Matt Powell

When Silverlight 2 Releases, Will You be Ready?

mattpo — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 23:48:00 GMT

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has been out since June 6th and the number of sites that have taken advantage of the go-live license has taken off. In addition there are probably hundreds of sites that have been thrown together as little samples or test sites that would not be considered production, but are built for Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

When the final version of Silverlight 2 is released, will you be ready? You should be aware of some key points:

1. The "go-live" license agreement addendum for using beta 2, indicates you will upgrade to the released version of Silverlight 2 within 7 days of it releasing.

2. Although it is quite possible that most of your code will not have to be changed at all, the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 version of the object tag that instantiates Silverlight for your site is version specific to Silverlight 2 Beta 2. Therefore, if someone does not have Silverlight installed and they come to your site after Silverlight 2 releases, they will NOT just run correctly with the released Silverlight 2. They will be directed to install Silverlight 2 Beta 2. After Silverlight 2 releases, users will be discouraged from installing the old Beta 2, and eventually will not be able to install it.

3. After Silverlight 2 releases, if users already have the released Silverlight 2 on their machines and they come to a site that uses the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 mime type on the object tag, they will be asked to install Silverlight 2 Beta 2. This will entail them uninstalling the released Silverlight 2 runtime and installing the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime. While this will make an out of date SL2 Beta 2 site run, it will not allow the users to run sites configured for the released Silverlight 2 - they will instead be prompted to upgrade to the released Silverlight 2, and will again be in conflict with the site built for Silverlight 2 Beta 2.

4. If you are like me and take the easy route to building your Silverlight applications by using the Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio, Expression Blend, or other such tools, the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 releases of these tools create Web pages with object tags that instantiate the Silverlight 2 Beta 2 runtime. Therefore if you have a Silverlight 2 Beta 2 project, and you try to update it for the release of Silverlight 2 by just changing your VB, C# and XAML code, be aware that the object tag in the HTML also needs to be updated. There will be released versions of the Silverlight Tools for VStudio and Expression Blend that will be available at the same time as Silverlight 2 is available, so you can use these tools to rebuild your sites with the right object tag mime type, but you have to go through that process of installing the new tools and rebuilding. Or you can edit the HTML by hand, but make sure you know what you are doing.

For details on how the object tag works with the MIME type and Javascript, and all the other details, see Peter's blog entries at Structure of the Silverlight Object Tag and Instantiating Silverlight: HTML vs. Script.

The best solution for your end-users will be to upgrade your Silverlight 2 Beta 2 site to the released version of Silverlight 2 as quickly as possible after it releases. For the most part, this will be a very easy process and should not take you a lot of time, even for large Silverlight applications. Just keep in mind that there is a little work that you will need to do when the release does go live. Unfortunately I cannot provide specifics on the release date at this time.

It is important to note that if you have a site built for the released version of Silverlight 1.0, it will just continue to work and you do not have to take any actions whatsoever. Silverlight 2 is backward compatible with Silverlight 1.0. This post is directed at people who have built Web sites for Silverlight 2 Beta 2 (or Beta 1, but they should have upgraded to Beta 2 a long time ago).

-Matt

Wow! Olympic Swimming

mattpo — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:04:00 GMT

Okay, I work for Microsoft on Silverlight and specifically run the http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight site among other things. This was a big weekend for us since NBC decided to use Silverlight to do their US coverage of the Olympics online. But with a big 500 person campout with the Rainbow Girls that I helped organize this weekend and mostly watching to just make sure our sites were operationally working well, I didn't get a chance to actually watch the events.

I just watched the Men's 4x100m Freestyle finals online: http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/share.html?videoid=0811_hd_swb_hl_l0194.

This thing brought me to tears...right in my office.

I'll be watching it a number of times.

Wow!

-Matt

Want to learn what this Silverlight thing is all about?

mattpo — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 21:55:00 GMT

I've had the opportunity to talk to quite a few Web developers at conferences and so forth, and the good news is pretty much everyone has heard of Silverlight. The bad news is that quite a few haven't reached the point of actually playing with it yet. I can certainly relate since as busy Web developers I'm sure finding time to dig into a new technology can be challenging.

And boy do I have a solution for you! Perhaps you are thinking about attending TechEd this year (TechEd US 2008 Developers, June 3-6 in Orlando)...in addition to a bunch of great sessions on the latest information concerning Silverlight (as well as ASP.NET, AJAX, Visual Studio, IIS, and all the other great Web technologies Microsoft has to offer), there will also be a day-long PreConference session on June 2nd designed to get you up to speed on Silverlight. Then you can walk into the other Silverlight sessions during the week knowing what you are talking about, and will return home as an offical Silverlight geek. And to top it off, this Silverlight PreConference session is being presented by the best guy in the business: Jeff Prosise. You cannot go wrong. The cost for the additional day of TechEd is $350 over the standard registration price of $1,795 (this is the early bird price which saves you $200).

