I decided since Virtual PC 2007 RC was out, I'd give Windows Vista another try.  Everything had been working OK for the last couple of days.  However, when I came into work this morning, plugged everything up to my laptop and booted up, Vista decided to change my monitor orientation and rotate both my laptop display and my second monitor 90 degrees.  Not only that, but it changed my mouse so that when I moved it up and down, the pointer moved side to side (which of course is up and down relative to the new orientation).  Trying to navigate the display properties under this condition is like trying to trim your ear hair using two mirrors (oh wait... maybe you didn't need that mental picture).

Here's the nice part.  Under display properties (Control Panel -> Personalization -> Display Settings), monitor rotation/orientation was no where to be found.  I started to Google the issue (by now turning my head and half my body totally sideways).  I found some tips for certain display drivers that use keyboard shortcuts to change monitor rotation, but this didn't work for me.

After digging around, I finally found something.  Under Control Panel -> Tablet PC Settings I was able to change the screen orientation to "Primary landscape."  That fixed my laptop display, but didn't fix my 2nd monitor.  To fix the secondary display, I found that when I went to Control Panel -> Windows Mobility Center, and then clicked the button for "Connect display" for External Display, it magically rotated back to landscape.

How's that for intuitive??

Jay must have been desperate for five people for me to make his list.  As Eric says, this meme must be about burned out :)

1. I didn't graduate high school.  What would have been my junior year in high school was supposed to have been my freshman year at Simon's Rock College of Bard.  Instead, I started taking classes at a local vocational-technical school and later got special permission to take the G.E.D. early.
2. As a teenager I played a screaming electric guitar, had hair halfway down my back, and had dreams of being a jukebox hero.  Nowadays I pick fingerstyle acoustic for fun, play bass for the student ministry band at my church, have hair that is short and vigorously turning shades of gray, and my dream is that I will be a hero to my wonderful wife and five boys.
3. My first Visual Basic application (1995?) was taking data collected from an automated (robotic) fabric testing system, loading the data into an Access 2.0 database, and then plotting the data using Excel 5.0 VBA.  The last I heard, it was still in use.
4. Several years ago, Johnny Cash stood in line behind me at a Kroger's grocery store.
5. I was born at home in a bathtub.

Now I need to tag five more people...

• Josh Evitt
• Joe Audette
• Erik Lane
• Bob Yexley
• Aaron Conrad

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is out and can be downloaded here.

AJAX 1.0 RC has been released, as well as new versions of the AJAX Control Toolkit and AJAX Futures.  According to the AJAX Control Toolkit, there are some namespace changes that developers should read up on.

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I just came across an article titled "At a Glance: ASP.net vs. PHP."  Let's be clear up front: I don't know diddly-squat about PHP.  I'm not here to start yet another language battle, in a war that will never be won :)  However, I do have some comments for the article regarding ASP.NET.  And, since there doesn't seem to be a way to post comments on the "Market Day" site, you get the benefit of reading them here :)

Ian Wilson writes:

In order to develop with ASP.Net one must obtain the extremely expensive Microsoft Visual Studio Programming Suite.

I won't argue that Visual Studio 2005 Professional or Team Edition is very expensive when compared to free.  However, the author fails to mention that you can develop ASP.NET using one of the free Visual Studio Express Editions, or even your favorite text editor.  What can you do with an Express Edition?  Just about anything you can imagine.  If you really need features that aren't available in the Express Editions, chances are you're developing for a company that can afford to pay for the upgrade.  For the individual Web developer, check out Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and one of the many starter kits that are available.

One of the arguments the author uses for PHP is the wealth of community resources.  I believe the same argument is true for ASP.NET.  Check out my list of free tools and resources.  There are lots of other great sites and online blogs for ASP.NET developers.

ASP.NET is a viable solution, even for individual developers who are community-minded, budget-conscious, and into open source.  Happy coding!

If you've been a subscriber of my blog for while, you probably know that I am a big fan of ComponentArt's Web.UI controls.  Their controls are absolutely outstanding, both from a user's and a developers perspective.

ComponentArt has announced a new suite of controls created specifically for Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX framework (formerly known as Atlas).  With extensive client-side APIs, integration with the Atlas type system, and optimized to work with the UpdatePanel control, this suite should prove to be the premier components for building rich, interactive AJAX-enabled Web applications.

I've been trying out Google Reader for the last couple of weeks.  I opened my browser tonight and was pleasantly surprised by a new version.  It's not just an update, it's a whole new app. 

Instead of categories, feeds are now arranged in folders much like other RSS readers.  As you scroll down your list of unread items, they are automatically marked as read.  I think the keyboard shortcuts have been expanded, too.

Be sure to check out the "Goodies" under account settings.  You can add book marks that allow you to navigate subscriptions, and to subscribe to new feeds without leaving a site. 

The only bummer is that it reset the status on all my feeds, so I had to mark a lot of items as read that I had already seen.  Not a very big deal, since you can click on folder and mark all items as read.