Eschew Obfuscation

I've been with MS for just under 11 months now, and I'm going through my first job change.

 After working on .NET Ria Services since I got here, I'm now moving to the project I originally interviewed for, and one of my true passions, MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) I've already written on MEF based application that you can find on my personal projects page and since I've joined the team, I've updated it (changes to be posted soon)

Look for more in this space as time allows.

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

You’ve probably seen this elsewhere, but I thought it was worth linking to. I’ve used a few of these already, and they are very, very useful.

If you happen to use the Terminal Services client in the Win 7 beta, there’s a cool new feature you might not be aware of. You’ll notice that the title bar at the top of a full screen window looks a little different, it’s more of a UI element than just an overlay. It turns out you can drag the title bar from it’s default position in the center of the screen.

This may not sound like much, but it means it’s much easier to have nested terminal services sessions (logging into one machine, then making a TS session to a second one.

Big productivity gain on telecommuting days!

It’s amazing how far we’ve come just to be stuck with a different form of some very old problems.

We got Wrath of the Lich King as a present for my step-son. Since he hadn’t been playing it in a while, we had to re-install. And the discs are still packed somewhere, so I pulled down a copy off of Fileplanet. After downloading that huge file, and installing (about 2 hours in itself), you then have to patch the game. It took about 12 hours to download and patch the game, because you have to download and install about 8 patch files, watch them patch, log in, then watch it do another patch. And one of them took about 3 hours by itself to download! Eeek. You’d think that they’d find a way to do one patch, or roll-up patches, and/or make a very current download available.

And then we went to watch Prince Caspian on Blu-Ray, and it needed to update for BD-Live, which took about 10 minutes, and doesn’t really give you much extra when the first thing you want to do is watch the movie. Why do brand new discs require title updates immediately?

I know we’ve had to go through installs for as long as there have been computer games, but it would be nice if they were shorter or smoother. It would be especially nice if they could install in the background while you’re playing.

Just a minor frustration for this holiday time.

Update: In the course of double-checking my facts, I did find out you can download a more recent install from Blizzard that brings it up to 3.0, but it’s not immediately obvious (I had to go through the trial account link, download the streaming trial, then get a link for the full install) and it still requires 2 patches once the install is done.

It’s our first Christmas here in the Seattle area, and while everybody tells us this isn’t normal, it looks like we’re going to have White Christmas. Unfortunately, we’re also getting Cabin fever. We’ve been trapped near our house since we got back into town Last Tues. I’ll be glad when it warms up a little bit.

I’ve noticed something very interesting. We live on a plateau, with an entire community, and shopping center close by. For the past several days, getting off the mountain has been difficult, but the community is open, and friendly and inviting. We can’t get away, but our own little microcosm is working pretty well.

Neat!

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays and all that!

After posting my snowflake sample on Friday, I decided I wanted to make it a gadget since that was actually my intention with the WPF version, but WPF gadgets aren’t easy. However, putting a Silverlight in the sidebar is very easy (As long as you are not running 64-bit, which I am at home)

Simply copy the html page and the xap to a directory, and add a gadget.xml document with the basic info. Here’s the one I used.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<gadget>
  <name>Snowflakes</name>
  <namespace>
    <!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->microsoft.windows
  </namespace>
  <version>
    <!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->1.0.0.0
  </version>
  <author name="Chris Szurgot">
    <info url="http://blogs.msdn.com/szurgot" text="Chris's Blog"/>
  </author>
  <description>Silverlight Snowflakes</description>
  <icons>
    <icon height="125" width="125" src="snowflakes.jpg"/>
  </icons>
  <hosts>
    <host name="sidebar">
      <base type="HTML" apiVersion="1.0.0" src="snowflakes.html"/>
      <permissions>
        <!--_locComment_text="{Locked}"-->Full
      </permissions>
      <platform minPlatformVersion="0.3"/>
      <defaultImage src="Icon.jpg"/>
    </host>
  </hosts>
</gadget>

The only other important change is to the html file. Change the source of the silverlight object to includ x-gadget.

x-gadget:///snowflakes.xap

Add an icon image if uou want one (it will show up in the “Add Gadgets” screen) and zip up all of the files into a file called name.gadget.

I’ve put together a gadget install here.

I will admit it’s not much, but it paves the way for some of the other stuff I have planned.

When I was younger, I used to type in programs from computer magazines. In an early issue of one of them (I forget which one), there was a small graphics program called snowflak.bas which drew an arm with ten lines, redrew it 6 times around a circle, inverted it, and drew it’s reflection 6 times so you ended up with a pretty “snowflake” pattern.

When I was learning WPF, I remembered this program, and thought it would be a good way to learn animations, so I coded it up in WPF.

This week, I realized I was going to need to do some Silverlight animations for an upcoming project, so it seemed like a good idea to port it over to Silverlight. It turns out the code for the Silverlight version is almost identical to the WPF version with a few minor changes to the canvas handling. (It was easier to setup the timelines in SL)

It’s a simple process. It determines all the random numbers up front, sets up a timeline for the entire drawing process, the kicks off the animation and lets it go. Each line starts out as a single point which is hidden, and as it’s time for that part of the arm to be drawn, the timeline shows the line, and extends it to the to point using a double animation. Each timeline was placed into a storyboard with a begin time that is at the end of the previous timeline to get the smooth effect. I even played around with alternate effects like drawing each spoke simultaneously.

At any rate, here’s the output of the first Silverlight app I’m posting to this blog.

(I wish I could say I had still remembered the code, but I had to look it up. The wonders of the internet :) )

This is my first post on my internal Microsoft blog. For many years, I’ve had a blog on weblogs.asp.net, but now that I work here I figure I’d make one on blogs.msdn.com :)

I’m currently an SDET working in the Developer Division. I’ve been here about 4 months now. I expect it’ll take a little while to find the right voice, but I want to talk about usability, both API/software usability and real-world interfaces.

I’ll talk about my current work when I am able, but suffice to say I’m happy to be here, and really enjoying the challenge.