Thanks to some great feedback from my fellow Microsoft Regional Directors, Dax turned around a great update to the new blog design that looks even better and is a lot better on the screen real estate.

Check it out: http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/

Check out the new blog site look and feel. Thanks to the design genius of Dax Pandhi and Nukeation studios, my blog has a great new face.

For those that don't know my background, I used to fly the now-retired F-14 Tomcat, and this cockpit is a geek-ified version of the F-14 cockpit.

The following excerpt from Scott Adam's Dilbert newsletter had me cracking up:

"

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:

1. The world sure needs more of ME.

2. Maybe I’ll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.

3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.

4. I know – I’ll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.

5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn’t involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.

6. What? It’s called a blog? I’m there!

The blogger’s philosophy goes something like this:

Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head.

"

You can subscribe here:

I've been using the Outlook version of Newsgator for a long time to aggregate the feeds that I care about. The problem is that the number of feeds that I care about continues to grow and grow, mainly because I will see a post or two of interest from someone on a topic I am focusing on, so I subscribe. Then after a while I discover that it was only a brief foray for that person into that area of interest and they become a stale subscription that I don't really pay that much attention to and eventually need to purge from my subscriptions.

So I was checking out some of the additional features that Newsgator online supports now through their business subscriptions, and decided to give them a try.

Smart Feeds Rock. I can create a subscription on a keyword (or keywords) or URL, and anytime someone out there in blog/chat/forum land uses that keyword, boing I get a post in my feed. Now I can set up smart feeds like one for ClickOnce or one for Indigo service, or Window Forms Data Binding 2.0, and keep track of everything people are saying about a technology. And yes, I must admit I set up an ego feed on my name to see what all you sneaky bastards are saying about me behind my back out there. :)

You do have to be a little smart about the keywords you pick. I started out with Indigo instead of Indigo service, and I got mostly stuff about the Indigo girls, art. etc. Add service to the keyword (it does an OR of the keywords unless you put them in quotes to get an exact phrase) and the noise went way down. There is still some noise, but much easier to filter through that noise than what hundreds of people may be posting on their individual blog at any given moment.

I still have my feeds to individuals who I like to follow, but I will be much less likely now to subscribe someone just because I found them talking about my technologies of interest. They will now have to break into my smart feeds repeatedly before I bother.

Depending on which subscription level you choose, you also get premium feeds, Mobile and Email editions, and varying numbers of feeds. I haven't fully started taking advantage of these yet, but probably will when I can find time to figure out how to employ them to add value and not just saturate me with more information that I don't have bandwidth to consume.

I use Newsgator for aggregating feeds into Outlook. Unquestionably the best tool available if you a) read blogs, and b) use Outlook for email or other daily functions.

I also frequently rebuild my laptop where I run Outlook and Newsgator. Being a speaker, trainer, writer, and consultant, I often introduce new software onto my machine, try things out, install and uninstall various betas and things, and I don't always feel like paying the perf penalty of doing it all in a VM. So a lot of software entropy accumulates on my machine, requiring frequent rebuilds, which take all of about 30-60 minutes to get back to a fully loaded and stable development machine baseline thanks to Norton Ghost.

The one thing that has annoyed me in doing this is that every time I rebuild my machine, then reattach Outlook to my Blogs.pst file where my subscribed feeds go, Newsgator redownloads all the latest posts into the subscribed folders, resulting in tons of duplicate posts. This is a pain on two fronts. One, it means that a bunch of posts get added that are marked as unread, even though there are copies of them in there that have been read. I haven't cracked that nut yet. The other problem is just the presence of the duplicate posts in the first place. That means that my blogs.pst file has been getting really big, which complicates my backups, and causes my Lookout and Google Desktop indexes to take longer to build and take up a lot more diskspace.

Enter MAPILAb Outlook Duplicate Email Remover. For a mere $15, this add-in does an outstanding job of scouring your Outlook folders and removing emails (or Newsgator posts, which use the Outlook email type for storage) that are duplicates. Well spent money.

OK, I know. I might as well not have a blog for all the posting I have done to it recently. Dec was a busy month, teaching 3 back to back 6 day sessions of our .NET Master Class to a customer in DC. Then I jetted off for a week vacation in beautiful St. Martin where I did absolutely nothing technical for an entire week, the first time I have completely relaxed for that long in as long as I can remember. The months prior to that, much of the same, conferences, the book, more customer demand than personal capacity, so blogging wasn't making it to the top of the priority queue.

So now I'm back and getting caught up. That includes trying to get back into at least reading blogs, which I had not been doing for a couple of months because of being swamped. Maybe I'll even write a few posts that people would care about.

Going to be a busy year with finishing up my book (Building Windows Forms Data Applications with .NET 2.0), moving to a new house, having a baby (and therefore discovering how much free time I actually used to have), probably starting another book, and continuing to work hard helping customers to learn how to properly employ .NET for application development.

I'm thinking 2005 is going to be a very fun year!

I'm not exactly what anyone would consider a frequent blogger, but it is my intent to share a few technical thoughts through this blog from time to time.

I have been dark on any real content lately other than links to demos and such because I said “Yes” about 10 times to many and have been totally buried with 8 webcasts, 4 conference talks, 4 user group talks, 6 book chapters, two product reviews, and a book technical review, all on top of full time consulting load, all in the span of July - September. So as you can guess, all that content creation and work doesn't leave a whole lot of leisure time for things like blogging. Heck, I have even stopped reading most of the blogs that I like because I flat out couldn't afford the time. Basically, my head has been about to explode for a while now, with me constantly asking myself: “why did you sign up for all this crap??“

Well, I am past most of it, at least the content creation parts of it, and plan to start blogging more to share some of the stuff I have been working on. I am spending a lot of time with the new WinForms features since that is what my book is about (due out with the release of .NET 2.0 next year), and am really digging the experience. The WinForms team has really done an awesome job with all the new stuff for building smart/rich client apps.

