Chris Pietschmann

Whether I won MVP or not I would still do what I do. My passion for technology and the pleasure of helping others it what drives me. This marks the 5th time I've been awarded Microsoft MVP, and am honored for this recognition. Thank you Microsoft! Congratulations to all April Fools MVP's; new and renewed! If you are not familiar with the Microsoft MVP Program, you can find information about it here: http://mvp.support.microsoft.com

General mvp, award

While we may not find evidence of extrasolar intelligence, there is plenty of terrestrial things to keep in eye on. But then again, you never know. The below items are not numbered, as I did not want to emphasize any single item more than the others. They are all important and their advancements WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING! “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke Advancements in Technology Touch Screens Sure, we’ve seen single touch monito... [More]

General future

Below are videos of two TED talks that I discovered over at TED.com. They talk about how bad plastic is for the environment, the earth, for us in the end. One disturbing thing that's mentioned is that plastic does break down into smaller pieces over time, but plastic is always plastic, is always plastic. It never truly breaks down to a point where the environment can use if for something other than pollution. Dianna Cohen: Tough truths about plastic pollution Capt. Charles Moore on the seas of... [More]

General pollution, ted

The 2010 Community Coding Contest winners have been announced. http://CommunityCodingContest.org

General contest, community, opensource,

The popularity of location aware devices and software has been on the rise for the last five years, since Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth (now Bing Maps) were initially released. Surprisingly, however, the utilization and adoption of geo-location and mapping haven't been as rapid as I had speculated back in 2005. Today there are all kinds of location based applications and services popping up. Paper Maps and Expensive Software Prior to 2005 the existence of maps were mostly on paper. Y... [More]

General

Today is the last day to enter the 2010 Community Coding Contest for a chance to win an MSDN Ultimate Subscription plus a total of approximately $20,719 worth of prizes!! All you need to do is write some source code to do something, and enter it into the contest. Who know, you could be one of the winners! http://communitycodingcontest.org

General contest, community

Update Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010: I have had a few people contact me about getting denied enrollment in the BizSpark program. Most of these people are trying to enroll a CONSULTING company; which is NOT what BizSpark is for. BizSpark is for companies that are “Actively engaged in development of a software-based product or online service that will form a core piece of its current or intended business.” That means, if you want to enroll in BizSpark, that you must be developing a product to sell/offe... [More]

General bizspark

Since Bing is a search (ahem, I mean “decision”) engine, I would assume that the rest of the website, other than the search, would be SEO optimized (Search Engine Optimization). It hosts blogs and forums, and I would assume Microsoft would want them to be indexed by Google and Yahoo. After all, more traffic to the Bing site should be a good thing. However, it seems that the “Bing Community” sections of http://bing.com are lacking when it comes to SEO. Below are some link... [More]

General seo, bing

I've decided to boycott BP until the Oil Spill in the Guld of Mexico is fixed/cleaned up! If you remember the oil spill in Alaska back in the '80's then you remember all the pictures/videos of all the animals killed by being covered in oil. The same thing is happening today in the Gulf of Mexico with the oil drilling blowout that has been spewing oil into the ocean for a month now. Oil does not occur naturaling in the ocean or on land. As a result animals can not breath or fly when covered in... [More]

General environment

"Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award!" I'm happy to announce that I've been awarded the Microsoft MVP award for the third year in a row. Just like last year, I've been awarded within the "Windows Live Platform" category. The "Windows Live Platform" category includes the Bing Maps SDK (both JavaScript and Silverlight Map Controls) which is the product/technology that I work with and help out others with the most in this category. Congratulation... [More]

Bing Maps, General awards

In my own personal discussions with other developers and computer users I've seen a fair amount of confusion as to what a database is. Since the purpose of almost all applications is to Create/Read/Update/Delete data, they need to connect to a database, since data persistence storage need to be provided for the application to function as intended. If you want to stick to the simplest definition below, then a file cabinet is technically a database, but now that we're in the information age we don... [More]

General database, software development

I've read a couple of "Intro" to neuroscience and psychology books, and what I've learned has fascinated and inspired my way more than anything I've learned about computers and electronics over the years. The Brain is truly the more complex "computer" the work has ever seen! Here's a couple books I've read that I highly recommend: A User's Guide to the Brain: Attention, Preception, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John Ratey Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin A ... [More]

General neuroscience, psychology, sociology, college

My Brother In Law, Jeremy, is back now after his second tour in Iraq. This time he was gone only 12 months, instead of 18 months the first time. He has a wife (my sister) and 3 boys (3yrs, 6yrs and 9yrs) of whom were eagerly awaiting his return. The people at WXOW Channel 19 in La Crosse, WI interviewed them when he returned to Wisconsin. Written Article - "Family waits for soldiers return" Video of Interview - "Family waits for soldiers return" The above picture is from the video, and is m... [More]

