Are you going to this year’s PDC? I’ll be there this year, and if you’re going, particularly if you’re from the Mid-Atlantic area (DC, MD, PA, VA, or WV), I’d like to hear from you.

Drop me a line, using the email link above, and let me know…I’d like to try to catch up with all the local folks who are there next week.

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area, as well as webcasts of interest…this list includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar, and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also automatically synced to the UGSS event calendar:

For folks who attended the DC Windows 7 Launch event this week (or who might be coming to the Baltimore Windows 7 Launch event on Monday) who are interested in taking advantage of new features in Windows 7 like multi-touch support and the Windows Ribbon from managed code, you’ll want to take a look at this overview of WPF 4 from Scott Guthrie, which includes details on the WPF 4 support for multi-touch, Windows Ribbon, Windows 7 Taskbar, and more.

If you attended the DC Windows 7 Launch yesterday in Tyson’s Corner, VA, you may have gotten a chance to see a very cool gadget in action, the Freescale Flexis JM Badge Board. It’s a sensor board that contains an ambient light sensor, 3-axis accelerometer, 8-button touch sensor, buzzer, etc. It’s programmable via USB, and best of all, it supports the Windows 7 Sensor API.

In addition to the demo I showed of using the board to control the XNA Racing Game starter kit, Pete Brown has been playing with one of these and recently posted about his experiments with an accelerometer as joystick.

Several folks at the launch event asked how to get the board, so I thought I’d post a link to the page where you can order it. It runs around $50, and their shipping is quite prompt (in addition to the board I used for the launch demos, I ordered one for myself to hang onto after the launch events). Here’s the product order page:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=JMBADGE&tab=Buy_Parametric_Tab&fromSearch=false

You can find more information on the badge board here:

http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=JMBADGE

Have fun!

If you’ve ever been in the situation where you’re visiting a site where some of the content is delivered via http, and some via https, you may have seen the following security dialog (this is the IE version, but Firefox has a similar dialog):

It’s not immediately intuitive whether the right answer is “Yes” or “No,” is it? But while the dialog itself can be confusing, the problem it’s trying to communicate is very real…mixing secure and unsecure content within the same page can be a big problem from a security standpoint.

Fortunately, there’s a solution, as Jon Galloway helpfully points out:

Fixing the real problem with protocol-relative hyperlinks

The real way to fix the problem is for web dev's to use protocol-relative hyperlinks, such as <img src="//www.google.com/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif" /> - that will use HTTPS if the page is HTTPS an HTTP if the page is HTTP, preventing both the security vulnerability and the security prompt. Rather than trying to fix the links in code, we’re relying on a specified and supported HTML feature (RFC 1808, Section 2.4.3, circa 1995)

As Eric points out, you can find out which content is causing the problem with an HTTP monitoring program like Fiddler.

Read the whole post for some additional background on the issue.

I haven’t had a chance to play with this, but it looks pretty cool…a sample that converts HTML to XAML and vice-versa.

(h/t Jon Galloway via Brian Henderson)

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area, as well as webcasts of interest…this list includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar, and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also automatically synced to the UGSS event calendar:

Want your events listed? You can add them here.

You can also add your events via the Community Megaphone web service API, which is now live. You can get more information on the API, and how to sign up, at http://www.communitymegaphone.com/API.aspx. You can also email me for more information.

I already announced our upcoming Mid-Atlantic Roadshow stops for this next quarter, but I figured those of you who read my blog who aren’t in Mid-Atlantic might be interested in finding out about the roadshows coming to your area. Thankfully, my colleague Peter Laudati already put together a list of the events, which I’m reproducing below.

Visit http://www.msdnevents.com to register for any of the roadshows.  Alternatively, you can click through on the links to each one to learn more about the varying topics that will be covered on each tour.  Check them out below:

	MSDN “Northeast” Roadshow – Piloted by Chris Bowen & Jim O’Neil Cities & Dates: 11/10/2009 – Burlington, VT 11/12/2009 – Albany, NY 11/13/2009 – Rochester, NY 12/3/2009 – Farmington, CT 12/8/2009 – Waltham, MA 12/9/2009 – Providence, RI 12/15/2009 – Augusta, ME
	MSDN “Metro” Roadshow – Piloted by Peter Laudati & Asli Bilgin Cities & Dates: 11/12/2009 – Parsippany, NJ 12/10/2009 – East Windsor, NJ 12/15/2009 – New York, NY
	MSDN “Mid-Atlantic” Roadshow – Piloted by G. Andrew Duthie, Dani Diaz, and Dave Isbitski Cities & Dates: 11/12/2009 – Pittsburgh, Pa 12/1/2009 – Harrisburg, Pa 12/3/2009 – Reston, Va 12/8/2009 – Roanoke, Va 12/10/2009 – Malvern, Pa
	MSDN “Southern Fried” Roadshow – Piloted by Brian Hitney & Glen Gordon Cities & Dates: 11/4/2009 – Greensboro, NC 11/5/2009 – Raleigh, NC 11/6/2009 – Columbia, SC 12/8/2009 – Atlanta, GA 12/9/2009 – Montgomery, AL
	MSDN “Tiki Hut” Roadshow – Piloted by Joe Healy & Russ Fustino Cities & Dates: 11/30/2009 – Tampa, FL 12/2/2009 – Fort Lauderdale, FL 12/14/2009 – Orlando, FL

Hope to see my Mid-Atlantic readers at one of our events!