Here's the link to register for TechEd and Jeff's Silverlight preconference session: https://www.msteched.com/dev/public/regprocess.aspx.

Spaces for Jeff's Silverlight Preconference session are limited and they are going fast so don't wait too long. BTW: Early bird registration ends April 4th, but I doubt there will still be spots in Jeff's Precon by then. So register quick.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Bill Gates will be delivering the TechEd keynote. I don't know all of Bill's schedule, but this has to be about the last big keynote he will be giving as Microsoft's Chairman. History in the making.

See you at Teched,

-Matt

Washing Machine Fun

mattpo — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 06:40:00 GMT

I just got back from vacation and right before I left my washing machine broke down. It wouldn't pump the water out of the tub (it was doing a constant beeping...and then when I unplugged it, let it set for 90 seconds and then plugged it back in, the pump would try to pump but you just heard the motor straining). This is a Fisher Paykel EcoSmart washer which we have had someone come out to repair too many times already and usually they are gone in less than 10 minutes or so after I spend 5 of the 10 minutes writing a $200 check.

So I decided to try and tackle the problem myself. The first thing I did was throw all the clothes in the washing room sink next to it and shucked all the water out with a big cup. After I did this I remembered one problem I had previously where a big plastic bag managed to slip underneath the washer and got caught around the big spinning motor until it eventually wouldn't spin. So I managed to tip it back so I could look underneath it but everything looked fine.

Then I pulled off the soap dispenser top, reached down the middle of the agitator and unscrewed the plastic winged nut that holds the agitator in place. Then I lifted the agitator out. Nothing seemed unusual. Nothing wrapped around the agitator gears or anything like that (of course if you are an appliance repair person then you are probably already yelling....IT'S THE PUMP! IT'S THE PUMP!).

But I'm not an appliance repair person.

So now I figured that it was time to open the cover. I couldn't figure out how to open the top. There are clips on the back that I thought you might have to unhook but there was something holding the front together and the clips in back looked suspiciously like a hinge mechanism. I finally gave up and went to my friend, the Internet...only really looking to find out how to open the top cover.

That is when I found this.

This was exactly the solution to my problem! And it was so easy to follow. So just in case the link dies for some reason, here is the fantastic information that saved me $200 along with my own notes inserted in italics.

Turn off the water supply at the tap where the hose is connected and siphon out the water in the machine with a hose. I didn't turn off the water supply and I used a cup to scoop out the water instead of a siphon.
Take off the lid by putting it in the upright position and pulling it straight up and out.
You will now see two screw plugs at the front top of the machine. Remove the plugs to reveal the two screws which you will also need to remove. Once the screws have been removed you can lift the top of the machine up and tilt it toward the back. The back needs to stay attached to the base of the machine. This is the info I was looking for to begin with. In retrospect this seems really obvious. My cupboard happened to nicely hold the top close to vertical and out of the way. I think the repair people that have come out before had a wire or something to hold the top up. A spouse's hand can also work. The screws are Phillips.
Now inside the machine take off the top soap holder and put your arm down the tube to unscrew the the locking device that holds the assembly together. Now you can pull the assembly out and put it to one side. I had actually already done this before I propped the top up.
The silver inner bowl needs to come out. The top cover of the bowl is clipped on by about six plastic clips which can break if you try too hard so be careful when unclasping these. Once unclipped you will be able to lift the plastic cover off but don't undo the attached spring. Just put the cover to the side that the spring is attached to and leave it there for now. There was a lot of gunk and lint over all the clips so it wasn't easy for me to tell how to properly unclasp (and yes this plastic does seem very fragile after having the machine for about 8 years). Pull the relatively thin cover plastic out past the underlying plastic hook. All six clips unclasp one by one nicely without the awkwardness of undoing more than one at a time.
Lift the silver bowl that usually holds the clothes out of the machine. It might need some force but it should slide straight up and out. Careful, the holes in the metal are sharp on the outside.
You can now see (probably under some water) a red plastic cover with one screw holding it on. The pump cover on my machine was translucent white. Remove the screw and take the cover out. You might now be able to see the offending item. It could be rusted by now. What is it? A hair clip or something? Show it to your wife with an all knowing look! In my case this was a zipper handle...I think from a sleeping bag that we had washed. I was now done and put the whole thing back together.
If the item has deteriorated you might need to take the next plastic cover underneath out. It should pull straight out and has a rubber seal that might fall off. Do not be alarmed! It fits snuggly back around the base of the cover. You will work it out when you go to put it back together.
You might want to syphon the rest of the water out. Point to note: it doesn't taste very nice! It is a good idea to give everything a clean with hot water as you go along.
Once you have removed all foreign objects you can put the machine back in the reverse order. If this does not resolve your problem, sorry, it's time to open the wallet and call a technician. Good luck!

