Jim Zimmerman

So I decided to volunteer for the FOOTS program with Microsoft and help train and answer questions at the Best Buy in Clearwater, FL of of US 19.

Why did I volunteer to do this?  I thought it would be fun to be around the consumers during the day of the launch event and get to see what people think about it.  

Well I just got back from showing the retail sales people at Best Buy and quite a few customers tonight and they were all very impressed.  In fact after talking about it so much, I am pretty impressed.  You see, I have only used it for email, writing code and blog posts.  I haven't gotten to use Word, Excel, Media Center, Photo manager, create movies, use Flip 3D, etc. very much. :)  People were generally very impressed and were only disappointed because they could not even buy what they were seeing.  Definitely an awkward sales position to be in.  "Look what you can have, but you have to wait until tomorrow".  All in all I think people are anxious to have a new version of windows on their computers.  Seeing all the good deals, I want to buy a new one for home.

If you want to see me in a Vista Polo shirt and give me a hard time at the Best Buy, please stop in.  I will be there on Tuesday, Jan 30th in the evening.

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 has just released!  We can now start to write great AJAX applications that will be fully supported.  They may have taken a while, but that is too be expected when they create a massive base framework that will be supported across multiple browsers.  This is not an easy task. 

This is a huge step to great things with using AJAX with ASP.NET 2.0.  I know there are a lot of frameworks out there, but this is one that will be around for awhile and is easily contributed to.  They have also extended the JavaScript language so that it feels a little bit more like C# and wait until they release the new Visual Studio where we will get intellisense for JavaScript.  I am so excited to see this in action.

Be sure to check out ajax.asp.net and watch some of the video demos they have and implement their code samples.  While we have all seen demos like this before, we can actually implement these scenarios in a supported environment.  Have fun!

I just got a slingbox because my neighbor is moving to London, U.K. and he wants to watch American TV over there and I guess there is not that much selection.  He said he had heard of something called a Slingbox and ironically my boss had just installed one and I thought it was pretty cool.

So being the nice guy that I am I offered to let him use part of my bandwidth, I have plenty to spare with my Verizon FIOS (fiber to the house) with 15 MB down/ 2MB up.  He just bought a slingbox to put in my house and I am going to add a third DVR and put it in the garage along with the slingbox.  He can control it from anywhere and record shows and then watch them later.  You know with a technology like this, it will be a big disrupter in the next few years.  Especially with their announcement of their new products at CES with the sling catcher so you don't need a computer. 

Also I just got this stuff to work on my Treo 700w.  So now I can watch any show I recorded or want to watch in real time anywhere here in Tampa.  We have EVDO everywhere which is about 400 kbps - 700 kbps which is really good for this stuff.

So as I was not planning on buying one, I still get to play with it because of my friend who is moving to the UK.  Now we will see if he kicks me off of it when he is trying to watch TV from over there.  It only allows one connection at a time.  I Hope I don't like it too much.

I just read a nice post from Jim Allchin on the Windows Vista Team Blog about some new data features in Vista that help you find data easier.  There were a few things I didn't really consider using the way he suggested and he had some very good pointers like using the search right above the windows new start icon to find not just programs but any kind of file.  Very productive tip.

I have been using Vista for over a month now and had not thought of using some of these features in the way they had intended.  I will let you read his post since he has a much better way of saying it than I would. Cool stuff.