Okoboji: a lake, a mythical university, Kevin Moore's blog : Random

New hotness, random musings

okoboji — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 08:37:07 GMT

Interacting with 2D on 3D in WPF

Holy hotness!

Check out details on the WPF3D Blog
Check out the Channel9 interview
Check out the CodePlex project (and download the toys)

Go build games for your XBOX

Too many links. A great write-up on FierceDeveloper.

Almost makes me want to buy a 360. (But then I wouldn't be coding WPF stuff, right?)

Diane: Space-of-the-week

Because Diane is female and we both work at Microsoft, I cannot legally use the word "hot" in this section. Diane and I met when we interned the summer of 2001. She's now out on the East Coast evangelizing.

Check out her blog. Send her a congrats comment and say Kevin told you to do so.

More teasing

I've made some hints about working on hotness (well, I guess I said "goodness"). I guess a more accurate description would be that I'm coordinating hotness.

Let's just leave it at this: 3DTools is just the start on CodePlex.

An aside: praise for Zune in Wired?

I love Wired, but the mag/website tend not to love my company much.

I was happily surprised to see this article: In Praise of Zune.

Yes, I'm posting a single positive article, while ignoring all of the negative articles from Wired and others. Still think it's nice to see our friends at Wired aren't myopic in their reviews.

Full disclosure, I've only played with the device briefly. But it's nice. If I wasn't so happy with my phone-as-music-player, I'd probably get one.

This post brought to you by Windows Live Writer. Yes, I made an attempt to proof-read this post. :-)

I'm going to be posting to my blog a lot more.

okoboji — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 09:10:03 GMT

Windows Live Writer just went beta.

Hot!

KevinButton, etc.

okoboji — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 04:16:00 GMT

KevinButton
Robby and I were hanging out at TechEd in Boston. Randomly I say, “Hey, we should put more people in buttons.”

Long story short, Robby hacks away on some XAML and gets laughs at my expense during his talk. Back in Redmond, Robby shows the button to Tim. Tim thinks it would be a good Channel 9 video.

Sufficed to say, it’s an utterly gratuitous example of Templates and WPF.

(We did a slightly more formal discussion for MSDN TV a while back.)

Having fun with Vista...setup
Installing Vista is fun. Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is available in my building on campus. Choose the boot option, pick a drive, come back after lunch and I have a recent Vista build (including a build of Office 2007 and some other internal tools).

Talk about a great user experience.

Random hotness: everyone has seen the Tesla Roadster, right?
Wired covered it. Slashdot covered it. There’s even a FoxTrot cartoon.

Check out the well-to-wheel efficiency. Read the whitepaper [PDF]. Wow!

I’m glad it’s well beyond double my car budget or I might try to justify a purchase.

Hello Tuesday

okoboji — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 03:48:00 GMT

Control Licensing in Cider (WPF designer for VS)
James provides some great information on supporting licensing for controls in WPF.

Jamie is blogging like a mad man
Jamie is going through some old posts by Bea and updating them for recent bits. He also walks through how everything works in EID (Expression Interactive Designer).

DataModel-View-ViewModel
Dan is not on the WPF team--he works on Max--but he's doing a great job plugging our technology. Read his write up on virtualizing panels [1, 2, 3, 4]. Then take a look at his discussion on DataModel-View-ViewModel [Part 2]. Very similar stuff to what John Gossman wrote about a while ago.

More on network neutrality
A great write-up of the current state of things on SaveTheInternet.com. The most interesting bit.

Thus far powerful phone and cable companies have spent an estimated $100 million on lobbyists, lawyers, “Astroturf” groups, campaign contributions and advertising agencies in a drive to dismantle Net Neutrality and mislead Americans.

The scary result:

...for every $1 spent by the grassroots to defend Net Neutrality, the phone and cable companies have spent approximately $500 to drown it. [Emphasis mine.]

Yesterday I posted some additional links and ways to get involved. Get involved!

Random musings.

okoboji — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 07:19:00 GMT

July CTP Bag-O-Tricks
Wow! People seem to be enjoying it...or at least downloading it. Let me know what you think. (I don't know what to do about adding more samples, though. What comes after eleventy?)