Thanks James and howtomendit.com. I definitely ran an empty hot water load since there was water that sat there for almost a week and was quite foul smelling by the time I got to work on this.

But now everything is working like a dream! I'm on a hardware high!

[Update! Well, I thought everything was running just fine. I'm pretty sure at one point water was pumped out of the machine, but then I ran into the same problem. So I did everything again to open her up and had to do step 8 this time...low and behold I found a rubber band. This time, it did work like a dream after removing the rubber band]

-Matt

Silverlight 1.1 Developer Reference Poster

mattpo — Thu, 10 May 2007 01:42:00 GMT

I had the opportunity during Mix07 to hand out posters that map out the capabilities and classes that are available in Silverlight 1.1. They were pretty popular so I think I handed out about 1200 to the audience of 2200 at Mix. A number of people asked if there was an electronic copy, since 24x14 posters are a little awkward to carry around.

The answer is, "Yes!"

It is at http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/2/e/f2ecc2ad-c498-4538-8a2c-15eb157c00a7/SL_Map_FinalNET.png.

Enjoy,

-Matt

"WPF/E" is now Silverlight!

mattpo — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:31:00 GMT

Tonight we announced the official name of wpfe....Microsoft Silverlight! This is the beginning of a bunch of work my team has been doing which begins tonight at NAB 2007 and culminates with a plethora of announcements and technical information that will be available at Mix07. Both happen to be in Las Vegas. But one has about 100,000 attendees and the other has about 2000.

Unfortunately Mix07 is sold out, but you can follow the happenings at the event on the Mix07 site and/or on the other Web properties (like MSDN).

And by the way, if you want to see one of the cooler capabilities of WPF/E...I mean Silverlight...check out the new site at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/. In particular the video quality is tres kewl. Maybe the video should be called, "We need skateboards...lot's of skateboards." :-)

I suppose one question a lot of people will have is, "Is there a new version out?" The answer is no. This is the WPF/E CTP that has been out for awhile. If you haven't looked at it, you may want to now.

-Matt

Ode to the Progress Bar

mattpo — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 20:20:00 GMT

I'm building the Virtual Machines for a number of the Hands On Labs that will be available at MIX and at TechEd.

I had not worked much with Virtual PC before and obviously when you are running two copies of Vista on your machine simultaneously (and VStudio and IIS, etc.) it can slow things down a bit.

So in the process of getting VS05 SP1 and then the update for Vista installed I happened to have a lot of time to admire the green progress bar. It happened to spur a moment of creativity. For your pleasure, here is the result:

Ode to the Progress Bar

By Matt Powell

Oh green and pulsing bar

That defines my future, unknown number of minutes

Every increment makes me joyful

Yet your mystery bemoans me.

How many times must you repeat your journey from left to right?

Only you know.

And will your travels be quick

Or will it be slow?

Hope allows me to believe that even when you sit motionless

That with a fury you will quickly reach your end.

And I hope…and hope…

And then there is the cruelty at the end of your journey,

When not even a single pixel remains uncovered by your greenness,

And your “seconds remaining” sits laughingly at zero.

“It says zero!” I wail as the wanton desktop languishes for 30...40...60 seconds and more.

Madame desktop unnervingly holds onto the last gleaming remnants of her progress bar

For she is sad to let him go, with his handsome, fluorescent green gradient

But ultimately she can hold him back no more

And his job is finally complete

And I must now start my work.

-Matt

Microsoft and the AJAX Community

mattpo — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:37:00 GMT

Scott announced that Microsoft joined the OpenAJAX Alliance today. I think this does a lot for Microsoft and for the AJAX community. We are certainly striving to be a big player in making AJAX an easy to use platform both for developers and end users, but it definitely needs to be done in a way that plays well with others.

On a similar note, Brad Abrams is in New York at AJAXWorld and will be delivering the keynote tomorrow morning to many of the folks in the AJAX community.

Finally, if you want to learn more about what sort of issues the AJAX community needs to be working on to work well together, you might check out the article we just published on MSDN from Scott Mitchell and Atif Aziz on JSON.

And don't forget, you can learn more about Microsoft's AJAX efforts in Las Vegas at Mix07. See you there.

-Matt

How to test your Web site w/ IE6 while running IE7

mattpo — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:29:00 GMT

Pete put a VPC up awhile back, but the image does have a timebomb. The first timebomb was set to go off on 4/1/07 so an update has been put up so that you can test your Web apps w/ IE6.

Pete deserves all the credit in the world for getting this up for everyone.

Thanks Pete.

-Matt

MIX 07 - It's coming!

mattpo — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 03:16:00 GMT

One of the cooler things about my relatively new position here on the Web Platform and Tools Marketing Team is that I'm deeply involved in the planning for a number of upcoming conferences. One of these, that I had not been previously involved in is Mix07 in Las Vegas, April 30 to May 2nd.