I've got 4 more webcasts this week that you may want to tune into if you have time:

Tuesday 10 Aug: Deploy Smart Client Applications with ClickOnce (1 PM PST)

Thursday 12 Aug: User Interface Process Application Block (1PM PST)

Friday 13 Aug: Extending ASP.NET (11 AM PST)

Friday 13 Aug: Bind Data Sources to WinForms Controls in Visual Studio 2005 (1 PM PST)

Then I am speaking at the Northampton MA .NET Architects group on 16 Aug (ASP.NET 1.1 Databinding), the NYC.NET group on 19 August (ClickOnce), and giving 4 talks at TechEd Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur 12-18 September. Then Extending ASP.NET for the DelMarva .NET Users Group in October, same for Little Rock Users group in November, and 3 talks at Visual Studio Connections in November in Las Vegas.

I love doing this stuff and teaching people how to use .NET. Too bad most of that doesn't directly earn me a cent... :)

Another excellent job by Clemens and crew with the release of dasBlog 1.6. In less than 10 minutes, I was able to apply the upgrade web files to a local copy of my site using xcopy to validate that it didn't break anything, then just xcopied again to my site on Orcsweb (an excellent hosting provider BTW) through FTP, and IJW.

You gotta love xcopy deployment and well designed apps.

Thank you Clemens again for providing this great blogging engine.

Michele now has a blog, very cool. I have been hounding her mercilessly to start. I'm sure we can count on many insightful posts from her. Surely she can outperform my pathetic ability to find time to post anything technically meaningful - meaning she just needs to have a pulse and some technical thoughts running through her brain that she finds time to share.

Welcome to the blogsphere my compatriot! We expect great things! No pressure....

Spent the day working on my TechEd 2004 presentation on deploying .NET applications. It was very cool to get selected to speak at TechEd. I am really looking forward to it. Not that the other conferences I speak at (VSConnections, VSLive!, DevEssentials, etc.) and user group talking is not important too, but there is a whole different anticipation level to preparing for TechEd based on its size and visibility in the industry. Only about 30 of us non-MS folks picked to speak, so feels pretty exclusive to be selected. I'm wearing a leather strap around my head to keep it from expanding unbounded. OK, not really, but maybe I should... Ah, screw it. I used to fly fighters, everyone expects me to be arrogant and obnoxious. :)

Another chapter complete on my book this week - at least as complete as it can be based on the PDC tech preview bits, which is not very... This one is an introduction to WinForms programming, and includes coverage of some of the new WinForms 2.0 controls that are not specific to data binding. Since the rest of the book will be focused on data binding and will cover the new data bound controls in detail, I deferred talking about them until the later chapters. Which works well since they are all in implementation flux in Redmond still. I'm really looking forward to Beta 1 to get to play with the bits that will be a lot closer to production than what I have now from PDC.

Two more articles became available in published form this week. One is my article on configuring ASP.NET and IIS to protect resource and document files in your web apps using whatever ASP.NET security mechanisms the rest of your app is using. This one is in the April issue of asp.netPRO. Unfortunately it is locked to subscribers only. The other is my bi-monthly DataStream column in asp.netNOW, this one is on working with loading XML schemas and data  into DataSets and XmlDataDocuments.

Last week I completed another partial .NET Master Class in Chicago. Next week I start a dizzying sequence of travel that is sure to make me long for a nice stable week at home. In the next 12 weeks I will be traveling to York PA, Chicago IL, New York City NY, Roanoke VA, Tampa FL, San Jose CA, Orlando FL, San Jose CA, Redmond WA, Chicago IL, San Francisco CA, San Diego CA, and Kansas City MO for a combination of teaching, speaking, and consulting.

Needless to say, I will continue to NOT be one of those guys who finds time to blog every day... Not that there is anything wrong with that, I'm glad they are out there for our consumption, entertainment, and education. I just wish I could find more time for it.

I am starting to wonder if I would get a lot more traffic by blogging on one of the mass aggregation sites like weblogs.asp.net or the new MSDN weblogs, rather than hanging off my own obscure site.

Any thoughts, those few of you who have stumbled onto my blog and actually read it?

So you may have noticed I haven't blogged much lately. Oh yeah, no one reads this because there is no content... Let me rephrase: I may have noticed I haven't blogged much lately.

I don't know how many bloggers keep up with it. I know you all are probably as busy as me. But there has just been no way to find time for blogging lately.

Excuses in the last few weeks:

• Delivered an Article on ClickOnce that will be in the May issue of MSDN magazine.
• Did my .NET Rocks! interview.
• Did a short notice UG talk.
• Just delivered the first chapter (really Chapter 2) of my book, which will be one of the longer chapters in the book (data access). Major milestone for me in getting the juices flowing on this project.
• Delivered the materials for the two conference talks I am giving at Visual Studio Connections (ClickOnce and UIP).
• Prepared and gave a day long seminar on Essential .NET in DC yesterday.

All this while consulting about 3/4 time.

I do lots of interesting stuff I'd like to blog about. Some I can't for customer reasons, some I can't because it is being published elsewhere, what's left I can't find the time for. I guess my fame and fortune will have to come from somewhere other than the blogsphere for now...

Thanks to Clemens and crew for v1.5 of dasBlog. Just like the initial install, this one went without a hitch. xcopy deployment rocks, and dasBlog 1.5 looks nice.