February, 2009

OK, so some of this stuff would have been (and still would be) very helpful during my recent updates to Community Megaphone . I finally got around to setting up a separate dev database, plus a staging server for testing new bits in a non-local setting...

Thanks to all the folks who came out for Tuesday’s MSDN Mid-Atlantic Roadshow in Reston, VA. Below you’ll find links to the slides, demos, and other resources mentioned during the presentations. If you have any questions, please let me know . Decks: Around...

Steve Smith has some interesting things to say about one of the passionate debates of the day among developers: In the last year or so, there has been an increasing amount of discussion on software craftsmanship, and what it means and whether or not it...

One of the more fun and compelling sample applications for WPF, which I demoed this morning at the MSDN Roadshow in Reston, VA, has just been updated, as announced by Tim Sneath : It’s been a little while in coming, but I’m delighted to announce that...

One of the UX technologies I mentioned during my talk for the MSDN Roadshow today was the Sidebar (and in Windows 7, Desktop) gadgets, which are great for surfacing small amounts of information in a a compact space. One of the attendees asked whether...

Tuesday, February 24th is the kickoff of the next MSDN Roadshow tour, in Reston, VA. We’ve still got room for more developers eager to learn about the latest in Windows Client technologies. Among the topics to be covered are: Windows Presentation Foundation...

Folks who follow me on Twitter (or those who follow a number of other folks) might have noticed something a little weird going on this weekend. Following a series of “retro” avatar pics that I posted, from my childhood and college (and early post-college...

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area…this list now includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar , and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also now automatically synced...

Denny Boynton , a fellow Microsoft Evangelist, has started a new blog series on Windows 7 that looks interesting, starting with a post on locking down which apps can be installed on your PC : I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta on all of my machines, work...

A couple of nights ago, I presented on web development fundamentals at the CMAP .NET Essentials SIG. One of the things we talked about was the fact that the .NET Framework is pretty large, so a challenge for new devs is figuring out where everything they...

We’ll be in Reston, VA next week to talk about all things Windows Client. Here’s the session list: Around the World of Windows Client in 75 Minutes Create Rich User Experiences with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Re-use Your Skills and Code to...

As I spend more time working on the client side, I’m more and more impressed with the jQuery JavaScript framework, and really glad that we’ve decided to ship it with future versions of Visual Studio (as well as with the soon-to-be-released ASP.NET MVC...

Here’s a collection of useful tools for generating CSS layouts, tabs, rounded corners, etc.: http://www.thegermz.com/my-ramblings/60-css-tools-to-reduce-your-work-load Note that some of these do not work properly on IE 8, though compatibility mode helps...

Two great apps that work great together: “Hey, you got your event in my UGSS!” “No, you got your event in my Community Megaphone !” If you’re a developer looking for events, or a community leader looking to get your events promoted, one challenge you...

A day late this week, but here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area…this list now includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar , and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also...

While getting ready to roll out some new functionality for Community Megaphone , I decided to go ahead and add an SSL cert to the site to support SSL encryption of credentials used by event approvers and other site features. Although it had been almost...

Came across this really thorough and interesting article on form design and development via Jeff Schoolcraft , and thought it was worth sharing. As the article notes several times, how you design your forms can have a direct impact on how much (or how...

This is a nice example of maturity . It’s not always easy to recognize when something you want really bad…something you’ve convinced yourself you deserve, would not be good for you. And it can be even harder, once you recognize, to allow that to change...

While I can’t claim to be a huge adherent of any particular set of development principles (I admire others’ passion in this area, but I’m very pragmatic when it comes to getting a given task done…there are lots of ways to do it, many of which can be ...

It’s lengthy, and I haven’t had the time to read through the whole thing, but this is a delightful look at the most common pattern in application architecture, the Big Ball of Mud : Abstract While much attention has been focused on high-level software...

I mentioned in a previous post that I’d been getting up earlier lately, as an experiment to see what being an early bird could do for this former night owl. I’m about a month into the experiment, and the results are quite promising. I have: been getting...

Shawn Wildermuth has posted a nice simple example of drag and drop in Silverlight 2. If you’ve been intimidated by drag and drop, Shawn’s example will show you how easy it can be. I've been trolling the Silverlight .NET forums again and there seems to...

My thanks to Steve Presley , who noticed that I posted the wrong date for the upcoming MSDN Mid-Atlantic Roadshow in Chester, VA, here’s the correct info: Richmond, VA (Chester) – March 10th, 2009 Some of our regulars from Richmond may wonder why we chose...

Wanted to pass along a couple of useful links found via Steve Andrews on twitter , each deals with the topic of making transparency in PNGs, something that isn’t supported by default with IE 6, work via a couple of hacks. Solution 1 , which has been out...

Good Monday Morning to you! Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area: Monday, February 09, 2009 6:00 PM: SoMD .NET UG - .NET Generics - Generic programming is a style of computer programming...