Moved... mostly settled in and back online.

Got to play on Xbox Live for the first time last night without a network cable stretched from upstairs in what is my office to downstairs where my wide screen and Xbox are setup. Now I’ve rewired the house for CAT-5 in a central closet. Had to get the phone company out here to run a separate line to the DSL network device so I could get past the 1.3mbit issue… which, for whatever ever reason in SBC’s infinite wisdom, since it wasn’t able to do 1.5mbit, they throttled me down to 768kbit. Of course, since it was a plan for 384-1544kbit, they thought that was completely acceptable. Needless to say, I decided to upgrade to the 1.5-3.0mbit… that why they must get me at least 1.5 ;-)

Working from home full time is a new experience for me as well. Pretty much have everything moved from my office to the house and next week would be my first full week of working from the house. As long as I can keep to a schedule (and have others honor it as well), I think it won’t be much different than working from a satellite office… other than I don’t have to actually drive to work or figure out what’s for lunch… just walk to the kitchen and get something ;-)

Last but not least, the question of the day from a friend of mine was:

How do I get a result out of a console application?

First, I was thinking that he was actually wanting the result code (or exit code) so that he could leverage that within a batch file or something. So I dug around and couldn’t immediately find it. I knew it was hiding in the FCL somewhere, but memory wasn’t serving me very well. Luckily Microsoft Instant Messenger and knowledgeable friends is such a handy tool to have. Sent a request to Jason Bock and he knew the answer off the top of his head (well, pretty much; it was actually his second answer ;-)).

Environment.ExitCode = *value*

Of course it turns out that that wasn’t what my friend was looking for. I completely over complicated it. What he was asking was so simple that I mistakenly went down the wrong path. What he was looking for was how to get a console application to output text to the console. And the answer is…

Console.WriteLine("what you want to output")

Go figure… ;-)