Scott Hanselman has some great tips for cleaning up disk space under Windows Vista. The best tip is using vsp1cln.exe to remove the sp1 install files.

vsp1cln.exe - After you install Vista SP1, it leaves around the original files so you can uninstall the Service Pack if you want. After a few months with the Service Pack, I've decided for myself that it's a good thing and decided I don't need the option.
Open up an administrative command prompt. That means, click the Start Menu, type cmd.exe, then right-click on it and click "Run as Administrator." Alternatively, you can press Ctrl-Shift-Enter to run something as Administrator.
Next, type "vsp1cln" at the command prompt. If you select yes, you'll get back around 2 to 3 gigs. The only thing, again is that you can't uninstall SP1.

One of my projects from last year was nominated for and won the IWS, Search Partner of the Year award. We received the award for a project we did for the Dutch consultancy company Twynstra Gudde.

We created a system which allows the user to search through many different subsystems using the simplest interface we could design:

Under the surface the system combines the results from all of their back-end systems to give the user a complete view of all the information available relevant to their search query.

The search results are presented in way that allows a user to filter the results and find detailed pages (all red text is a link):

I am very proud that I was part of the team to build this solution, which the client is very enthusiastic about and the Microsoft chose to honor with the Search Partner of the Year award!

Microsoft press release

Tam Tam press release

My company is organizing a one day conference about Employee 2.0 (in Dutch only) together with Agile, Wortell and Microsoft. The main part of the program consists of case-studies of actual application, which help employees to find the information they need, communicate more efficiently etc. And it's free!

From Rands:

Here is an audacious goal for your resume: to get you to a point in your career where you no longer need a resume. It’s the point that in your chosen industry people know who you are and what you are capable of. And they want you doing it at their companies.

Jeff Atwood posted an entry today about how it's important to have fun at work. I can only agree with him, since the reason I still am at my current job is the fun I'm having and the great people I work with.

If you love software as much as I do, you deserve to work at a company where people come to work not to punch a clock, but because they love software, too. You deserve to work at a company where software engineering is respected. You deserve to work at a company where peers meet to enjoy building software together.

And just like Jeff's company, we're hiring too.

Who am I?

As you probably guessed, I am Paul van Brenk and I live in Rotterdam in The Netherlands. I've been writing this blog since October 2003, when I started it to write about the PDC in that year. I've been developing software since the Commodore 64, using Basic. I rediscovered how much fun it was when in college writing small asp applications, in vb-script. The move to ASP.NET was obvious when the beta of .NET 1.0 arrived and now I'm comfortable in C# and VB.Net, but prefer the first. I recently developed an interest in LISP and try to get more comfortable with C and C++, but I don't use that often enough.

I currently work for Tam Tam, where I specialize in Custom Solutions for the Information Worker business Unit as a sr. software engineer. My time is spent designing and writing applications and training the junior developers. In my spare time I contribute to the opensource blogging platform dasBlog.

Why a blog?

A blog is a good way to keep track of the things I find interesting or discover and a great way to share them. Hopefully you'll find them intersting, helpful or atleast point you in the right direction. Since blogs are best when there is 2 way communication, please post comments or send emails. Just try to keep them more or less ontopic.

Can I email you?

paul.van.brenk@gmail.com

What platform do you use?

I try to run the latest daily build of the dasBlog, as far as my host supports it. So you may encounter the occasional issue, but that's life at the bleeding edge of software development.

Again for 2007-2008 Tam Tam had received the Microsoft Gold Partner status.

Via: Freakonomics Blog

 Microsoft released a beta of Live writer [0] this weekend and says it works with dasBlog, so this is a test to see if it actually does.

[0] Writer zone

Available on SourceForge.net, haven’t found anything yet, excellent work Omar, Scott and everybody else.

[full list of new features]