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July 2008 - Posts - public: class Alon : IArchitect, IAzure, ICPP, ISmartHome, IHomeServer

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July 2008 - Posts

I have good relationships with computers. I make them happy and they make me happy. With Windows Home Server (WHS) I have much strong feeling, she happy image  and I am happy. She worries imageand I immediately check why.

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She has problemsimageI don't sleep well.

My son's computer is an old Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with 1GB RAM and Window Vista. It worked well for his needs (Watching TV and Movies with Media Center). Two weeks ago I installed Service Pack one on it. I left the computer and when I got back I saw a disturbing message from the BIOS that actually told me, your 160 GB main hard drive is dead. I had not got the time to check it until today. I checked the disk on another machine and it is totally dead. This is when I asked the WHS to be nice and to make me happy. I replaced the old broken hard disk with a new one that I had (a bigger and newer) and put the WHS Recovery CD in the drive. The system booted from the CD, asking me to enter the WHS password. It recognized the computer and with just few clicks and one hour later the computer booted with the new disk. Here was the surprise; It continued installing Vista SP1 from Stage 3, while telling me not to turn off the computer!!! (It was turned off for two weeks by now). The SP1 finished its installation and I got a working computer. I am happy again and so does the WHS.

Teaching is hard! you have to know the subject very well, you have to be prepared. You need very good presentation skills to "sell" the matter to the audience and you need to know how to act when they ask you something that you're not so sure what the correct answer is. I work at Sela since 1995. I used to teach a lot, and I love it. In these days we are having a series of courses for our own professional experts. I gave the very first lecture in this series, A C# 3.0 course. I wrote at the beginning of this post that teaching is hard! Imagine a class full of knowledgeable people, most of them read about C# 3.0, about half of them are using Visual Studio 2008 and C# 3.0. How do you teach something that your audience is already knows? I made it informative to the people that don't know C# 3.0 and interesting to those who know. For each of the new features, I talked about the motivation, the syntax and what the compiler does behind the cover to implement the feature (Reflector to the rescue). Then we had a conversation about the feature, and we heard many different opinions. The interesting thing is that I had also learned one or two things about the subject.

At the end of the evening I have showed some of the open source project that Sasha and I have implemented and I asked people to join us.

These are the projects:

http://www.codeplex.com/NonPagedCLRHost/

http://www.codeplex.com/JobObjectWrapper

http://www.codeplex.com/UACHelpers