For the life of me, I can't seem to come up with any new blogging topics. At this point, I've exhausted all that's in MVC Preview 3, and haven't been doing anything super fun or cool at work lately. Hmmm, toss some things out and maybe I'll come up with something. Anyone?

On the flip side, I've fallen in love with Twitter - allows me to output my thoughts immediately.

This is either for your consumption or mine, whatever suits you best!

1. There's a new technical preview of Windows Live Writer available here.
2. Use Witty for twitter on the PC, it's f'n awesome!

Ohh, by the way today was the first time that Windows Live Search was defeated in one swift blow from Google when searching for 'twhirl' (Live vs. Google) and 'witty' (Live vs. Google). Just don't keep that up Live, or I'm switching back.

I'm giving this a try, it's the "fad" thing now - yeah, I'm late to the game, I know. Oh well, let's see how that goes - probably just as good as my MySpace & FaceBook stints... I give it 1.5 months, and it'll be done! Anyway, if your in any way interested, start following me.

I've just released my re-designed website and blog. I finally decided it was time to give up the blue and yellow look for a more inviting green and orange look. Below are some notable changes:

• The major structure and content has stayed the same, but I have made some perks to drive more traffic to portions of the site. All incoming links remain the same.
• I have also decided to ditch the full width of your browser to a more appealing 1024px width. This gives me the opportunity for placement of information.
• I've added a quicklinks and a quickblog section to the right sidebar allowing for quick access to the most important information easily.
• There's no more "ideas" page - mainly because it was just a page that didn't get looked at or where I wouldn't take ideas from anymore.

If you come across any issues, please contact me or leave a comment!

Just wanted to share the beta of my re-designed website. Please kick the tires some for me and give me some honest criticism. The first thing you'll notice is the ditching of the yellow & blue with a more fun green & orange.

You'll also notice that I did a bit of re-organization within the menu, but for the most common tasks - I added a "quicklinks" section that hopefully has the most common tasks one is looking for. I've also tied my blog in with the new design, displaying the last 10 entries, hoping to drive more visitors to the site.

Again, please enjoy this and comment on what you like, don't like, whatever!

Linky to Beta

Ahh, I've worked so hard on this. I hope you all enjoy it. Check out my new design as I've taken a different direction for the site. I hope your a real developer and feel at home with my new layout!

Update: Okay, thanks for humoring me :) The site has been officially moved and the link above has been updated.

When I was setting up my blog (I used BlogEngine.NET) I was walking through some tutorials on how I can create my own theme since none of the built-in ones fit my overall site style. One of the videos I was watching showed him converting a design from Open Source Web Design. This is a very cool site for the design challenged folks like me who can't come up with a good color combination or a great layout scheme.

Since viewing this site, I've decided it was time for me to ditch my current website look and bring in some new "flavor". Now, it's not live yet - but I'm still working on my redesign and will post when that is live. If you have any other cool open source sites like this or repositories for [free] stock images, please let me know. This stuff is great!

Well, if you've made it over here and saw this blog post - great! I realized it was time to start blogging again, and since http://weblogs.asp.net is getting too extremely cluttered, I decided to venture out on my own. First off, thanks for your support and I hope you enjoy keeping up to date on my blog. I swear I'll be more proactive about things. The biggest reason is leading me up to my second statement, I have some exciting news to come! I can't share just yet, but the two things I have in the works should be very exciting for both me and the community.

So, hopefully I can become more diligent in posting, as I've been doing some really cool things recently, and wanted to start sharing again. Now, I still can't say for certainty that this blog will remain technical by any means, but I'll definitely try my best. Until later...

I've been keeping this under wraps for about 6 months now, but since the book has been finally published & I just received my copy, I'm happy to promote the book Windows Developer Power Tools.I was asked by James Avery and Jim Holmes to be a contributor writing about Unleash It. Check out the book as it has a ton of awesome free & open source tools, and read my section (12.8) starting on page 650. Yay!

If you’ve visited my site tonight, you may have noticed that it’s currently down for maintenance. What does this mean? Well, nothing bad of course, just migrating from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005 which will hopefully allow me to utilize some fancier features with the new website coming in a few weeks (hint hint). This migration hasn’t been easy as I started off with high hopes from my hoster. 24 hours later I have a working plan - which involves the following steps…

1. Backup my SQL 2000 database
2. Download my SQL 2000 database to my home server
3. Restore my database to my home server (SQL 2005)
4. Backup my database from my home server
5. Upload my database to my SQL 2005 server
6. Restore my database to SQL 2005
7. Execute a script altering the schema from ‘user’ to ‘dbo’ on all objects
8. Point website / forums to SQL 2005 server & hope it all works!

Eight fricking steps, not too shabby considering it’s considered a major migration. I really wish it would have been easier, however my hoster seems to have some issues restoring SQL 2000 databases to my SQL 2005 server, so it must be ‘cleansed’ prior to a restore. Anyway, hopefully things will go smoothly as I’m currently on step 2. Please let me know if you notice any issues, though I doubt anyone will.

Update: Site is now back up with a smooth migration! Now, if only I could tell the difference from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005…