What is perhaps my favorite PC game of all time has been re-incarnated as a daily flash-based game.  Head over to www.youdontknowjack.com to play a new Dis or Dat question every day.  I wonder and hope if this means we'll be seeing a new Jack in the future...

I have updated the article with some new source code and executables, and a video of the beginning of my first sequence using what I’ve built.  Take a look!

Update: If readers of the article/blog have questions regarding the project, please use the Contact link above or use the new Forum topic so that I can respond to you.  If you have a comment which doesn't require a response from me, please leave that comment below.  I've received several questions over the past few days entered as anonymous comments and I have no way to respond to them without cluttering up the section below.  Thanks!

My latest article is now posted on MSDN's Coding4Fun website!

We've all seen those animated, musical holiday light shows videos on the internet, or perhaps the beer commercial last holiday season.  I set out to create my own show using off-the-shelf components and .NET .  So, with one or many Phidget Interface Kits, some extension cords, and Visual C# Express 2005 or Visual Basic Express 2005, you too can create your own holiday light extravaganza!

I'll be posting updates to the article as time goes on, including a video of my own show once completed, so check back often...

I was recently selected as a member of Microsoft's Coding4Fun writing team!  Coding4Fun is a site on MSDN devoted to geeks like me that enjoy building fun and quirky hardware and software projects using Microsoft technologies. My first two articles were for Halloween and can be viewed here:

• Motion-Detecting, Blood Squirting Halloween Skull
• Scary Halloween Application

I will be contributing about one article per month.  I'll post here when new articles become available.  Lucky you.

While it is completely unsupported by Microsoft, I ran into a few issues dealing with IIS and ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio 2003 along with Visual Studio 2005.  Note that through all of this (and in general) I run with UAC turned off.

First off, it's required that the IIS6 Compatibility Layer be installed otherwise none of this will work.

After installing both VS2003 andd VS2005 (in that order), I was unable to install anything dealing with IIS from the "Programs and Features" control panel.  After several hours of trying various things, I finally found the solution.  I had to uninstall the .NET Framework v1.1, after which I could install any of the IIS options available to me.

I then re-installed .NET Framework v1.1 and ran into the second issue.  Every time I attempted to open an ASP.NET 2.0 project, it would ask me if I wanted to configure the server to use ASP.NET 2.0, even though the application directory was already setup to do so.

At the Visual Studio …