We have a TON to talk about at MIX this year with the recent releases of ASP.NET AJAX, WPF/E, the Expression Suite and, oh yeah, things like Vista and IE7. Upcoming is the "Orcas" release of Visual Studio and Longhorn Server (with IIS7). For those of us focused on the Web world, this is a HUGE time for us at Microsoft and MIX is probably our key event.

And being an old developer, I have worked most of my career with underlying communication technologies, so it is really fun to be involved with the bells and whistles of the User Experience side of the world. We have some really creative designers inside and outside of Microsoft who will be presenting and will be available to talk with. And for us devs whose idea of UI is a text box and button, you will also see how Expression and VStudio allow you to work together with the designers and do all the amazing things that WPF and WPF/E allow you to do.

And there is a TON of other cool topics of discussion as well. So whenever I get the daylight savings blahs, all I have to do is think about Mix and I perk right up. :-)

If you haven't registered yet, hurry up and register since the early-bird discount ends this Thursday (March 15).

-Matt

Is it just me?

mattpo — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:58:00 GMT

Is it just me or has this year's daylight savings seemed to effect people more than others?

Maybe because of a combination of some recent travel, some late nights/early mornings working on some big events, a number of extended family members experiencing physical hardships, or the fact that spring has started to hit the northwest and allergens are filling the air, but my entire family just seems out of wack with the Spring ahead we did this weekend. Maybe it also has to do with the fact that this is happening earlier this year.

Losing an hour of sleep is never a pleasant thing, but everyone in my household seems to be walking under a cloud today. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

-Matt

Emerson College Musical Theatre Audition

mattpo — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:42:00 GMT

Audition #2 in the ongoing effort for my daughter Katie to get into a top notch Musical Theatre program. Last weekend it was Emerson College in Boston. This has always been at the top of my daughter's list, partially because last summer she met someone who went who really liked it, and partially because she is also interested in ASL (she has 3 years of American Sign Language at her high school). For those of you who don't know, Emerson is focused on communications (performance arts, broadcast journalism, technical communications, etc.) including a good Communication Disorders program. For the musical theatre program there are about 500 applicants and 30 to 40 positions.

I did not go on this trip, but my wife and daughter loved Boston. I've only been to Boston for a conference in a hotel and we were pretty much hotel-bound the entire time. Apparently there are something like 37 colleges in Boston and my wife and daughter felt like they were surrounded by other college students their entire (short) stay. They felt safe. Emerson is consolidating in a single block of Boston so their campus buildings will probably be changing a lot in the coming years. I had to laugh a bit at some of the wonderful changes coming since they will be happening either after my daughter would have graduated or in the last year of her time there. For those of you with twelve year old children, this campus should rock by the time your kids are ready for college.

Apparently the audition went well. She had a bit more time with the auditioners at Emerson than at Carnegie Mellon and they got to know her a little bit. They went through her resume pretty closely. She sang "Repent" from On the Twentieth Century and a ballad from Follies. She will probably change her second song for some of the other auditions since neither sufficiently shows her high range. And she has been working on her high range and has really improved with a new song. I don't know the name of the piece she is doing but it does sound very good. "Repent" is good because she can really show off her presentation and acting skills with it. It is quite funny. On the other hand, "Repent" might make it look like she is trying to hide her singing abilities. I guess the ballad should be making up for that.

She had very positive feedback from the voice auditioner and the acting auditioner and once again she was the best dancer in her little group. Also, it sounded like a few more people may have noticed her leadership abilities as she once again took charge of her little group and connected with many of the other auditionees. For instance, when they were doing their monologues, the group waited outside as one by one the were called in. After Katie returned from her turn, someone said, "Oh good, Katie's here. We can talk again." Ahh, the intangibles...hopefully someone notices what an amazing person my daughter is.

So in the end, she felt pretty positive, but you have to wonder if the responses of the auditioners is positive for everyone. I could imagine that if you have 10 minutes with an extremely nervous kid, in order to get to know them at all you have to be nothing but positive and complimentary. They will have plenty of time to be disappointed later when they get their letter.

Next stop...Pepperdine this weekend. They are more of a straight acting school (in fact I think the degree is stage and television acting) but they will listen to a song if you have one during the audition process. This is going to be a whirlwind trip since my daughter has commitments Friday and Saturday night. So we are squeezing in a flight to LAX, a short night's sleep in the hotel, a quick drive to Malibu, an early morning audition, dash back to the airport, catch a flight in time to make it to the Saturday night performance. Ugh.

Break a leg, Katie!