Do you code PHP?

Would you like to win a 52” Digital HD home entertainment system, plus an all-expenses paid trip to Chicago for php|tek 2010? Or an XBOX 360?

I thought so…then listen up. Head over to http://phparch.com/win, and find out all the details, including how to win, and sign up for free.

There’s only 121 days left to enter as of today, so don’t dilly-dally!

In anticipation of the launch of Visual Studio 2010 next March, I wanted to have some bling on my blog counting down the days ‘til the launch. The Visual Studio folks put together an HTML/CSS/JS widget that looked pretty cool, but was fixed  width, and wouldn’t fit the somewhat narrow sidebar on my blog.

So I decided to create my own version in Silverlight. I wanted to have something with an old-school digital clock face (as in drop-down numbers), so I did a Bing search for “flip,” “clock,” and “Silverlight,” and one of the results that came up was a post by my buddy and fellow Microsoftie Josh Holmes, on a Silverlight Countdown badge he created. Josh kindly included the source code, so I grabbed it, did a few tweaks, and the result can be seen in the pic to the left and in my sidebar.

Host this Widget!

If you’d like to run this widget, all you need to do is add the following code to your page or blog:

   1: <div id="silverlightControlHost">

   2:     <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="190" height="180">

   3:        <param name="initparams" value="TargetDate=03/22/10" />

   4:        <param name="source" value="http://gdtest.members.winisp.net/ClientBin/SilverCountDown.xap"/>

   5:        <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" />

   6:        <param name="background" value="black" />

   7:        <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="3.0.40624.0" />

   8:        <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />

   9:        <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=3.0.40624.0" style="text-decoration:none">

  10:           <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108181" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/>

  11:       </a>

  12:   </object>

  13:   <iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe>

  14: </div>

One of the tweaks I added was the ability to set the target date based on Silverlight’s initparams parameter. Josh went further and added updates to his widget to pass in paths to the images, event date, registration URL, and more.

So whether you’re looking for an example of how to create a simple Silverlight countdown widget, or want to host my Visual Studio 2010 countdown widget, the links and code above should have you set!

Drop me a note, or leave a comment if you decide to host the widget, and let me know how it works for you!

If you’re starting to work with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (and you should be, particularly if you’re doing WPF or Silverlight, Karl Shifflett has posted a new XAML PowerToys for the Cider designer in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.

The release includes a Grid Layout tool, as well as new menu options that provide some neat tweaks for inserting controls in a grid cell and having the width modified to fit the current width of the column, as well as additional alignment tweaks.

There’s a short (13min) video linked in the post that shows the PowerToys in action.

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area, as well as webcasts of interest…this list includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar, and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also automatically synced to the UGSS event calendar:

Want your events listed? You can add them here.

You can also add your events via the Community Megaphone web service API, which is now live. You can get more information on the API, and how to sign up, at http://www.communitymegaphone.com/API.aspx. You can also email me for more information.

Just got word via David Makogon that there’s a new release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit available, the October Preview release.

So if you’re itching to dig into what’s coming in the next version of Visual Studio and .NET, the training kit has hands-on labs, demos, and presentations on these topics, to name a few:

• C# 4.0
• Visual Basic 10
• F#
• Parallel Extensions
• Windows Communication Foundation
• Windows Workflow
• Windows Presentation Foundation
• ASP.NET 4
• Windows 7
• Entity Framework
• ADO.NET Data Services
• Managed Extensibility Framework
• Visual Studio Team System

The October Preview release is designed to work with the just-released Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 (which is now available to everyone!).

I feel a bit guilty for getting this out late this week, but I’ve been under the weather for the last few days, so what can you do?

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area, as well as webcasts of interest…this list includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar, and all events entered in Community Megaphone are also automatically synced to the UGSS event calendar:

Want your events listed? You can add them here.

You can also add your events via the Community Megaphone web service API, which is now live. You can get more information on the API, and how to sign up, at http://www.communitymegaphone.com/API.aspx. You can also email me for more information.

If you’re an MSDN Subscriber, you can download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 now via subscriber downloads. If you’re not, don’t fret, you’ll be able to get Beta 2 in just a couple of days.

The nice folks at the 10-4 show have been kind enough to record a show walking you through the process of downloading and installing the beta, so I thought I’d pass that along, too:

Go visit the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 page on MSDN for more information.

Enjoy!