So today, I bought a used DM6 paintball gun from a local guy.  I needed a new gun because mine that I had from back in the day is way old technology (Intimidator 2K5).  I am not getting back into my professional days again for those that are wondering.  I got out for a reason...too much travel and time.  I now have a family and a business to tend to so there is no way I could be gone every weekend traveling the country playing again.  Plus the sport has gotten a lot faster since I played and I would need to take several months to get back to playing shape.

I am, however, going to start playing more local and regional events.  I have already been asked several times this year to play but I was either too busy or the events were canceled.  At any rate, I need a hobby to get away from the indoors and this seems to be the best.  I can't wait to play now!

Since I got a Triple-Headed monster and I am now working form home for the most part, I have had the desire to get a new desktop PC to drive my monitors better and get better productivity at home.  I figured the cost of the new desktop would pay for itself probably within a week.  I tried to use my current desktop for 3 months and it was just too painful (that sentence exists for the wife acceptance factor).

I followed the advice of several co-developers (Scott Hanselman, Dustin Campbell, Jeff Fansler, Justin DeCourcy, and Bill Wheelock) and got the parts that they suggested or they have already used to build their own ultimate developer rigs.  Here is a list of what I got:

• ANTEC P182 Black ATX tower case - I ordered this from mwave because I wanted the black which newegg did not carry.  I can not how good this case is.  It is the best designed case I have ever used.
• EVGA Nvidia nForce 680i SLI Motherboard - I originally ordered the MSI P6N SLI Platinum Nvidia nForce 650i from mwave because it was cheaper and I was already ordering the case from mwave but the board had a short in it.  I knew that Dustin had issues with this motherboard as well, so I opted to take Jeff Atwood's advice and go with this Motherboard.
• Corsair 750 W Power Supply - This is a really nice power supply and probably the largest that will fit in the case without having to remove the bottom fan in the case.  I wish I would of gotten a modular one with removable cables but I was able to fit all the extra cables in the case nicely.
• Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz processor - What can I say...lots of power.
• 4 OCZ Gold 2 GB Sticks - These are really nice high quality RAM sticks.  The motherboard will support 8 Gigs and I plan on using Vista 64 to take advantage of all the RAM.
• 2 MSI GeForce NX8600GTS PCI Express x16 cards - These will support my Triple Headed Monster just fine.
• 4 Seagate Barracuda 500 G 7200 RPM drives - I was originally going to run a 10,000 RPM drive for the OS and a large 7200 RPM drive for data but I opted to go running RAID 0 + 1 with 500 G drives and for this, you need 4 identical drives.  This will give me really fast IO speeds with 1 T of space.
• 2 Lite On 16x DVD-ROM drives - I like to have 2 drives when I rip something (er, backup).  These are really fast and cheap drives with Lightscribe.

This new rig is super fast!  My build times have decreased dramatically and I can actually now use the Windows Ultimate DreamScene backgrounds.  How fun!  I have to say that Vista is a lot better with a PC that supports it.  It is now a little more fun to use.

For the install, I followed the advice from Jeff Atwood on his Coding Horror site for when he built the ultimate developer rig for Scott Hanselman.  I would suggest looking at that if you want to build your own.

This post is a duplicate from the istu blog.  The original can be found here.

Microsoft has been nice enough to release the .NET source code as a reference to developers in order to allow them to step into .NET Framework methods.  Up until a couple of days ago, this capability was only available to Visual Studio 2008 users.  John Robbins and Kerem Kusmezer then stepped up and created the .NET Mass Downloader utility which grabs the pdb's from the Microsoft servers and places them on your desktop.  This enables you, amoung many other things, to step into Microsoft .NET Framework source code from within Visual Studio 2005.  Here is how you set it up:

1. Download the .NET Mass Downloader utility from CodePlex.
2. Extract the downloaded zip file somewhere.
3. Start a command prompt and run the extracted NetMassDownloader.exe with the following parameters:  netmassdownloader -d C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727 -output <any drive location where the pdb's will be downloaded to (e.g. C:\ReferenceSource)>
4. Add the pdb file directory as a location to look for in VS 2005 Options dialouge.  Go to Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Symbols and add the symbol file location that you specified in step 3.
5. Uncheck the "Require source files to exactly match the original version" option under Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> General tab.
6. For each solution you would like to view the .NET source, you need to go to that solution's properties -> Common Properties -> Debug Source Files and add the symbol file location that you specified in step 3.

There, you are now ready to start debugging into your VS 2005 projects within the solution you set up.  Here is an example in action.

Set the break point:

Hit F11 to step into the System.Drawing.Color.FromName method!

That's it!  How cool is that!  VS 2008 users can't have all the fun.