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May 2007 - Posts

Undisclosed Browser Technology

When people ask what I worked on at Google and I answer "undisclosed browser technology", I think some folks think I'm just being coy or obnoxious. The truth is, I'm required to say that publicly and privately until Google publicly announces the technology Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 31, 2007 10:29 AM by dthorpe | 5 Comments

Microsoft Surface

You've got to see it to believe it: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ Mmmm-mmm good. It may be time soon to dust off those great old Avalon Hill board games and look at implementing them on this table - without the thousands of chit markers . Twilight Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007 1:11 PM by dthorpe | 2 Comments
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A Cross-Domain Silverlight Channel 9 VideoRSS Player

Last week Kevin Ledley, keeper of the dev.live.com content, asked me for a bit of help to get a Silverlight video player working. He wanted to "borrow" the cool scrolling video list and video player from our sister site, msdn2.microsoft.com and set it Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2007 1:26 AM by dthorpe | 3 Comments

Hosting Silverlight On A Server That Won't Host .JS Files

Torontonian " wavesmash " has been tinkering with getting a Silverlight app up and running on his Blogger blog. Silverlight Streaming got him most of the way there, but he found the recommended pattern of placing the Silverlight control construction in Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 27, 2007 12:10 PM by dthorpe | 3 Comments

HTML Namespace Attributes and IE document.namespaces

A few posts ago I promised to elaborate on a little gotcha that bit us in the butt while prepping the "blocks" to enable Popfly apps to use the Windows Live Contacts web control and Windows Live Spaces web control . Here it is: IE has a handy document.namespaces Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 27, 2007 11:27 AM by dthorpe | 0 Comments

Silverlight XPS Document Reader Proof-Of-Concept

Delay started out poking around in the XPS document format. Before he could stop himself, he had an XPS document reader implemented in Silverlight ! Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007 7:38 PM by dthorpe | 0 Comments
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More: Avoiding Popup Windows in Your Web Apps

Scott Isaacs shares some additional "best practices" points on dealing with popup windows and popup blockers: Always program window.open() very defensively... Always try catch any calls to window.open() and if you are retaining a reference to the window Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 22, 2007 6:10 PM by dthorpe | 1 Comments

Maker Faire

Photos from this weekend's Maker Faire Part carnival, part science fair, part flea market, part performance art. It was funky, kooky, often corny, occasionally silly, and universally fun. The only thing I can think of that would be more fun than going Read More...
Posted Monday, May 21, 2007 6:39 PM by dthorpe | 1 Comments
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See Popfly at MakerFaire: May 19-20 San Mateo Fairgrounds

Hey, whadayaknow: John and the Popfly team will be at the O'Reilly Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo. As a hard core tinkerer myself (don't ask what's in my garage, ask what's not!), I've been following Make: magazine since discovering it last summer. Read More...
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007 2:43 PM by dthorpe | 0 Comments
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Popfly: Mashups Made Easy

Today John Montgomery 's NPT team launched Microsoft Popfly , a web-based development environment for building web applications with little or no code. John shares some background and history on his blog , but what you really ought to see first is the Read More...
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007 2:05 PM by dthorpe | 1 Comments

AOL Building on Silverlight

Mashable.com noted a small point that I had missed during the MIX07 madness: AOL's Social Mail Gadget due out in mid-May, is being built on Silverlight . Cool! Read More...
Posted Friday, May 18, 2007 10:41 AM by dthorpe | 1 Comments
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Name Change: Windows Live Quantum Mechanics

It's time to freshen things up a bit here. Out with the old musty ambiguous "Momentary Gouts of Reason", in with the new more specific and delightfully irreverent "Windows Live Quantum Mechanics". Why "Quantum Mechanics"? It was late at night, several Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007 2:10 PM by dthorpe | 0 Comments
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My Content, My Tags

Tagging online content with categories or keywords is a great idea. I love GMail's use of labels instead of folders. I tag all my Flickr photos six ways to Sunday. What I'm not so excited about are sites that encourage others to put public tags on my Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 16, 2007 10:36 AM by dthorpe | 0 Comments
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Avoiding Popup Blockers in Your Web Apps

Tim Heuer laments the growing number of otherwise reputable web sites that instruct their flocks to disable popup blockers in order to complete some task within that web site. Having stumbled into popup blocker hell myself only a few months ago with the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2007 2:51 PM by dthorpe | 2 Comments

Hello World with Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming

I've been tinkering with Silverlight and Silverlight Streaming and thought I'd share some of my discoveries and pointers. Silverlight is designed to dovetail into a traditional HTML+JavaScript web app. Your web page loads a Silverlight.js file and constructs Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 08, 2007 8:46 PM by dthorpe | 22 Comments

MIX07 Speaker Interviews on Channel 9

Video interviews of many of the MIX07 speakers are posted up on Channel 9 . I think most of these were filmed before MIX and released during the event. Koji and I were interviewed by Catherine Heller here . Read More...
Posted Sunday, May 06, 2007 7:35 PM by dthorpe | 0 Comments
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Installing Silverlight 1.1 Alpha SDK

If you set out to install the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha SDK and installed all the additional recommended (but not required) bits such as Visual Studio Orcas and ASP.NET Future , you won't see this problem so you can stop reading now. If you're a minimalist Read More...
Posted Friday, May 04, 2007 5:15 PM by dthorpe | 1 Comments
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MIX07: POST/GET/PUT/DELETE Your Way To Windows Live Data

Martin Heller posted an article on Infoworld, " Data Wants To Be Free ," about the Windows Live Data "secret session" at MIX07. The Windows Live Data service (probably not its final name) enables a deeper level of integration and data access than the Read More...
Posted Thursday, May 03, 2007 12:38 PM by dthorpe | 1 Comments

MIX07: Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight

Silverlight implements isolated local storage on the client. Currently in the Alpha, the storage is limited to 1MB per web application and is keyed to the full URL of the XAML/HTML page. That means for this alpha release, two pages that are part of the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, May 02, 2007 10:34 AM by dthorpe | 1 Comments

MIX07: Bat Signals and Five Minute Field Ops Centers

I apologize for cutting short my live/raw soundbyte blog post on the MIX07 keynote yesterday. I was literally called out of the keynote (audience) to fix an issue caused by a server update-in-progress back at the office. IM's went out to the team at MIX Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 11:59 AM by dthorpe | 0 Comments
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MIX07: Silverlight Supports Dynamic Languages (Iron Ruby, Iron Python, JavaScript)

Josh Holmes has a great summary of the Ray Ozzie / Scott Guthrie keynote yesterday. Towards the end of his post, Josh notes with shock & awe that Silverlight not only includes a .NET CLR execution environment, but also the Dynamic Language Runtime Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 11:17 AM by dthorpe | 0 Comments

MIX07 and Silverlight in Technorati Top 10

Chris Woodill noticed that the MIX07 event and Silverlight announcements are creating ripples in the blogsphere. MIX07 and Silverlight are in the top 10 searches on Technorati! MIX07 Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 10:48 AM by dthorpe | 0 Comments
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MIX07: Windows Live Platform Beta

Live & raw notes from Brian Arbogast's keynote : ( watch the video ) "Today we are announcing the Windows Live Platform Beta" Simple and consistent terms of use across the Windows Live service spectrum Predictable costs at scale - so that you can Read More...
Posted Tuesday, May 01, 2007 9:39 AM by dthorpe | 2 Comments
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