I've been sitting through Visial Studio .NET training for two days. I'm not a programmer, really, to begin with, and a five-day class in two days of lecture (no hands on anything!) was kind of mind-boggling. Not that having a computer in front of me would have accomplished anything, as my programming tends to be within the very sheltered world of Office and Exchange. It was interesting, though, to see how all of this stuff is going to be brought together, and I think I have a top-level conceptual understanding of how these things work together now.
Interestingly, though, I asked one of the instructors (they weren't trainers, the two guys teaching the class are hard-core programmers, which was great) during a break about what all of this .NET platform means for my two sort-of programming languages, VBS and VBA. I explained that I was curious because Visual Basic is changing, sort of, and I wanted to know if I was going to need to be adjusting things within my office applications. He said no, they'd basically remain the same, and went on to ask me about custom programming against the Journal feature in Outlook. I must have given him a funny look (I never use that feature) because he explained that he uses the Journal to keep track of what he does during the day and wanted to update his log. He sort of looked up at me and said, "I keep a log. A blog. You know about blogging, right?" hee! I said yes, as a matter of fact, I've just started blogging. So we talked about what he could do programmatically against the Journal in Outlook to automatically update his log (his Radio blog, even!) when he adds items to his Journal. So I'm thinking I'll create a custom Journal form that both posts to the Journal folder in Outlook and also generates a message to a POP3 mail account that could be set up to be monitored by Radio. I haven't played with that mail-to-your-blog feature yet (haven't played around with most of the features yet!) but it'll be something to do this weekend. Err, next weekend.
It was just weird to randomly have a conversation with someone and find out that they blog. That was a first for me since I started this. And even weirder to realize that he uses the same software!
