I ran into an interesting problem earlier today. I was using a CDR dump from our Cisco system. However, all of the datetime fields were represented as seconds. I knew right away that it used an epoch value. What I didn’t know is what the originating date was. Apparently, I was correct at my first guess. I guessed that it was using the standard Unix epoch value of 1/1/1970. Many applications, such as Microsoft Excel, use 1/1/1900.

Last night, August 7th, on World News with Diane Sawyer, their research team collected evidence to show how carrying purses and other items can cause harm if too heavy. According to their research, a single shoulder strap bag, such as a purse, messenger bag, duffle bag, should not weigh more than 5% of your body weight on a consistent basis. So, if you’re a male weighing in at 200lbs, your bag shouldn’t be more than 10lbs. I wanted to see what that meant for me. I currently carry a 17” Dell Precision M6700 that weighs in at 7.76lbs. That’s hefty, but it’s something that I feel is needed for the line of work I use. I’ve been using a backpack, but I’ll cover that in a bit. For this example, I’ll use the weight of the new messenger bag that I purchased for me and my team. Over on Amazon, we had purchased the 17.3” Microsoft Impact Messenger Bag for $43. Amazon states that the shipping weight is 2.9lbs. I didn’t weigh it, but the bags I purchased with shipping packaging weighed on average 3.5lbs. So, I’ll assume this bag weighs in at 2.9lbs. That’s already 10.66lbs before adding pens, paper, tablets, and anything else I may normally carry in my bag.

I’ve kept track of tweets. I’ve kept track of the user group anniversary date. I’ve kept track of my marriage anniversary date. But, for some reason I forgot about when I started blogging. That was, until one of my good friends, G. Andrew Duthie, blogged about forgetting about his blogging anniversary as well.

A former coworker of mine had blogged awhile back about solving an issue with older Cisco AnyConnect clients on Windows 8. When installing AnyConnect on a Windows 8 machine, the display name key in the Windows registry for the Cisco AnyConnect VPN Virtual Miniport Adapter has some extra data.

There are times that you may need to install an older Windows application especially something developed using Visual Basic 6 or earlier. In these cases, you should always ensure that the installed application is using the most current common control library available from Microsoft. If not, you may receive strange error message that logs the following in the Event Viewer (abbreviated exception):

First of all, before I begin, please know that in every case, you should detect browser features and not browser versions. However, there are still times that you may need to know the browser version (such as providing screenshots of various browser alerts – ie: ActiveX installation).

If you’ve ever built a Windows Phone 7 or Windows Phone 8 application, you may have found that your app looks great when building it in Visual Studio. However, as soon as you attempt to change the theme of the application, the design would not appear correct.

As the years go by, more and more research, information, and documents can be found online. However, several business verticals still use CDs and DVDs to access research content, backup documents, and share files. In every position that I’ve ever held, I have been asked by someone to locate a disk. I had an old WMI script that would grab the information, place it in a text file on a machine, and notify me via a net message that the file was ready. This was great and did the job, but I wanted to see how I can do the same using PowerShell (and WMI).

So today is the big day where my wife is being induced with our fourth child. Given the past, today’s experience should last between 6-10 hours. Knowing I’ll be hearing monitors in the background, I figured I should do some work. Since I haven’t spent the time to complete an app for Windows Phone yet I figured I would challenge myself. I’ll be live blogging this experience today and am up against mother nature. My goal is to see what comes first: my new baby boy or my new Windows Phone app. Wish me luck (on both fronts)!

On May 3rd, Wrox Press released Professional ASP.NET 4.5 in C# and VB. I co-authored this book with two Microsoft employees Pranav Rastogi and Scott Hanselman as well as two Microsoft MVPs Christian Wenz and Todd Miranda. The book is packed with the most current information about ASP.NET 4.5. It is also the only book I am aware of that explains One ASP.NET. The foreword for this book is written by Scott Hunter of the ASP.NET team.