After a few pre-announcements beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 is now available. Go here to get it!

No info yet that I could find about updating beta 1 to beta 2... I'll have to find out, since I've got beta 1 installed on my laptop at the moment.

I like my Outlook for appointment management, I really do. But it lacks certain functionality I would really like to have. This functionality, in my case, has to do with event management, but I guess there are a number of other scenarios where one might have the same problem.

Consider this: There's a conference taking place on a few specific days in October 2007. Now, in conjunction with this, there's an abundance of appointments and deadlines I need to store (just an example):

• The start and end date of the conference itself.
• If I'm going to travel to the conference, there are these additional dates to keep track of:
  
  • I'll probably leave home somewhat earlier and arrive back somewhat later. This time span I would like to store.
  • At some point in time I have to book a flight and/or make other travel arrangements.
  • At some point in time I'll have to look into booking a hotel.
• If I want to speak at the conference, there are several deadlines I need:
  
  • The deadline for the Call for Papers
  • The deadline for submission of my slides and samples
  • The date of the speakers' dinner or similar event
  • The deadline to RSVP for the speakers' dinner or similar event
  • Several other deadlines that are usually set by the organizers for various things
  • The point in time where I need to start preparing my presentations for submission - depending on the presentations, of course
  • The point in time where I need to start revising my presentation before the event - depending on the presentations
• If we exhibit at the conference, there's yet more:
  
  • Deadline to book a booth location
  • Deadline to book a nice booth location
  • Deadline to ship the booth and other materials to the location
  • And similar additional stuff as above

Okay - I guess there are sometimes additional things, but I'm sure you get the picture. Now, what I do right now is basically this: I create lots and lots of separate entries in Outlook to make sure I get a reminder at all important points.

In some ways that's not bad... I'm not prepared to totally migrate my time keeping to another application and at least the Outlook data can be synced onto the BlackBerry easily. But obviously it's a pain in the neck to handle this information, and once there's more than one event going on per year (joke - of course there are always numerous events in some stage of preparation), it becomes really difficult to see what entries in Outlook belong to what event.

It would also be nice to get a per-event report or timeline out of Outlook, but it can't do that.

I'm currently thinking that it would be great, and maybe not even too complicated, to have an external application to manage these "information sets" per event, and to have that application simply do the grunt work of adding and modifying all the Outlook entries for me. It could probably also create nice reports.

But then I thought well, there are people out there with the same problem, and some of them are bound to have much greater trouble with this than me, so maybe I should just ask whether somebody has a solution to this. Is there a tool or something that I'm not aware of? Please let me know!

(This is probably one of those blog posts that for some reason never get a single comment. Oh well. <g&gt

I was just going to look something up in the help file for Putty, and this window popped up:

So, it's happened - Windows Vista can't read Windows help files by default. Wow. This page here explains Microsoft's reasoning, basically that "... the Windows Help program has not had a major update for many releases and no longer meets Microsoft standards." I should think that with Microsoft's resources at my disposal, it shouldn't be much of a problem to create an update to the old application that meets the standards, but there you go.

The good news is, there's a simple solution: just click here to download a Windows update file with support for 32 bit help - there's even a 64 bit version available. Interesting, huh? Did I mention there's support for 16 bit help included in Vista by default? So what's the point of leaving out the 32 bit support, I wonder...

Probably Microsoft is trying to push people away from the still very popular HLP format, for instance towards CHM or Help 2. I can understand that, and to a degree I even think it's a good idea. But how about providing convincing arguments for such a change, instead of arbitrarily restricting functionality in new OS versions? HLP has a boatload of features that CHM doesn't have (and both formats haven't changed significantly in many years), and Help 2 is rather complex to use (and I think it still doesn't do a lot of what HLP did). I can understand how it's rather hard to convince software companies to use the new formats if they aren't visibly better than the old ones.

In October I'm going to be in Bristol at the .NET Developer Network, doing talks to introduce WPF as well as Silverlight. I'm looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Guy has described the sessions on the group's web site, much better than I could :-) So click here to have a look at the details and to sign up!

I finally made it :-) Here are the files with slides and sample code for the sessions Ian and I did at DDD 5.

Bluffers' guide to C# 3.0

10 cool things to do with C# 3.0 - Ian's stuff

10 cool things to do with C# 3.0 - Oliver's stuff

Finally, the sample from my session .NET 3 - The Game Challenge can be found here, attached to my previous blog post.