General

Now that it's 2010, and over a year since the first Community Coding Contest came to an end, I'm thinking about running the contest again in 2010. Last time it ran for 3 months and we had 6 really great entries. This time around I'm thinking that it may be better to accept entries for 6 months, and have the voting run for a full month. This will give much more time for entries to be submitted, and for people to work on their entries before submitting and/or voting begins. These are just some i... [More]

General community, contest, bingmaps, .net framework, software development

I just finished installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 within a Windows 7 Virtual Machine running within Windows VIrtual PC and the Final/Finish screen of the installation wizard contains a weird, blue, Mac-style Button. Ok, I know it’s not exactly how the button are in the UI of Max OSX, but it’s much closer to that than it is to Windows 7 buttons. The button looks so incredibly out of place, and I wonder who decided that it should be used, especially since it doesn’t match the... [More]

General visualstudio, .net framework

I really haven't been reading enough books of the the last few years. Sure I read a ton of blogs and such online, but what about books? Books are nice, cohesive collections of information; at least most of the time. There are a lot of things I'd like to learn more about, both related to computers and not. So, sometime in January (this wasn't a new years resolution, just a coincidence), I decided to try to read at minimum 12 books throughout the year. Basically, at least 1 book each month, and af... [More]

General books, personal

Some of you that follow my blog may have noticed that it’s been almost a month since I’ve really posted anything. I know I’ve done this in the past when I’ve been busy working on other things (mostly to get paid), but this time it’s for an entirely different reason… My wife and I had a beautiful baby girl! And, we’ve been adjusting to our new sleep schedule of only getting 2-4 hours of sleep maximum at a time. Anyone with kids understands how it is with a newborn, and now only after having one ... [More]

General general

I first started downloading Windows 7 Ultimate off MSDN using the old File Transfer Manager and it was taking FOREVER to download. The download started out good, then it dropped off to about 40KB/sec and said it would take about 14 hours to finish! Man, I was hoping I’d be able to get it downloaded quick so I can start updating my machines today/tonight. Then I saw a Twitter post by @Rickster_CDN mentioning a link to a page with the AKAMAI links for TechNet to download Windows 7 WAY FASTER! Act... [More]

General windows, msdn, technet, akamai, download

Microsoft has announced the initial pricing for Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services. My question is still "What is the Minimum it will cost to host a small website/application on Azure?"If your application is racking up "Compute" time when ever it is "live", then that equals a total of approximately 720 hours of "compute" time for a total of $86.40 per month.If you store less than 1GB of files, that's $0.15 per month.Then if you also use a database with SQL Azure, that's an additional $... [More]

General azure

I’ve been questioning here and there as to what happened to Managed JScript on the Dynamic Language Runtime. The most recent preview release is really old, and it has since been taken out of any further preview releases of the DLR, where as IronRuby and IronPython continue on. No More Managed JScript on the DLR? For some time I never really got any good answers. Well, it’s really sad to hear that apparently Microsoft decided to drop it completely. According the this link, a member on the DLR ... [More]

JavaScript, General javascript, dlr, .net framework

Congratulations 2009 Microsoft MVP! Dear Chris Pietschmann, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. The Microsoft MVP Award provides us the unique opportunity to celebrate and honor your significant contributions and say "Thank you for your technical leadership." Toby Richards General Manager Community... [More]

General mvp

Apparently, Windows 7 will "officially" support Logon UI Background Customization. The previous link describes what needs to be in place (a registry key and image file) for you to be able to have Windows 7 use any image you want as the Logon UI Background. What the previous link doesn't specify is if this works with the Windows 7 Beta (build 7000). Actually, I just test and confirmed that it does work perfectly in the Windows 7 Beta. Good news for us of whom can't (or don't want to) run a newer ... [More]

General windows, beta

Two years ago I posted "Cheap PC - Build a Vista Premium Ready system for under $500 including the OS". I can't believe that was two years ago already! Anyway, the original premise of the post was to point out that you could build a "cheap" PC for under $500 that included and could run Windows Vista with "Aero" Glass Enabled. After I wrote that post I decided that I would try to remember to write a post like that every year to serve two purposes: 1) chronicle ... [More]

General hardware, cheap pc

One of the things the Live Framework has to offer is a Local Live Operating Environment you can connect to so that you can Offline Enable your Live Framework Enabled Desktop Applications. I found the process of getting it to work a little tricky (especially since I was running Win7 Beta; I'll explain down further) so I've decided to write up a summary of my experience to help anyone else interested. This was written using the Live Framework CTP. Connecting to the Live Operating Environment Th... [More]

General azure, live framework, .net framework

There have been a lot of talk online for a while now about the much desired demise of Internet Explorer 6, and other out dated web browsers. I don't think I've used IE6 since the first Beta of IE7, and I haven't used Firefox 2.0 since Firefox 3.0 was released. However, I can see that there are still a few users that visit this blog of whom are still using some of these OLD versions of these web browsers. So, I am joining the effort to "Push up the web" by including the sc... [More]

General