So we were at our local Asian food market the other day (Chang's Food Market) and came across something that I am assuming must mean "Giant Freakin' Jelly Bean Tapioca." Or something like that anyway. These are huge, about 2/3" across. If the size isn't enough to scare you, the alarmingly bright colors should do the trick! My boys love tapioca, and they love jelly beans. Of course we had to pick up a pack! I admit I'd like to try them. It's just $1.49 for this 250g package. Seems like a steal!We're going to try them tonight, so we'll...

This is old news by now (announced April 19), but I just think that it's so cool that the Express editions of Visual Studio will be free forever now! Honestly, I would have been pretty surprised if they hadn't made that announcement. Not that I had any inside knowledge on the subject, but it made so much sense. In terms of competing with Java, there needed to be a good powerful free product out there. Visual Studio has always been the IDE gold standard to me. I programmed in Java for years, but I...

Late last year, I worked my tail off getting a number of small samples ready for the release of Visual Studio 2005. Well, at least I thought that was when it would be released! As it turns out, nothing was posted on MSDN until now. Introducing 101 Samples! These are almost all available in both VB and C# (unless not possible in a given language), and are extremely task-focused. Titles include:Creating and using User Defined Types with SQL Server 2005 (Data Access)Running Asynchronous Tasks (Windows Forms)Using LayoutPanels (Windows Forms) Creating custom menus in Outlook...

So I'm doing some exploring in Writely one day, when I look a little closer at the top menu bar. The Blog menu has always been there, but I never really paid attention to it. I use .Text for my blog engine, and it always seems like I'm on my own when it comes to integration with other products. After a little Googling, I realize that .Text works just fine when using the MetaWeblog API. I didn't even realize that this was an option. It turns out that the required URL...

Well, I decided a few months ago that this blog would be my vehicle for disseminating tips and tricks that I came across during my daily coding, in addition to my essays, rants, and opinions. Based on my frequency of posts, apparently I don't have much to say! I actually keep a running list of things I'd like to cover, but honestly priority is a bit low compared to my paid work!Today, I've got a pretty bried entry to share some great information on saving datasets to disk. This comes up a lot in my Coding...