Charles is Having Fun
Animated drawing brushed. Beautiful XAML-only samples. Take a look.

Recent Channel 9 Data Goodness

SQL Everywhere - [Video] [Site]
ADO.NET Entities - [Video] [Site]
BLINQ - [Video] [Site]

I can't wait to start digging into this stuff.

Network Neutrality
I ranted about this a bit ago. Some more good writing on the subject:

A great write-up in BusinessWeek: The Phone Companies Still Don't Get It
A great analogy done by Bob Frankston: Sidewalks: Paying by the Stroll
A great analysis by Tim Berners-Lee: Net Neutrality: This is serious
A great tool by the folks at SaveTheInternet.com: Find out where your Senator stands. Call them! Send them an email! Tell them you won't write them a check next election!
A good analysis from the Daily Show. (Although I still prefer Ask A Ninja.)

When gun owners and librarians, MoveOn.org and the Christian Coalition, Google and Microsoft and Yahoo agree on something, it's probably really important. Please get informed and get involved.

Start by posting something on your own blog, but more importantly, talk to people who are not as plugged in.

Finally...
The coolest t-shirt I have every seen. (My bar for cool is pretty low.)

Have a good night.

IE 7: Cool to Wicked Cool

okoboji — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 05:14:00 GMT

I’ve been happily crankin’ along with IE 7 Beta2 for a while now. I just upgraded to IE7 Beta3. Wow! Demonstrably faster. I just feels tight and crisp.

Go download...quick...now...

FYI: make sure you un-install any previous IE7 Betas before you try this one.

Oh, and I’m hoping to have an update to the bag-o-tricks this week--a real update. Including a helper class for expanding nodes on a TreeView (and an explanation of why it’s not in the shipping control) along with...wait for it...DatePicker and MonthCalendar.

I’m making promises now so I’m guilted into staying up late one night this week to get it done.

Hope ya'll had a good weekend.

Reasons to submit error reports

okoboji — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 01:26:00 GMT

Punish your Microsoft developer

Okay, so submitting bug reports isn't quite this gratifying, but I know from a lot of first-hand experience that these reports are amazingly helpful.

We feel your pain...if not literally.

Save the Internet!

okoboji — Wed, 17 May 2006 20:55:00 GMT

In general, I avoid political discussion like the plague on my work blog, but since Microsoft has already taken a stand on this, I thought I’d throw my hat in.

<Rant Disclaimer=”The following rant is solely my opinion and not that of my employer.”>
I got a phone call last night. I could tell instantly it was a telemarketer. After my attempts to derail the canned spiel failed, I could tell it was a recording.

The automated recording asked a seemingly simple question: would you rather “big internet companies” pay their fair share of the bandwidth they use or would you rather you, simple internet user, have your rates increase?

It’s easy to imagine how my mom and probably your mom would respond to this.

Like so much policy discussion these days, it’s easy to take a horrible, selfish policy direction and paint it rosy and noble.

Yeah, I’m talking about network neutrality.

You have to feel a bit sorry for network providers. They push bits across the wire. Not a very sexy business model. Not much room for innovation. With deregulation, city-wide WiFi, and other technical advances, they are seeing their business model slowly become commoditized.

They had three options:
1) Make the hard technical and business investments necessary to improve service and lower prices
2) Watch their stock prices slowly melt in a world of relentlessly shrinking margins
3) Push to change the fundamental soul of the internet in a way that destroys its most important characteristics

Guess which one they picked?

Yes we can be sorry for network providers, just like we’re sorry for telemarketers. It doesn’t mean we should protect their business model.

Take a look at:

MoveOn.org
Common Cause
SaveTheInternet.com
And, most importantly, Ask A Ninja.

It's your internet. It's my internet. It's our internet. Let's protect it.
</Rant>

In other news...

okoboji — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 11:18:00 GMT

Our friends from Max have been busy.

Not only are they cranking away at a beautiful WinFX app, but they're taking time to blog about their adventures.

Ben has blogged about IScrollInfo [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]. If you are making your own panel and want a ScrollViewer to party over it, start here.

