Microsoft Notebook: Top exec shares business lessons

• It's often better to cannibalize your own business than to give someone else an opportunity to do it.
• In some situations, your biggest competition is yourself.
• One of the best ways to compete is to bet big on a "paradigm shift."
• When you dominate a market and you're looking for ways to grow, adjust your thinking to enlarge the potential market you're pursuing.
• Keep your mind open to unexpected opportunity.

Over the weekend I realized that my notebook became quite slow and was always reading something on the HD, even without any memory pressure. When I was to some music, starting an application was really corrupting the sound. So after some I realized that my Primary IDE controller went from DMA back to the old PIO mode. To solve this issue I reinstalled the the primary IDE port using the Device Manager, and after two reboots it went back to DMA and a acceptable speed.

You might find more information about that issue here: IDE ATA and ATAPI disks use PIO mode after multiple time-out or CRC errors occur.

Ever wanted to copy paste some code from Visual Studio .NET 2003 to your blog tool (e.g. Sauce Reader) and keep the colorization ?
Here is the solution, CopySourceAsHtml, an awesome plugin from Colin Coller. The cool point is that if “VS.NET can highlight it, CSAH can copy it, and your code should look the same in your browser as it does in your editor“. I was a bit disappointed not finding the context menu in the editor for other source then C# but you might add a keyboard shortcups as described on this page.

Even better, Colin provides the source. I guess I will soon integrate his colorization way to Tech Head Brothers Word 2003 publishing tool.

“Today, you can download a tool that you can use to describe the concepts in a problem domain as the basis for a modeling tool or graphical designer. It is itself a graphical tool built on top of our designer platform and it is completely integrated into Visual Studio. For example, if you need a business process modeling tool, this editor allows you to describe the concepts specific to the way you like to model your business processes.”

It is basically a graphical designer hosted in Visual Studio 2005 for designing and editing the concepts (or metamodel) of visual domain specific languages.

There is also an interesting : “Walkthrough of the Microsoft Tools for Domain Specific Languages“ showing the use of the object model for a user interaction process (UIP) chart language. UIP chart defines pages and transitions between them as part of the design of a Web site, a wizard, or a form-based application. Figure 1 is an example of a UIP chart for a fictitious online shopping Web site. You might find more information on this page about the User Interface Process (UIP) Application Block - Version 2.0.

If you are using log4net like me then I am sure you will like this idea. I combined it with ReSharper.

A log4net tip

This morning I woke up at 4:30 AM, and could not sleep anymore, so I decided to work on my publishing tool for my site Tech Head Brothers. I finally managed to publish directly from Word 2003 in a secure way.
The website expose a publishing web service that uses WS-Policy, to specify that it needs Signature and Encryption using a X.509 certificate. When the user hit the publish button, the tool:

1. Transform the XML generated by Word 2003, e.g. to include pictures, colorize source code...
2. Zip the XML document and all referenced files (pictures, zip)
3. Attach the zip file using DIME to the SOAP context
4. Add signature and encryption to the SOAP context
5. Call the web service