-Matt

Carnegie Mellon Musical Theatre

mattpo — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:25:00 GMT

My oldest daughter, Katie, is a senior in high school and therefore is applying to various colleges across the country. She is a pretty talented actor, singer and dancer so she is trying to get into a first rate theatre program, and in particular is trying to get into a musical theatre program. This weekend we went with her to Carnegie Mellon for an audition there. I must admit that Pittsburgh does not strike me as the center of the musical theatre world, but they do have an amazing program. Good enough in fact, I believe, that if you graduate from there you can probably guarantee yourself an acting career. It sounds like at Carnegie Mellon that the students in the musical theatre program live at the Purnell Center which is quite nice. We weren’t big fans of Pittsburgh in general though. But the program sounds amazing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look very good for her getting in (of the 30 kids at the audition, two were told to sing for some other faculty…I’m pretty sure this was the “short list” of applicants and doing a little math around the number of audition sessions and the number of auditionees in our session led me to believe that 1 or 2 out of 30 would get one of the coveted 28 spots in the musical theatre program). Official word is in March.

We have a number of others to go: Emerson, Michigan, Webster, Northern Colorado, Pepperdine, Evansville. These are exhausting trips. Judging your own talent is hard to do when you are a pretty big fish in a small pond so her approach was to apply to top notch programs to see if she had what it takes to get in. This would be a good barometer if she should make this her career. I think we are a little depressed at the moment, but some of the schools on the list aren’t quite as selective. Of course one of the things you have to get used to if you are an actor is rejection so that’s how it goes. Of the three threats (singing, dancing, and acting) Katie’s strongest asset is dancing. Unfortunately the hierarchy for musical theatre is singing first, acting second, and dancing third, which is basically the exact opposite of my daughter’s strengths. She is still quite a good singer, but she is a natural alto and you have to have the range to get to that next level. She can support, open up and hit those high notes in her head voice, but it isn’t natural for her yet and it not only has to be natural, but she needs to be able to revel in it. I think she is about another year of voice lessons from getting to that point. As it is right now, she probably hits 98% of her notes, but it only takes one weak note to screw up an audition. Do the math on 32 bars of notes and chances are better than not that something in those 32 bars will leave you wanting.

The really top notch schools only take a few people. I hear University of Michigan only takes 10 people a year. Apparently thousands apply. Whew! And I guarantee most of those thousand are considerably more talented than the people on American Idol. Jeez, even half the finalists on that show miss the pitch on some of their notes – something that I’m pretty sure none of the auditionees yesterday did. My daughter, being the social magnate that she is, immediately started engaging with the others at the audition in the few minutes they had and it is sad to note just how many of them said that the Carnegie Mellon audition was their entire life’s dream. They do have a great program, maybe even the best, but it was not my daughter’s first choice so she was under a lot less pressure than some. It is really sad to think of the tears that will be shed in March when those rejection letters start arriving. I’m sure it will be disappointing (or you never know…maybe it will be elating) for my daughter even if she wasn’t planning on going there. She did think she was probably the best dancer in her group…for what its worth. She also immediately became her little group's leader, something that comes naturally to her as the oldest of seven kids, but you got to get past that voice evaluator before peripheral qualities like leadership and personality kick in.

Emerson and Pepperdine are next. Break a leg, Katie!

Air bags + basketballs

mattpo — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 02:03:00 GMT

My wife was in an accident last night. Someone turned left on a two lane road right in front of her. She hit the back end of their car at a high enough speed that the air bags deployed. She was in the car with three kids (two of ours and one carpooler). Everyone was fine except my 11 year old son who was in the front passenger seat. They were heading to basketball practice and he had his ball in his lap. They airbag smashed it into his face and he had some pretty bad abrasians, general face swelling and a scratched cornea. Nothing broken...not even his nose. His face is pretty swollen but he should be fine in a couple days. Apparently eyes heal quickly too. I imagine he will have some good black and blue colors over a lot of his face in the coming days, but in a week or two he should be completely back to normal. Thank God.

I've seen warnings about kids being in the front seats of cars because of possible air bag injuries. My son is well past the normal weight limits of those warnings. I've also heard cautions about having loose items in your car. But how often do you have a book or some other item in your lap when you are a passenger in a car. I guess the good news is that the injuries were relatively minor even if he would have been better off without an airbag or a basketball in the car.

BTW: Everyone in the car was wearing a seatbelt. This would not be nearly as happy an ending if anyone was not.

-Matt

Photosynth

mattpo — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:13:00 GMT

This is very cool. If for some reason you haven't heard of Photosynth yet, you have to check it out.

There was a James Bond movie many years ago where in the movie they had a picture of a freighter of some sort that was linked to the evil doings of one of the 007 villians. The ultra-modern computer system they had was able to figure out, based on a little bit of shoreline in the picture where in the world the picture was taken. This is the current incarnation of that. The 007 experience wasn't nearly is cool and intuitive. In fact I don't think there was any kind of user experience shown.

Make sure you subscribe to the blog to follow how this technology develops.

-Matt

A few Commercial Real Estate Terms

mattpo — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:03:00 GMT

I mentioned in my earlier post that I have been learning about the Commercial Real Estate business due to my involvement in trying to get a Masonic Lodge built. I am by no means an expert but here are a few terms I have learned in trying to get a grasp of the market in rentable office space.

