Silverlight Training

Free Silverlight Essential Training on Lynda.com, by Mike Harsh.

DDD6

DDD6 has been announced for November 24th.

With SqlBits on the 6th October, I can't help wondering when the next WebDD will be?

SQLBits

SQLBits is a community conference on all things SQL, to be held at Microsoft Reading on 6th October. It's free.

Galaxy Zoo

Galaxy Zoo is a site where you can help to classify galaxies, up to a million of them if you have the time...

A lot of them look very fuzzy, but then they are far away and long ago...

Scott Guthrie videos

Phil Winstanley has made four videos of Scott Guthrie available on the WebDD website. These were really good sessions, so it is worth downloading them...

Live Folders

Windows Live Folders is in Beta, but not in this region. Maybe later?

It offers 500MB of online storage.

MixUK

Mix:UK 07 is "the premier event for web designers and web developers."

I wonder if it will be like Mix07... where all the sessions are recorded? I hope so.

Silverlight tutorials

A series of Silverlight tutorials on Wynapse.com

Real Alternative to Real Player

The BBC still seems to provide a lot of content in Real Player formats, .ram or .rm files. Rather than installing Real Player there is an alternative, called Real Alternative.

I have installed it, and so far it seems ok. There are a lot of other free video and audio tools on the site.

A virtual conference for the rest of us...

It's Virtual TechEd.

Keep running

Here's another one...

The Microsoft code name “Acropolis” Community Technology Preview 1 is a set of components and tools that make it easier for developers to build and manage modular, business focused, client .NET applications. Acropolis is part of the “.NET Client Futures” wave of releases, our preview of upcoming technologies for Windows client development.

Expression videos

The Microsoft Expression Knowledge Centre has some videos on the Expression tools

DDD5 agenda

The agenda for DDD5 is available...

Microsoft Surface

The Microsoft Surface computing website...

and a video.

DDD5

Register now for DDD5. It is on June 30th, at Microsoft in reading, and it's free.

Silverlight physics

A Silverlight physics demo from Chris Cavanagh.

Popfly mashups

Popfly makes mashups easy. This one gets videos from soapbox and displays them in a video player. I didn't write any code, not a single line.

Silverlight reflector

A view source reflector tool for Silverlight

IanG on tap

Ian Griffiths on language choice

Bristol DotNetDevNet

Alex Homer gave a splendid talk, at Monday evening's .NET Developer Network meeting, on the Enterprise Library from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group.

He then went on to talk about Cross Cutting concerns, Aspect Oriented Programming and The Policy Injection Block.

As you can tell from all the links, this was a learning experience for me.

Javascript

Some javascript tips from Simon Thorneycroft and Jonathan Hodgson

Popfly

Microsoft Popfly... online tools for building mashups.

Ajax view

Mike Ormond on Ajax View

Scratch

The BBC has a story on Scratch, another "programming for kids" tool, this one from MIT.

Free powershell book

A free download of a PowerShell book...

SilverlightPad

Silverlight Pad is a Silverlight 1.0 Beta application that gives you a simple way to experiment with creating XAML content--the XAML you enter can be instantly rendered as Silverlight content.

100 apps

A list of 100 web applications for freelancers.

The upside-down-ternet

I'm not sure whether to think this is real or not, but it sounds very convincing. The upside-down-ternet... a brilliant way to discourage your neighbours from stealing your wifi.

There are some very clever people about.

Scott Hanselman on Mix

Scott Hanselman's post on Mix, DLR and Silverlight

The Guardian

The Guardian on Silverlight.

Silverlight examples

Lutz Roeder's Silverlight examples.

Silverlight Quickstarts

The Silverlight Quickstarts are now available...

Silverlight everywhere?

Miguel de Icaza seems to be very keen on the idea of creating a version of Silverlight on Mono.

Mix Sessions

All the Sessions at Mix are available to download.

Jasper

Another one!

