To continue with my topic on things you can do in VB9 that you cannot (yet) do in any other .NET language, I wanted to write a bit about XML Schema Support and intellisense support for XML properties in VB9.

First, I highly recommend reading Eric Meijer and Brian Beckman’s research paper XLINQ: XML Programming Refactored (The Return Of The Monoids), which provides background as to the motivation and implementation of XLINQ technology. The Monads referred to in the paper remind us that the constructs being integrated into the .NET framework are enabling a more functional programming ...

While I am not an expert on the subject, in my tenure as a founder of the Bay Area .NET Users Group (Bay.NET), I am very much aware of cultural differences between programmers who work with the Visual Basic and C# languages. An excellent overview written by Nigel Shaw on these cultural differences can be found here.

Having lived in many places throughout the world I would consider myself as one who is most interested in culture and cultural differences. In my experiences, I have discovered in myself an inclination to find things I appreciate about other cultures (and people).

I think we all tend to look at differences, be they cultural, as in those who prefer Apple Computers to Windows or Linux and make some value judgments based on what camp we live in and what camp

Some songs are deeply personal and yet address experiences we all go through, creating an environment for the listener to experience their own feelings intensely. Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” is one of these. It is a song about a person involved in a moment in time where she becomes aware that someone else is breaking up with her, apparently brought on by a decision from the other person.

We start in Imogen’s head asking “Where are we?”, as if waking from a dream, hearing her voice in a mixed with a vocoder, with thoughts of disorientation and the key line “sinking feeling”. Whether we heard all of the words or not, if we heard that phrase, it is something we can all identify with.

Her incredible sense of description, blending metaphors of movement with a sense of awareness that something completely personal is happening within a larger world ...

I wanted to begin sharing some of my perceptions about music that I have been listening to recently that has been particularly inspiring to me.

One track that never fails to compel me is Chab's "Closer To Me (Alex Neri Vocal Mix)". Note the vocals are by JD Davis, not Alex Neri. The track's slow build and highly syncopated rhythmic intro gives the listener so many choices in the dance moves they might choose to act upon, a choice I feel is basic to a good dance track. There is a sense of mechanism and power that emerges with the arpeggiated synth that cuts through at about 1 1/2 minutes and carries the entire song with its melodic line. The line itself is the hook of the song, thr ...

I recently got a new computer preloaded with Windows Vista. I must say that when I got the machine I was extremely surprised at how well it worked and how easy it was for me to transfer my data to the new machine (Lenovo T60p). With all of the comments I had been hearing which indicated that many people felt that the Vista operating system was problematic, I was rather surprised at how smooth my transition was.

Alas, this was not to last, and what is rather ironic is that I have been subject to a number of issues in the past month that have been rather disruptive and taken some time to remedy and yet are not related specifically to any flaw in the operating system.

The first sign of trouble was when I shut the computer down after doing some work and found it would not start the next morning. I believe a file was (or files were) corrupted somehow on shutdown (although I do not know for sure) and were only able to get back to an operable state by restoring ...

I have often noted with intense interest that people who program in particular languages seem also to fall into certain patterns of thinking about the problems they solve. Kenneth Iverson, the inventor of the APL programming language spoke to this point in his 1980 Turing award lecture entitled “Notation as a tool of thought”. The thesis of that paper is the general idea that “the advantages of executability and universality found in programming languages can be effectively combined, in a single coherent language…”.

Fast forward to 2007 – here we are in a world where there are not five, but hundreds, if not thousands of programming languages. For ...

We've decided to wait on the release of our next project "Don't Stop" in order to find a record company to work with who can help us with the marketing and promotion of our work.

"Don't Stop" is a great song and we really want it to reach a much broader audience than our previous singles so have taken the decision to wait on the release.

It has been really amazing to do all of this ourselves for the past four years, but the time has come to take things to a new level. Charlie has some great video ideas, and if we are going to shoot a video, I want to know with certainty that it will be seen. Sometimes you have to hold off in life for the things you want for them to come to you. This is one of those times.