I’m pretty excited about two upcoming events coming to our community and I have an active role in both of them. 

First, I’ll be presenting at the .Net Data Access Firestarter on March 17, 2010.  This event, hosted at the Microsoft Office in Malvern, PA covers a variety of .Net data access strategies including LINQ to SQL, WCF Data Services and OData, Entity Framework, and even Azure Data Storage.  It’s a pretty good variety of information.  I’ll be doing one of the earliest sessions on the day, my topic is “Introduction To LINQ”.  I’m excited about this because LINQ is such an important part of the .Net Framework now.  While it isn’t really a data access technology, most of the data access technologies use LINQ!  It should be a lot of fun and I am honored to be a part of the event.  Also, if you can’t make it out to the event, you can watch it online too!

Here is a link to more information.

Second is of course, Philly.Net Code Camp.  Our next Code Camp is April 10, 2010.  Once again we are back at DeVry University.  These Code Camps just continue to get better and better.  Once again, we 60 sessions in a variety of technologies.  In addition, we are broadcasting a portion of the content via Live Meeting and they’ll also be available for download later.  That alone makes this an exciting event.  This year, we’ve also invited some folks from Alex’s Lemonade Stand to come by.  At the end of the day, we’ll be presenting them with a donation to their worthwhile organization.  How are we raising the money?  This year we are offering two kinds of tickets to Code Camp.  The first is the standard, free ticket.  Anyone is welcome to come to Code Camp for free and enjoy the day (and breakfast and lunch are included as always).  But we have added a Booster ticket this year for $25.  If attendees choose to donate this small amount, they get a few benefits:

• $5 of the each Booster ticket goes to Alex’s Lemonade Stand
• Boosters are included in some premium raffles
• Boosters are included in the post Code Camp party
• Booster money will help sustain Philly.Net throughout the year.
• Other benefits are included as well.

This is sort of an experiment.  The leadership, of which I am a member, doesn’t know how this will turn out.  It seems to me that $25 is a small price to pay for a ton of content at Code Camp, not to mention the fact that we provide breakfast and lunch.  And we hope that people won’t mind donating to our efforts, it takes a lot of money to run the organization and all of the events year round.  Plus, we are donating a portion to charity.  On the other hand, I always liked these events being free.  People donate their time so that others can come and learn for free.  It’s a great concept!  But times are changing and we need money to run our organization year round.

In any case, whether you choose to donate or attend for free, I hope to see you at Code Camp.

If you are looking to learn about Silverlight development, here is your chance.  Our local Microsoft Developer Evangelists are running a free full day event this Saturday featuring a good variety of information. 

To learn more or register, click here.

If you are a beginner or haven't gotten started yet, this is a great opportunity.  I'm not a beginner and my weekends are pretty busy these days.  So initially, I was going to skip this event.  But from my conversation with Dani Diaz last night, it sounds like there will be a decent range of information here, so I think I will attend too. 

I don't know the full agenda but some of the speakers include Dani, Lindsay Rutter, Bill Wolff and Pete Brown.  That's a good line up but to be perfectly honest, Pete Brown is the big draw for me.  I've been reading his blog since I started doing Silverlight development, this guy really knows his stuff.  One thing I've learned over time is that if a good speaker if giving a talk, even on a topic that I think I know fairly well, it is worth attending.  You never know what kind of tidbit you may pick up from them!

Hope to see you there.

I've already blogged about how cool Live Mesh is, you can read my previous post here.  Well the other day I had a great idea to synchronize my Internet favorites for all of my machines in Mesh.  It was really easy to do.  Of course I am not the first person to have this idea and there are lots of blog posts out there already about how to do it.  Here is the basic idea... Just find the folder on your computer where you already save your favorites.  Add that folder to your Mesh.  Make sure your other machines are synced to that folder too (you can do that when you add the folder to your Mesh, or you can go to your Mesh Desktop and set it there too).  Then on your other computers, you can specify where you want the new folder to go.  Just set it to replace (actually you can merge the two of them) your existing Favorites folder on each machine.  If you have used Mesh at all you will see this is very easy to do.

Some other people have already taken the time to explain it in detail here, here, and here.

 

So I'm working with Silverlight these days.  It's an excellent technology but it's got a fairly steep learning curve.  For the past several years I've been working predominantly with ASP.Net.  As a matter of fact, I've really gotten pretty good at it!  In addition to all of the in's and out's of ASP.Net, including the page lifecycle, custom controls, etc, I had gotten really comfortable with CSS and I've even stopped saying "I hate JavaScript" and started liking it.  Of course, with JQuery, it is really pretty good to work with.  But I digress.

Anyway, all of that stuff I have learned is out the window now.  Silverlight is completely different.  The easy part is that all of my C# code goes right to the client, as well as running on the server.  So much for JavaScript.  But there is no HTML, no ASP.Net controls.  None of it (at least in the apps I am writing).  This is not an ASP.Net application with a little Silverlight mixed in.  The entire UI for this business application is Silverlight.  The only html/asp.net is the page that hosts it.  So all of the UI is written in XAML.  XAML is cool and very powerful but takes getting used to and when you start with it, you are starting from scratch.  It's not like writing a web app or a windows forms app at all.  But don't get me wrong, I like it.