Dan is blogging about creating a virtualized panel (for putting lots of data in a list). [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

If you haven't heard, IE7 is beautiful. One of my first blog posts was about Mozilla 1.5. About the same time the IE team was getting rolling again. They have done some amazing work. Check it out.

Today Bea, Namita, and I met with some folks from the VB team to chat about integrating their new language features with WPF data binding. Wow! I know there are some C# guys out there laughing at VB. Guys and gals: download the demo. You may soon forget your love of semicolons. Mmm...XML inline with code...*drool*. (Oh, and check out Bea's post on doing grouping with ItemsControl. Very cool.)

Have you been reading about InfoCard? You should be. Kim is your man. Check out his blog.

On a personal note, I've been having fun updating the Bag-O-Tricks for our next public release. I stayed up late on Valentines Day hacking away as a Valentines gift to you, my loyal readers. I've added some new things that I've been asked about. I've also put all of the controls in an external library which includes default styles. This is for control authors that want to ship a control with its template in a single library.

Also, the team that built the WPF ListView has a bunch of samples that they should be posting very soon. People have been asking about a TreeView with columns. Let's just say the power of WPF composition will blow you away.

Stay tuned.

Most powerful wizard?

okoboji — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 09:59:00 GMT

I ran into my good friend Charlie on the bus tonight. Not only is Charlie a great Ultimate Frisbee player, but he's also a PM on the Excel team.

Not only did Charlie introduce me to the wonder that is the pivot table in Excel, he also told me that the Excel PivotTable Wizard was in the running for "Most Powerful Wizard" on a recent Slashdot poll.

I'm not here to encourage people to vote one way or another (or at all), but I thought it was humorous it even made the list.

Great MSFT blogs not on blogs.msdn.com

okoboji — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 06:48:00 GMT

Like many people, I subscribe to the agregate MSDN RSS feed to get all feeds from Microsoft.

Except, there are at least a few (and probably more) amazing blogs from other softies that are not on MSDN. If you are not reading these guys, you should be.

Chris Anderson - simplegeek.com

I've recently moved to Avalon, and Chris is just around the corner from me. Super cool guy. Super smart. Author of the XamlPad. If you have an MSDN subscription, download the latest CTP build and then get XamlPad. It's a blast.

Kim Cameron - IdentityBlog.com

I had the honor and pleasure of working with Kim on some identity features. Amazingly nice. Amazingly smart. Great insights into identity, security, and the web.

Don Box - pluralsight.com/blogs/dbox/

I haven't had a chance to work with Don, but his PDC demo with Chris and their MSDN videos are hilarious. Don is an architect on Indigo and perhaps best known an the author of some of the most well respected books on COM. Don is on the latest installment of the .NET Show

April 19-25 is TV-Turnoff Week

okoboji — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 08:14:00 GMT

April 19-25 is TV-Turnoff Week. (CNN has an article.)

When I first moved out to Seattle in the summer of 2002, I spent a month in Microsoft-provided temp housing. I'd come home from work and spend 2 hours vegging in front of the TV. When I got my apartment downtown I spent a lot of time thinking about which cable service to get. My final conclusion: none. After a month, you don't miss it. Not having TV has substantially increased the amount of sleeping, reading, and coding I've done in the past 20 months, not to mention the money I’ve saved. How much does extended cable cost for a year?

Check out the official web site: TV Turnoff Network.

Master the Skills of Influence and Persuasion

okoboji — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 04:54:00 GMT

An article I'd never expect to find on a Microsoft site, but I guess it's just more proof we're a big company.

Master the Skills of Influence and Persuasion

The overview: How do top salesmen and leaders persuade others to act and motivate people to achieve? Learning influencing skills can help us in our work as consultants and project managers.

Interesting how the kinds of influence are broken down. Important if you want to be a person who can influence others...and if you want to be able to pick apart someone who is trying to influence you.

Hey, Don't knock Iowa

okoboji — Tue, 25 Nov 2003 10:22:00 GMT

I grew up in Iowa [close to Okoboji]. I've done my share of knocking my home state, how I'd never live there, etc.

Well it turns out that Fast Company disagrees.

It turns out that Des Moines, IA [the state capitol] is the best place to work in the US.

I never would have guessed...until I looked at the housing prices. It's like a different world.