Net Rentable Area. This is the total number of square feet of rentable office space in a given area. In my case we are talking about the area of Mountlake Terrace and Edmonds. Not included in this number is office space that is owned outright by its occupants. It is all the space in the area currently being rented plus all the space that is currently vacant but is on the market to be rented. This number is important, not only because it is critical in determining the areas Vacancy Rate, but it also tells you what sort of impact your new building may have on the existing market. For instance you may have a vacancy rate of 10%, but if your new building will double the amount of office space in the area, then there is a good chance that adding that space will have an impact on the vacancy rate...basically you are drastically increasing supply and chances are that demand will not increase significantly so prices will go down. In my little venture we will be increasing the Net Rentable Area in Mountlake Terrace and Edmonds by about 2%. I believe this change is small enough that we should be able to maintain the current vacancy rate in the area. In fact, considering our location and the fact that we will be new construction, I'm hoping we will be reducing the vacancy rate in the area.

Vacancy Rate. The vacancy rate is the percentage of the Net Rentable Area that is currently not rented. This is probably the key market analysis number that investors need to be aware of. An area's vacancy rate is probaly a good indicator of what the vacancy rate in your building will be. Therefore if you need to have 2/3rds of your building full in order to break even, and the vacancy rate is 11%, then you should go ahead and invest since 89% of your building will be projected to be full (well past your 2/3rds requirement). My gut tells me that vacancy rates are not all they are cracked up to be. For instance, say the current vacancy rate in our area is 20%. In preperation of building our building we start lining up renters and say we get to 60% of the space rented. I'm told banks will not loan you the money to build until you have 60% of your rentable office space committed. Now in all the office space rental situations that I have been vaguely a part of (about 4 situations that I know of) the length of lease has always been 5 years. So if we are at 60% today, you know you will maintain at least 60% over the next 5 years. But the remaining space does not come off the market. Agents will continue to try and rent out the space. Therefore you would expect that the occupancy rate in your building will increase over time as the last few chunks of your building's space is rented. After five years, you may find that some of your renters will leave as their first lease finishes. But the good news is that inflation will kick up rents so you won't have to maintain as high a vacancy rate to break even.

I will leave it at that for now since it is getting late. More real estate terms ahead.

-Matt

Commercial Real Estate

mattpo — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:09:00 GMT

I'm a member of a Masonic Lodge that meets in a lodge building in Edmonds, WA. We don't own the building, another lodge does and we rent their lodge to hold our meetings in their building twice a month.

Our lodge has existed like that for more than 30 years.

About 12 years ago we purchased a piece of property that is adjacent to I-5 in Mountlake Terrace. We have wanted to build a new lodge building on that property for a long time but had to raise a bunch of funds in order to try and get it off the ground. In the mean time we have watched a bunch of other lodges loose their building since they have to pay taxes on properties whose value has increased drastically. The intent is always to build or renevate a new building, but if you sell a building for $400,000 and that is all the funds you have, then you will build a building with the money you have...namely $400,000 and you have to still pay all the taxes and so forth. A bunch of assets of Masonic Lodges have been squandered in the past 10 years or so in real estate deals that go awry. The result is fewer and fewer lodge buildings in communities and less and less visibility for this excellent organization.

So the mantra these days is that you have to have a Lodge building that has an income source to support your lodge. We have now done all the analysis on our land for building a 3 story office building where we use the ground floor and rent out the top two floors for office space. This entire building is about 34,000 square feet and would have about 22,000 square feet of rented office space.

So now the question is can we keep a building afloat while we pay off the mortgage on a $5 million dollar building. The monthly payments for this beast are going to be somewhere around $25,000. MONTHLY PAYMENTS! Man, I thought my home's mortgage was a lot.

You can see how we might be a little nervous about undertaking such an effort. You hae $100,000. You build a building. You don't have anyone to rent the space for 4 months...$100,000 is gone! Wee!

So in all my free time lately I have been looking into the world of Commercial Real Estate. I now know what Net Absorption Rates are, Vacancy rates and so forth. Vacancy rates in Mountlake Terrace are running around 11.2%. As a simple projection of what we can expect it should be good since we simply need to have a 61% occupancy rate to break even. Yet me in others are a little paranoid.

I should mention that 3 other lodges are considering joining in our little endeavor. Two of them already own aging buildings which equals pretty fat assets which can contribute to the funding of our mamoth undertaking. So we are currently beginning the process of convincing everyone that they should get involved in this including the members of my Lodge. Tonight I presented a powerpoint presentation to my lodge on the plan. It went very well and we had a unanimous vote afterward to continue moving forward with the plan. Success! The real cool thing about the whole project is that at some point in the future...presumably 30 years...our mortgage will be paid off. If you do a little math, our rental property will be bringing in about $50,000 in income per month...and that is before you add in inflating office rental rates. $50K per month is a TON of money. As a non-profit service organization, that is a lot of service money with which we can do some fantastic things for the community. Today we struggle to give a $500 scholarship once a year to a student at the local high school. In the future we will be able to give a handful of $30,000 scholarships. Today we fund a local school's reading program. In the future we can fund a school district's reading program.