Anyway, the purpose for this first Silverlight post...

So I'm working along and things are going good.  My app is coming along and working as well as it should in the very rough state it is in.  After making a bunch of changes I fire up the debugger and run my Silverlight application in Internet Explorer.  "Hmmm, that's weird, it shouldn't do that" I think to myself.  I checked the code, and sure enough, it should not do "that".  So I run it again. Same result.  My code is running without the recent changes I made.  Ok, I try a bunch of stuff, not necessarily in this order: Build my Solution, "Rebuild" my solution, "Clean" my solution, put obvious changes in my UI and re run it, restart Internet Explorer, Ctl-F5 to clear IE, try Firefox, close/reopen my solution, close/reopen VS2008, reboot my machine.  I probably tried a few more things but no matter what I did, the application continued to show the UI before my changes.  At some point in all of this, it became clear that my XAP file was not getting updated in my web project.  I tried deleting it, figuring that would signal Visual Studio to replace it when it builds again.  No luck.  I manually placed a current XAP file (from the Silverlight app) into my web project.  Now when I run my application is perfectly up to date!  So I am positive on the problem but unsure how to fix it. I figured that in my Property Pages of my Silverlight Application I'd find something telling me where/when/what to do with the XAP file.  But I couldn't find it.  Next I searched the Property Pages of my Web Application.  Presto, there it is!  From a web application, select the "Silverlight Application" tab.  When I did the list of projects was empty!  I have no idea how it got to be that way.  But I clicked "Add" and the rest was self explanatory.  I picked my Silverlight project and selected where I wanted the XAP file to go. 

 

Last night at the Philly.Net meeting Rob gave a cool talk about Live Mesh.  I had heard of it before but hadn't paid too much attention.  But now that I've gotten a good look at it, I am impressed.  So what can I do with Mesh?  Probably a lot.  But at first two things jump out.  I can synchronize files between multiple devices (my home PC, my laptop, a phone, etc).  Plus in addition to the files being synced, I can go to my Live Desktop and view the files there.  The Live Desktop is just a web site though, so it is accessible from anywhere.  So if I am traveling without my laptop and I want to access one of the files I've got in Mesh, I can get to them from any browser.  Cool!  But from my Live Desktop I can also connect remotely into my home computer (or any computer on my Live network). That way I can not only access files stored on that PC, but I can actually control the computer just as if I was sitting in front of it.  As a matter of fact, I'm doing it right now.  I'm blogging this from my home PC, but I'm sitting in front of my laptop. I'm connected via Live Mesh into my home PC and running Live Writer on my home PC.  Ok, file synchronization and remote desktop are nothing new.  But what makes this cool is just how easy it is. And it all seems to work very quickly too.  Very cool!  Rob also demonstrated some other cool features, like you can write applications to run on Live Mesh, and you can write applications that use Live Mesh.  Maybe I'll get to that one day but for now, I'm having fun with Mesh and it is useful for me in business too.  Awesome.

Diamond Technologies is teaming up with Microsoft to present: Technology Day.

Date: Tuesday ~ October 23, 2007

Time: 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Place: Diamond Headquarters

From the invite...

Do you have questions about IT, Vista™ , or Sharepoint? Would you like to see the latest technology in mobility solutions? Is your company looking for new ways to improve decision-making, productivity, or collaboration? Is your IT team challenged by evolving security threats, rising deployment, support costs, or increasingly complex desktop infrastructures?
As a part of our commitment to deliver quality products and services that help your business succeed, we are offering you the opportunity to participate in Technology Day.

Join us for lunch, participate in a demo or Q & A session, tour the Microsoft Bus and enjoy learning about the exciting new releases from Microsoft:  including Vista™ and Sharepoint.  Network and request a song from WSTW live at lunch.

Click here to get some more information or register to attend.

Here's a heads up on two events coming soon.  This is a great opportunity to learn about Silverlight and Expression Studio from three of the local Microsoft Developer Evangelists:  Danilo "Dani" Diaz, G. Andrew Duthie, and Zhiming "Z" Xue.  Check out the links for more information and to register.

Each event has two sessions:

• Building Rich Interactive Applications with Microsoft Silverlight
• Delivering Rich Web Experiences Using Microsoft Expression Studio

 

 

I've gotta start by saying I love Vista.  A lot of people I talk to are still scared of Vista but I have really enjoyed using it.  I'm no expert on the features but I did blog about a few that I liked right out of the gate.  Lately,  one thing that makes me crazy is the TrustedInstaller.exe.  First, you should understand that I built my own machine and I guess either my CPU fan or the box itself (or both) must suck.  Because when my CPU is cranking, the fan revs up and rattles the entire box.  It is really annoying!  And because of this, it is obvious to me every time TrustedInstaller.exe is running.  This thing typically runs at 48% of my CPU and lasts for 15 minutes or so.  I don't know why it isn't throttled back a bit, it doesn't make sense to me.

