Here's who we are and what we do: http://www.microsoft.com/germany/msdn/kontakt/microsofttechnologycenter.mspx

My blog has been sadly quiet so far. But being a Microsoft employee now, blogging has virtually become an obligation. Plus, I've reached an age where I start to forget little technical details at an amazing rate, so having an external repository is a life-saver.

Thus, my New Year's Resolution for 2006 is simple: More blogging. Way more blogging.

Upgrading to dasBlog 1.8.5223.2 was painless. This update even comes with a new theme "Project84", which I've promptly put to good use. But what annoys me is the fact that many style sheets offered by the various themes don't seem to be fully tested. I hardly expect perfection, but if you're able to put together a nicely designed theme, why not give it the polish it deserves? Here are two changes to the Project84 theme's CSS you might find useful:

.categoryListNestedOutlineTitleCellStyle {
    font-size: small;
}

.categoryListNestedOutlineBodyTableStyle {
    margin-left: 1em;
}

These changes have two effects:

1. Blog subcategories are nicely indented.
2. All categories use the same font size.

As of November 1st, I've officially joined Microsoft as an architect in the Microsoft Technology Center in Munich. Everybody who's familiar to cryptic abbreviations like SB, ADS, PoC or arcane names like Contoso — expect to meet me rather sooner than later.

Unlike updating DasBlog 1.6 to 1.7, moving to 1.8 wasn't really scary… too bad the CSS for my favorite theme "Elegance" seems to be somewhat broken. So I settled for "Essence", but moved the administration link to the left side, because the logout link will not show up in the page header.

While I had some fun meeting with all of my firm's technology guys in Paris, my sister did some real work and gave birth to this beautiful young lady called Eva:

Looks just like her mother back in 1976

I know it's bad.

Validating this site with a validator like W3C's Markup Validation Service isn't fun at all. Lots of deprecated HTML <font> tags, unencoded ampersands in query strings, weird attributes… it's a crime.

Unfortunately, it will take some time to fix that. Actually, it will take ASP.NET 2.0 and an updated Version of dasBlog to fix all of that. Or Tomcat, Spring, and some weeks to write my own blogging software.