Jasper sounds a bit like Ruby on Rails. Convention over configuration, RAD database applications...

Astoria

What is Astoria?

Getting started with Silverlight Streaming

Following Tim Sneath's post on Getting started with Silverlight Streaming.

I downloaded Expression Media Encoder and encoded a short video. The video I imported was not widescreen, so I had to resize it. It had something like a coloured barcode effect down the right hand side after being imported into Media Encoder.

After encoding, it opened a browser to view the results... and wanted to install Silverlight. That's a bit odd, since I already have it installed. Then it wanted to restart, reporting Error 3010, "Silverlight installed successfully, but needs to restart"...

I followed the rest of Tim's instructions and soon had my video uploaded to Silverlight.live.com and available to play on my own web page.

The Expression Media Encoder trial version has a 180 day licence.

Mix announcements

The Mix07 keynote.

"Today we announced that Silverlight is not only a great media platform; it is cross-platform .NET."... Silverlight on Channel9

Silverlight Streaming. A free account, with 4GB of space where you can upload Silverlight applications.

There are a lot of Silverlight screencasts on Channel9 too.

Silverlight quickstart coming soon

The Silverlight SDK and QuickStart will be available April 30th.

DDD5

Don't forget to vote...

Javascript intellisense

The Visual Web Developer 2005 Express edition has Javascript intellisense support just like Orcas.

I have been writing more Javascript recently, and this could really save a lot of time. And, it's free.

DotNetDevNet Bristol

I attended the first DotNetDevNet meeting in Bristol on Monday.

It was a brilliant event, organised by Guy Smith-Ferrier, with Mike Taulty as the inaugural speaker.

Guy explained the aims of the group. This is a free group, which is remarkable really, given the quality of speakers Guy has already lined up for the first three meetings.

Mike Taulty was entertaining and informative. I liked his approach to presenting LINQ, explaining some of the mysterious features that have been appearing in .NET recently and showing how, although they may not be things you have wanted to use, the LINQ team needed them. I found it was a struggle to keep up at times, it had been a long day... but fortunately Mike Taulty's blog has plenty of posts on LINQ and other topics to catch up on.

He also mentioned the Road Show Resources.

LINQ for SQL was very impressive. At first, I had what turned out to be inappropriate flashbacks to SQL select statements hardcoded in VB3, but then realised that this is very different. LINQ seems to offer a lot of power, and does an amazing job of figuring out the right way to behave whatever you do.

I'm looking forward to the next meeting. Alex Homer is another excellent speaker.

Hansleman on Silverlight

Scott Hanselman has a podcast on Silverlight.

Strangeloop

Strangeloop.net... not ready yet, check back later. Some kind of clever optimisation, using routers...

Geocoding

Rooftop geocoding allows you to locate properties correctly. A lot of current map applications seem to locate by postcode.

The Region

The Region is a web site run by Microsoft Regional Directors. It has posts from people like Richard Campbell and Scott Hanselman.

Silverlight

Tim Sneath announces Microsoft Silverlight, previously known as WPF/E.

Another way to sell shareware

ByteCommerce offers another way to sell shareware. They keep the payment for every twentieth item sold.

MicroISV in 25 steps

Leon Bambrick has reached step three of his microISV series, designing your website.

Where's Wally

You can find out on the BBC's Walrus Tracking map. Over the next two months the map will be updated to show the location of ten tagged animals.

It's a shame they didn't use Virtual Earth or Google maps.

UI design

Fun with check-boxes.

I don't like check boxes. Too complicated.

Run As Radio

Run As Radio is a new weekly podcast from Richard Campbell.

It doesn't seem to be available on iTunes yet, but maybe that will change.

DDD5

The proposed sessions for DDD5 are looking good.

Speech in Vista

An article on speech recognition in Windows Vista.

It seems there are new voices available, including "the Windows Vista Chinese synthesizer, Lili".

