Ken Levy's Blog

Sara Ford has her new Microsoft Visual Studio Tips book released this week. All of the proceeds for this book go to students at a school impacted by Hurricane Katrina.

I had pre-ordered by copy a while back and copies are arriving starting today, so I’ll get mine when I return home from PDC later this week. You can see from her PDC Day 0 blog post that they are selling the books starting.

Sara is a friend of mine who lives near me, and we meet for wing or burgers and beer at the Wing Dome in Kirkland about once a month.I met with her the night she completed writing her book, and last Friday night I met her just after she received the first copies. Here is a photo from that night, probably the first photo taken of her with the new book:

The first episode of the new CodeCast podcast has been released, at http://codemag.com/codecast/. This is a weekly podcast for CoDe Magazine. The RSS feed to subscribe is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/codemag/codecast

CodeCast tag line: The Late Night Show for .NET Developers

I’m the primary CodeCast host, with co-hosts Markus Egger and Gary Short.

Each CodeCast show episode should be about 30 minutes even though this first one is about 44 minutes. The file download will typically be just under 100MB since it is recorded and in MP3 format at 320K bit rate for maximum voice and music quality, so it could be called CodeCast HD.

Update: Based on feedback, we are going to make the default podcast 128K which will keep the file size down to about 25MB-40MB. The result is not that much different when listening, especially the vocal audio only.

This episode introduces the podcast, the hosts, CoDe Magazine, as well as previews the PDC 2008 (Microsoft Professional Developer Conference) this week and several of the technologies expected to make an appearance at the event.

I’ve been spending time with Twitter at http://twitter.com/KenLevy rather than blogging over the past month. While I will continue on Twitter, I have many things to blog about here and I’ll be posting more here starting today.