I think this is the start of one of the more significant things that I have ever done in my life. I can't wait to see this happen. Maybe in the coming days I'll share some of the things I've learned about the world of commercial real estate.

-Matt

IE7 Ships!

mattpo — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 10:02:00 GMT

Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP shipped tonight!

Get the download and check out all the details at the IE developer center on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/ie/).

In my birthday post yesterday, this was the cool thing that I was referring to that would happen on my birthday.

Blow out candles and install IE7. The perfect birthday.

-Matt

Birthdays

mattpo — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 00:33:00 GMT

One of my sons was born on Christmas. There was an abruption (this isn't good) and so it kind of put a damper on opening presents when instead we rushed Cindy to the hospital as fast as we could. We named him Nole, since he was born on Christmas. Get it? It's kinda a dislexic Noel that sounds more masculine. Get it?

As an aside...I once co-wrote a book called "Running Internet Information Server" and in the author's bio I mentioned my children's names so that they could say, "my name was in a book." And then of course I would reply with, "Yeah! You aren't on the cover though are you! Huh! Are you!" At which point they would quietly walk to their rooms and plot my death. But until then...so I co-wrote this book. And I mention two interesting things that on their face value seem unrelated. My son's name is Nole...did I mention he was born on Christmas? The other thing I mentioned is that I went to graduate school at Florida State University.

With all the fame and fortune of writing a book that sold several copies, as you might expect, I received a lot of fan mail. Most of it was, "Why do I get error 0x3ab93dwg93230 when I browse to my Web server." Which I of course reply with, "Thanks for the kind words. I am so blessed with fans like you. Hugs and Kisses, your friend Matt." But actually I received a piece of fan mail, kind of. It said something like this, "Loved your book! If you're ever in town maybe we can catch a football game together. Maybe I'll name my son "Nole" too. Go 'Noles!" For those of you who are familiar with school mascots, you may be aware of the fact that the Florida State mascot is the Seminoles, which is the name of a Native American tribe that I believe is close to non-existence at this point although they are supposed to have had a history of being fierce fighters. When the crowd is cheering, they don't usually say, "Go Seminoles!" Instead they shorten it to, "G'Seminoles!" That's not really true....actually they say, "Go 'Noles!" which is interesting because my son just happens to be named Nole. But that isn't why we named him Nole. We named him Nole because he was born on Christmas morning and we thought it was a more masculine, but dislexic twist, on Noel. There's some irony there. It's almost amusing....almost. But I was talking about birthdays...

Anyway, there's another member of my family that has a interesting date for a birthday. My wife was born on April 19th, which I'm sure you all remember as the day the government attacked the Branch Davidians and fire ensued and all kinds of people were killed or burned. Not a happy day. A couple years later, to make Cindy's birthday even more fun, a couple guys blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. I suppose things could be worse, I've run into several people born on Sept. 11th over the years.

Boy, that just tore down the whole mood of this post didn't it.

Tomorrow I turn the ripe ol' age of 43 (see! there is a common thread to the insanity of this post). I suspect some cool things will happen tomorrow...stay tuned.

-Matt

Sign-up for ASP.NET Connections in Las Vegas

mattpo — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:31:00 GMT

Time is getting short for folks to sign-up for ASP.NET Connections from Nov. 6 - 9th in Las Vegas. Microsoft is promising some exciting announcements at the show and you will be able to attend the sessions at the simultaneous Visual Studio, SQL Server, SharePoint, Office and Mobile Connections for free.

Spots are filling up fast.

-Matt

Ajax, Ajax, Ajax

mattpo — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 01:16:00 GMT

Scott announced today the future of our Ajax product plans. The stuff that has been code named "Atlas" in the previous CTPs is now solidifying into a real product with a real standard Microsoft name. In particular the "Microsoft AJAX Library" (client side script library) and "ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions" (the stuff that makes it easy to write ajax code w/ ASP.NET). In addition there will be an ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit which will provide some shared source controls and that you can use w/ ASP.NET.

If you have been intrigued w/ AJAX, this is some great news to get some actually supported libraries and controls fairly soon that can give you that great AJAX Web experience.

-Matt

Is your web site ready for Internet Explorer 7?

mattpo — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 20:06:00 GMT

Millions of people will be hitting web sites with a new browser in the next few months. Internet Explorer 7 is on its way and if you haven't already been testing for it, you might want to make sure your web site or your other aplication is ready.

Fortunately Microsoft has created the Internet Explorer Readiness Toolkit for just such an undertaking. It is a free download. Mke sure you check it out.