XML Tools

There are some useful XML utilities here.

Xml Notepad 2007 and XML Diff and Patch...

Windows Workflow starter kit

Windows Workflow Foundation Web Workflow Approvals Starter Kit is an example Workflow application

Search .NET

Dan Appelman has created a .NET specific search site using Google's custom search. It limits the search to selected web sites that Dan recognises as having good .NET related content.

$5 app

More on the $5 app idea.

Of course, there is more profit to be made from a £5 app.

Selling software

ShareIt.com - Selling software online

Refactoring

James Shore on Refactoring.

WPF/e demo

There is a very nice new grand piano demo of WPF/E on Channel 9.

Viewstate

An article on truly understanding viewstate written by Dave Reed.

£5 app

Simon Harriyott blogged about a £5 app event. It seems the idea is to create a small app and sell it cheap, or possibly a lot of small apps.

A bit like the microISV idea with less time invested in creating the product.

Architecture

The Architecture Journal has an interview with Scott Guthrie.

Bristol-On-Sea

What would Bristol look like if the sea level rose by 10 metres? Or 7?

There are many places more at risk, as this site shows

Gmaps Pedometer

Gmaps Pedometer can show you the elevation of a route.

Bristol .NET group

A new Bristol based .NET user group, organised by Guy Smith-Ferrier

BBC podcasts

New ways to listen to the BBC...

Architecture Conference

The Microsoft Architect Insight Conference presentations are available for download.

OpenAJAX

OpenAJAX is an alliance of companies working towards open and interoperable AJAX based web technologies. It is interesting that the list of members includes both Microsoft and Google.

Fun with Antivirus Software

Something upset my antivirus software the other day... so, after a quick reinstallation I am now having fun with antivirus software.

I am running:
Grisoft AVG
SpyBot Search and Destroy
Lavasoft Ad Aware
Windows Defender
and Windows Firewall

Just for extra fun this evening I am trying out Windows Live OneCare. Although I am not sure about it. Why does it cost $49? All the software I listed above is free. Does Microsoft need my money? Wouldn't it be nice if Windows included this in the OS?

I'm also not sure why it orders things the way it does. It does a disk cleanup and disk fragmentation scan before checking for open ports. I would have thought it better to check the ports before worrying about fragmentation...

Security

Alik Levin's links on Google Hacking

Mock Objects

TypeMock is a tool for creating Mock Objects for use in Unit Testing.

It says in the list of features...
"Mocking takes place on the fly, working on your production assemblies."

One of the benefits is that it...
"Saves time by eliminating refactoring and restructuring of your code, just to make it testable."

There is an explanation of how it works, and this explains that you do not have to change your code to make it testable.

Blinq prototype

The blinq prototype...

"Blinq is a tool for generating ASP.NET websites for displaying, creating, and manipulating data based on database schema. Just point Blinq at a SQL database and it will create a website with pages that display sorted and paged data, allow you to update or delete records, create new records, and follow relationships between tables in your database."

Security engineering

Advice on Security Engineering from Microsoft Patterns and Practices. Including security checklists for ASP.NET 2.0

In fact, there is a huge amount of information available on making websites more secure.

WPF Tools

Microsoft .Net Framework WPF tools for Developers and Designers including Charles Petzold's XAMLCruncher, an application that lets you experiment with XAML.

Keywords

An article on keywords. I had thought search engines didn't take too much notice of keywords these days, but this article seems to suggest that they do.

It also suggests that choosing keywords correctly is very important, that as a website developer you need to think of the way your customer's customers will search. Their choice of keywords may not match your customer's choice.

Amnesty Widgets

Amnesty Widgets is a free tool for converting web widgets to run in the Vista Sidebar.

Microsoft and small businesses

Two Microsoft websites for small businesses...

Microsoft Small Business Channel Community

and

The Microsoft Startup Zone

RSS on CodePlex

ASP.NET RSS Toolkit on CodePlex gives ASP.NET applications the ability to consume and publish to RSS feeds.

