
   
Panel.ScrollBars
   
Very cool, the ASP:Panel control now has a scrollbars. So, you just define a constant height or width and the scrollbars will appear as needed. The web is really merging with the Windows Forms world more and more, in preparation for Longhorn, I guess.
   
ImageMap
   
The new ASP:NET ImageMap control allows you to define clickable hotspots of an image. This will generate the appropriate

It's official (although we all kinda know this by now), but Whidbey and Yukon now have official product names and release dates:

Whidbey will be called Visual Studio .NET 2005 and Yukon will be called SQL Server 2005. Both of them will be released in the first half of 2005.

Source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=4&u=/nm/20040311/tc_nm/tech_microsoft_delay_dc

Before everyone complains about why it was delayed. I dunno, I have my own opinion about this. They say that Whidbey is being released since it's so tighly integrated with Yukon, and I understand that some people (like me) care less about Yukon and are more excited about Whidbey.

However, c'mon folks, give Microsoft some time. They say that they are releasing Yukon, Whidbey, Longhorn etc simply whenever it's ready. Under no circumstances should they release software prematurely if it's simply not ready for prime time yet. On the one side, everyone complains that Microsoft produces buggy software, but on the other side we are pushing them to release stuff ASAP.

Look at your products you write at your company. You guys know how incredibely hard it is to write bug-free code. If Whidbey is released at a later time, it's for the better. I just wish I can go to sleep and wake up in 2005 to start writing master and content pages now. ;)

Yesterday, I stumbled on a well-known website of a company with tons of customers that was vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. It's so funny, I always thought that by now most of the big guys are past this stage and prevent these exploits for quite some time. But yeah, I was able to tweak the SQL code and see parts of the SQL statement. I was able to run some SQL statements that slowed down the database.

However, I didn't feel morally right to mess with the data more and informed the company about this vulnerability and they fixed it by now.

Nevertheless, I found it ironic that MS Access in this case is “better“ than SQL Server, for it apparently does not recognize the “--” comment tag. So, I was a little bit limited in tweaking the SQL statement, because I had to accomodate for the SQL statements that follow my injection.

So, yeah, folks, please take a time and learn what a SQL injection attack is and fix your code. There is soooo much damage one can do with these kind of attacks, and it's scary how many companies still allow this. 

See: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/794

I've stumbled over these Longhorn videos. They are not high-quality, but for someone who has never seen Longhorn, check this out:

http://www.winsupersite.com/files/pdc2003_aero_rock_video.wmv

http://www.winsupersite.com/files/pdc2003_longhorn_desktop.wmv

http://www.winsupersite.com/files/pdc2003_avalon_transparency.wmv

ftp://ftp.extremetech.com/pub/extremetech/news/winhec/WaveWindows.wmv

ftp://ftp.extremetech.com/pub/extremetech/news/winhec/StarWars.wmv

ftp://ftp.extremetech.com/pub/extremetech/news/winhec/dizzy.wmv

Have fun, and yeah, if you have any other Longhorn videos, please let me know!

Does anyone know where to view or download the 2-minute Longhorn “movie trailer” that was shown at DevDays 2004?

I just finished reading (well, rather skimming) the book “ASP.NET Coding Strategies with the Microsoft ASP.NET Team”. In a nutshell, this is a great book--if only I have read it two years ago. As an experienced ASP.NET developer this book can be a bit boring at some points, since you know most of the stuff already.

It's interesting to see though that the Microsoft team suggests patterns and practices that I have adopted in my previous projects before--kind of a confirmation that I did it right. For those who are learning ASP.NET, I strongly recommend reading this book. It's very valuable and will save you the trouble from reinventing the wheel.

k, time to return to my “A First Look at ASP.NET v.2.0”, before I start with the “WinFX” book. Oh boy, soo many cool books to read, and so little time. ;)

So I attended DevDays 2004 in San Diego today. In a nutshell, it's nothing too surprising. The web development track was really repetative. I don't know about the other DevDays around the country, but the four sessions on the web track here could have easily been compacted into two. I didn't attend the Smart Clients track, so I can't comment on those.

I think what most people got excited about is Whidbey, but at this point I think I have attended too many user group meetings and conferences on Whidbey, that I simply have gotten used to it by now. Don't get me wrong, I think Whidbey is just freaking awesome and I can't wait until the final version is shipped. There are so many features I wish I can use in production code right now, and I am sure those people attending DevDays today who have never seen Whidbey in action must have been deeply impressed by today's great demonstration. It's just that by now, it seems as if Whidbey is already old news among early adopters---and that almost a year before it will be shipped.

Now, what did got me hooked today was a preview of Longhorn. I am probably one of the few developers left on this planet who didn't get a chance to go to PDC 2003 in Los Angeles, so I never got a chance to see Longhorn. I've read about it, I've seen code, but never saw it in action, and don't have access to the Longhorn Technology Preview (hey, if anyone can send me DVD from the PDC, I'll deeply appreciate it). Today's DevDays ended with a two minute movie-trailer-like preview of Longhorn, and--wow--those two minutes will blow your socks off, if you have never seen Longhorn before. Apple now has some serious competition when it comes to aesthetics!

Hope everyone else enjoyed DevDays 2004--it wasn't amazing, but sure beats being in the office for a change. On a good note, all San Diego DevDays attendees received Brent Rector's "Introducing Microsoft WinFX" book for free, since he was one of the speakers.

Minh T. Nguyen.
PS: Oh yeah, for those who want to know, the Whidbey Technology Preview DVD you receive is the 30703.27 build. I don't know if that's different from the PDC or not---let me know.

So, now I have my own blog. What gives?

I always have been reluctant to create my own blog for two reasons:

First, I don't believe in the "if you build it, they will come" notion when it comes to blogs. C'mon, just because you write a blog, doesn't mean that people will read it. Unless you are really funny or become relatively famous, it doesn't make you an important person all of a sudden.

Secondly, I have been writing diaries since I was twelve. Throughout my teenage life, I've written pretty much every day into it (though I have been a bit lazy recently). With almost 30 entire handwritten diaries completed until now, why do I need a blog on top of that?

To this, I have two answers:

First,  I have a passion for computer programming and innovative technologies. I've been completely hooked on Microsoft .NET since its beta stages and am starting to dive into Longhorn, Whidbey, etc... I've been writing a lot on the Microsoft .NET-oriented community site gotdotnet.com under the username "enderminh" and try to attend a lot of conferences and user group meetings. I figured that it's time to create my own blog so I can publish my technical ramblings. ;)

Secondly, unlike my diaries, this blog will be relatively technical one. So, you won't be reading much about my personal life, my very active involvement in the Vietnamese community, my cat, my passion for film music, my significant other, etc. For those stuff, just visit my unfortunately too static website at http://www.enderminh.com. Here on this blog, you'll find my thoughts, articles, user samples and opinion about the world of computer programming.

Enjoy