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So I just bought two new laptop drives for the Dell 1720 that I have.  I figured I should keep hold of this machine for at least another year or so, and new drives that are easily faster and bigger than the current single drive would help me do just that.

I purchased 2x, 200 GB, 7200 RPM, Serial ATA Internal Hard Drive with Free Fall Sensor.  Not sure what exactly how the free fall sensor works but it could prove useful.

My plan is to try out the drives in the various RAID configurations (0 and then 1) and figure out based on that what I want to do.  Either way, even if I go with the redundancy mode it should easily be faster than my 5400 RPM 160 GB drive that I have now.

Hats off to awesome hardware!  Cross my fingers hoping that it tides my thirst for performance over until I deem it financially reasonable to buy a new laptop (or SERIOUS gaming machine or Apple).

Excel Project

My current project is leading me in some interesting ways.  One of the major focus points that I’ll be touching on is development with .NET against Excel and prospectively Excel Services.  Most of what I’ll be working on is primarily centered around an Services Oriented Architecture mentality.

I have since purchased the Programming Excel Services book from Microsoft Press written by Alvin J. Bruney.  From my quick perusal of the book it appears that there are some solid topics right in line with what the project will be attempting to encompass.  Between SQL Server functionality like Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS), and the services of SharePoint the scope of available use for Excel and Office based applications is massive, if not outright incomparable in competing products (are there any existing these days?)  I’m definitely looking forward to this effort.

Expression

I’ve also, mostly in my spare time that I have none of, started trying to get some graphics awesomeness in my skills.  I won’t even exaggerate, I’m not graphics wiz.  I can get layouts, design, and other such things put together.  I can even do some color matching appropriately.  But I can only do these things with the wonderfully archaic tools of pen, paper, pencil, and a bit of color pencils or other coloring devices.  Getting that back into the medium I need it in, the web and computer interfaces, is next to impossible for me.  So I hope to change that over the next 4-6 months and get some solid chops on the graphics side of the web world.

Some of the additional sites that I’ve been checking out lately include the following:

• Wayne Smith – Musing about Microsoft Expression
• Expression Blend and Design – The team blog of the Expression Blend and Design Products.
• Microsoft Expression Web – Team Blog
• Microsoft Expression Training
• Lynda Training Videos
• Anna Ulrich
• UK based site focused on Expression Web

There are a ton of others which I will include in my follow up entry based entirely on Expression tools.

So that is it for now, I wanted to add some “Keeping Up” news but I really don’t have the time.  Maybe I’ll get to dig through it later.  Until then, keep up the coding and be agile like.

So I had an initial project kick off for this new effort I’m jumping into.  So far we’ve agreed to work by a fairly solid agile type methodology.  Not extreme or any of the other tenants of agile, but strong communication, people over tools, and other emphasis of that type.  I’m relieved to have met the fellow developers for this effort and all are ready to get started.

So far we’ve notched out basic stand up criteria, ideas behind communication, and how we’ll go about making high level architectural decisions.  In addition we’ll be setting up a build server, maybe using Unfuddled, or at least subversion, and other 3rd party software to create our application.  Of course, our standard IDE will be Visual Studio 2008.  Beyond that I’m not 100% sure what else we’ll be using.

One decision still left open, which is a minor thing, is what test framework to use.  If we even need to limit ourselves to one framework.  Another question in line with that topic is, whichever framework, will we or should we put the tests in a separate project or include the tests in the building projects?  If we do the later that might provide a simple way to eliminate broken builds if they go with the code base.  Feel free to chime in and comment.  We’re still open to suggestions for most of these pieces of the project.

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/beta/beta.html

The official ReSharper 4.0 beta is released (they made an official e-mail broadcast).  So if you even look at C# code (or VB) you know what to do.  Go GET IT!