Brent Rockwood

It’s been 48 days since my last cigarette.  I rock.

 The last week or two has seen a flurry of discussion about the use of JSON in web apps vs. XML.  Most folks have been coming at it from a developer’s point of view - asking which has better tool support or is less bandwidth intensive or easy to use in various scenarios.
It seems to [...]

I’ve been creating some new projects and it occurs to me that it’s remarkably time-consuming to set up a modern development environment for anything but the simplest of projects.
For me, we’re usually talking C#.  Let’s look at the steps…

Create a new project in Visual Studio.
Sign it with my strong-named key.
Manually fix the path to the key [...]

May as well get in on the discussion of the new iPhone from Apple.  Some quick notes:

Apple almost never announces anything before they’re ready to ship.  Why now?
From what I’ve heard, there may not actually be a working prototype at this point.
You can’t use a touchscreen without looking at it.  For some people that’ll be [...]

This is the first in what will hopefully end up being a series of music articles.  My musical preferences are extremely wide ranging, and generally have little to do with the mainstream.  This is because I haven’t listened to radio or watched MTV/MuchMusic in years.  I do, however, spend a ton of time in great [...]

Here we are near the close of the second week of 2007.  Way back on January 2, I resolved to try to blog every day this year.  Perhaps it is fitting that I had already missed a day.  It seems I have a little work to do.
It all started badly and went uphill from there.  [...]

What with Vista about to GA, and my trusty sidekick increasingly showing its age (though holding up remarkably well), I’m thinking of getting a new laptop.  My must haves are…

dual core processor (T7xxx series Core 2 Duo would be nice)
at least 5400rpm drive
high resolution display - at least 1280×800, more is better
DVI out, dual-link DVI would [...]

I hate to be a part of shameless marketing for a huge corporation, but I’ve been to the Bellagio, and they didn’t have anything like this.  VanishingPoint clue #1 (hint: suffer through the bad country music…).

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer to post to my blog.  All in all, it’s a pretty slick piece of software.  However, it does contain one of my pet peeves - custom proxy server settings.

I don’t see what the point of providing custom proxy settings that are usable by only one application.  What is the [...]

OpenID appears to be the new hotness.
I’m only just starting to learn about this.  There doesn’t appear to be anything technically earth-shattering here.  As with most good ideas, it’s seems fairly simple.
It appears to solve all the same problems of authentication that a certificate based system does (with the same caveats around the problem of trust).  However, unlike [...]