-Matt

New Refresh of the Internet Explorer Developer Center on MSDN

mattpo — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:37:00 GMT

The MSDN Internet Explorer Developer Center has finally come up to speed!

As part of the Web Platform and Tools Marketing Team, one of the pieces of information we are trying to make sure people know about is all the great new features of IE 7: better security, better CSS standards support, the RSS support, etc. You may be aware that there has been an MSDN Developer Center for IE for sometime, although I doubt it since it has received very little traffic in the past. It was created a long time ago and suffered from not taking advantage of improvements MSDN has made in its design and infrastructure over the years. Well those days are no longer. Besides a two week vacation, I spent most of August revamping the site so that there are now MSDN Forums for IE Development, there is an RSS feed for new content, the information architecture (the table of contents for those of you not used to creating large web sites) is in sync with the standard MSDN IA for developer centers, and the content should be a lot easier to find.

One of the things I had discovered is that there is a lot of great IE7 content in the MSDN library, but that because the IE content team was publishing their own content into the library that it wasn't being entered into the MSDN content database. This means that no headlines were being generated across MSDN and the content wasn't appearing in any of the RSS feeds. We aren't completely finished getting this setup (so some of this is being done by hand and there is still a technical issue where a bunch of the content takes you out of the dev center when you click on an article - and an interim redirect makes it hard to get back to where you were) but I'm optimistic that these issues will be resolved in the next days and weeks and the user experience will be what it should be. We have done some internal education on using the MSDN tools to get the content into the MSDN database, so hopefully the IE content will remain hidden no longer.

Another thing I discovered during this process is that the IE Team Blog rocks! They are constantly posting really good content...and you can find it under Dave Massy's picture on the homepage of the IE Developer Center. :-)

What is the main thing you should take away from the IE dev center? That IE 7 is just around the corner! Get the Release Candidate, make sure your web apps work using the Readiness Toolkit, Check out all the cool Add-ons that extend IE7 and see what tools are available for tracing, rolling out IE, etc. Where do you find all this info? On the IE Developer Center of course.

So check out the new and improved Internet Explorer Developer Center.

-Matt

Web Development

mattpo — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 22:49:00 GMT

It has been awhile since I've done much Web development. My technical focus for the last few years has been on Web services, which certainly qualifies as Web development, but is only a part of the mix.

So I've been given the task of a) coming up to speed on the information we have already on Web development, and b) understanding the needs for more information.

At the moment my primary focus is the ASP.NET developer center on MSDN, but one of the other channels for asp.net information is of course http://www.asp.net. Beyond that, there is also http://www.iis.net for information on IIS, IIS extensibility, IIS 7 and so forth. It is interesting to note that www.asp.net gets about 5 to 10x the traffic of the ASP.NET dev center although we have different reporting mechanisms and it isn't quite an apples to apples comparison. www.asp.net is obviously a place where the latest asp.net technologies can be hosted and played with whereas MSDN has to be more of a location for library content, product documentation and general asp.net news. I believe as I continue in the role that I'm in, that the lines between these two sites will blur quite a bit. There is already a fair amount of cross linking, but I imagine there will be even more in the future.

-Matt

New Team - New Role

mattpo — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 21:24:00 GMT

After about six years at MSDN, I've moved to a new position on the Web Platform and Tools Marketing Team at Microsoft. But although I am working in a different group, many of the things we are delving into are the same. For instance I am still working on Content Strategy, but now with a wider view than just MSDN. The vision is that the effort that we used to do Content Strategy at MSDN can be leveraged to also manage content on our other Web properties as well as for things like field communications, events, and so forth. There are still a lot of questions to be worked out as the role is defined, but I am excited about the opportunity and look forward to working on the Web Platform and Tools team.

What is the Web Platform and Tools team? This is the team that is on the hook for the adoption of Microsoft technologies in the world of the Web. We focus mostly on developers but also on the IT Pro side of the Web world as well. Another big part of the audience we are worried about are Web hosters. And don't forget Web adoption on corporate networks too. The technologies that fall into our team include ASP.NET, IIS, Visual Web Developer, Commerce Server and the developer side of Internet Explorer. This is a pretty fun time for this group since Microsoft rolled out ASP.NET 2.0 a little while ago, we have upcoming technogies like Atlas (Ajax for the Microsoft tools and platform), Vista with IE 7, Commerce Server 2007, WPF, the IIS 7 release of IIS, and the Orcas release of Visual Studio. Needless to say, folks are very busy around here trying to make sure those of you outside Microsoft know what is going on.

Among other things, I will be trying to make sure that there is technical information on MSDN and microsoft.com in general that support the various product releases and events that the team is involved in. We are just getting started in this regard and we have a ways to go, but I think the end result will be some great information for those of you who are trying to stay on top of what Microsoft is doing for you in the world of the Web.

-Matt