Anyway, when I first figured out that TrustedInstaller was the culprit, I did some web searching and found a blog post by Scott Hanselman.  I was really glad that I wasn't the only one suffering, especially someone that I respect like Scott (sorry Scott).  But it validated me, that I wasn't doing something wrong myself. 

Interestingly, when I looked up his blog post today to include it here, I read something that stood out to me:

"When I see things like this, I think "If I worked for Microsoft, fixing this problem could be a HUGE opportunity.""

Posted 5/28/2007 on Scott's Blog

Wow, that is awesome because I remembered another post on Scott's blog from which I quote:

"I'm going to work for Microsoft. There, I said it. I'm going to work for ScottGu's team in the Developer Division."

Posted 7/21/2007 on Scott's Blog

OK, I am pretty sure ScottGu's team isn't responsible for the TrustedInstaller.  But Scott (Hanselman), can you PLEASE walk down the hall and talk to someone!

Reading Pete's blog I found out about the new version of Windows Live Writer.  It is still in Beta, but now even better with Beta 2.  I'm curious as to why they don't just release this and take away the Beta already.  Anyway...

Right away I noticed some differences (I am posting this with the new version, of course).  The UI is a little slicker.  One of the coolest new features is that you can easily insert and modify tables in a post.  Previously, I had to switch over to html view and put my own tables in.  It was a nuisance.  I also like the way they display the categories now.  Also I just noticed while I am typing this that the spell checking is enhanced.  Check out this list of new features.

One feature that I think needs to be added is support for post descriptions.  My blog runs on dasBlog.  With dasBlog I can put in a description of my post and then only the description shows on the main page with a link to the body of the post.  I'd love to be able to insert the description via Live Writer.  I'll submit my feature request to the team.

Quite a while back (maybe a year) I saw a great video on YouTube that demonstrated a new user interface that used a touch screen like never before.  They likened it to the awesome UI from the movie The Minority Report where guys drag "objects" around computer screen by hand.  Sure, the one in the movie was MUCH cooler then this, but this was a step in the right direction.

Today I worked from home which meant that I got to watch a bit of the Today Show before starting work.  Much to my surprise, they did a segment with Bill Gates where he introduced Microsoft Surface.  This is a pretty similar concept to the original product I saw a year ago.  Of course, I have no idea if they are similar beneath the hood. 

This is definitely worth checking out.  They said it would be available in retail uses this soon but not for home users to play with for 2 more years.

Lastly, I thought I would have a scoop on this since I doubt many other people who work watch the Today Show.  But I was scooped by Scott Cate.  He also mentions seeing this at the Microsoft Museum (I've never been there) and he also notes that it uses Flash, not Silverlight!  Now that is interesting.

A few friends have asked lately about pasting code into blog posts from visual studio.  When you do add code, you want to retain the syntax highlighting features from VS so the code is more readable.  This is a snap with Windows Live Writer.  Live Writer is still considered Beta software but it seems to work pretty well for me.

All you need to do is go to the Live Writer Gallery and check out the cool pluggins that are available.  In this case, I am using the pluggin called "Paste From Visual Studio".

Just install that and in a snap you go from this:

 

public void dosomething(string anArgument)
{
//this method doesn't really do anything.
string message = "hello world"
DateTime date = DateTime.Now;
}

To This:

    public void dosomething(string anArgument)
    {
        //this method doesn't really do anything.
        string message = "hello world";
        DateTime date = DateTime.Now;
    }

It couldn't be easier!  Now I just need to add some posts to this blog that really use some pasted code!  Check out this other post I wrote about some other cool features of Live Writer.

I am planning to install Vista on my home PC. While I am really excited about it, I keep hearing about "little problems" that people are having and it is making me nervous.

Peter Laudati has a good post on his blog about the Microsoft on-line mapping service.  I really agree with the point he makes.  I don't know what the mapping service is really called but you can check it out here.  I've used this service before.  If you haven't used it, it is Microsoft's answer to MapQuest or Google Maps.  The product is pretty slick and the aerial photos on it may be the best on the web.  And it has some great 3D features.  But I am not going to debate the pros and cons of one mapping service vs another.  The biggest problem with the Microsoft service is the name.  The website says "Live Search" at the top and "Microsoft Virtual Earth" at the bottom.  And the URL is any of the many url's that you used to find the site. So which is it?  And what does Live Search mean?  How would I know that has anything to do with maps?  Plus they changed the name a bunch of times including local.live.com (or was it live.local.com?  Who can remember?) and maps.msn.com, etc.  You would think a monster company like Microsoft would have a better idea of how to brand products properly.  No one has to wonder what "Google Maps" or "MapQuest" means. 

In my opinion, this is not the first similar mistake Microsoft has made.  I am a happy C# developer and I love .Net, but I hate the name!  .Net???  What were they thinking?  What does that mean?

There is definitely a lesson to be learned here.  I hate to say it but no matter how great are code is, without good marketing guys we are screwed!

I just checked the Tech-Ed 2007 site and I noticed that the session catalog is up.  I'd expect changes since Tech-Ed is not until June.  But it is nice to see what is planned so far.