Timeline search

TimeSearch.info is a time-based search engine. For example if you enter -4m as the search term it will return information on events 4 million years ago.

Samsung Q2

The Samsung Q2 Ultra Mobile PC.

Virtual Earth

PietschSoft.VE - ASP.NET AJAX Virtual Earth Mapping Server Control on CodePlex, allows you to use Virtual Earth without any need to use JavaScript.

More videos

More videos than I have time to watch...

Microsoft eLearning Developer Catalog has some free courses.

Russ and Joe on Microsoft Expression Web (60 minutes)

Virtual Labs on Windows Workflow (90 minutes)

And, it only takes 14 minutes to create a data driven web-site.

WPF Virtual labs

Microsoft virtual labs on Building WPF applications in C#.

Lunar Eclipse photographs

The start of the eclipse...


Totality...


And the beginning of the end of the eclipse...

Lunar Eclipse

Look outside.

Burning ISO image CDs on XP

A utility for burning ISO images to CD that runs on XP.

Why the operating system didn't do this itself I don't know, but this is a nice utility. It attaches itself to the .iso file extension, so if you right click on an .iso file in Windows Explorer the pop-up menu includes an option to "Copy image to CD".

Kids Corner

Microsoft Kids Corner has some fun resources, including C# for Sharp kids.

Blend videos

Richard Godfrey links to some expression blend videos. These are designed to help with the "What do I do now" experience that you get when you first open Blend...

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is available free for download. It runs on XP, and can host Vista. For now, this is the only way I am going to be able to do anything with Vista, as my BT Wireless Network 1250 broadband modem is not compatible.

I need access to the internet.

Vague UML

How vague should your use cases be?

It depends how you are using use cases. If your process is to do big design up front then it becomes important to get them "right". The longer this takes though the more likely it is that the customer will change their minds about what they want. Then your carefully crafted use cases are not so much use.

Now, in an agile process, you might develop your use cases to the level of detail required to be able to prioritise them. Then develop just the ones required for each iteration to more detail.

FEELIX Growing

The BBC has a story on a European project, called Feelix Growing, the aim of the project is to create robots that learn from people.

WPF Planets

Karsten Januszewski has posted a beautiful demo of WPF Planets using some texture maps from NASA and some 3D tools from CodePlex. I didn't realise what he meant at first but the trackball code lets you use the mouse to rotate the model in 3D.

Very cool.

Web design from scratch

The web design from scratch website has lots of articles, and ideas on web-design.

Low energy web site design

White on Black web designs are quite fashionable, and in some cases could save lot of energy. They tend to be a bit hard on the brain though, after a while.

I'm not sure if they only save energy on CRT displays, but there are still a lot of those about anyway.

There is some interesting advice on energy use of different colours and screen savers.

EcoIron has also come up with a low energy palette for web designs. It uses white but only for highlights and accents.

The best way to save energy is to remember to switch off when you have finished ... You could even remind your visitors to do that. Switch off now!

StartupSpark

StartupSpark is a site giving advice on starting a business... not specifically microisv style, more general advice.

Refactoring for ASP.NET

A free download from Developer Express, refactoring for ASP.NET.

More petitions

The petition in favour of road pricing is doing well, with 3170 signatures so far. Although I noticed that someone has given their name as "AnyonewhosignsthisisaTrotskyistwhoouldbebettersuitedlivinginRussiainthe1900's".

The site would be improved if you had to register to sign a petition. There is really no need to show the names of people who have signed.

We are likely to get road pricing in Bristol sometime, since the planners are removing all the car parks. Personally, I'm in favour of anything that will finally stop me spending 2 hours a day in the car, even if it means spending longer on a bus...

DDD5

Developer Day 5 has been announced.

List of Trouble Makers

Why not add your name to the list of trouble makers and sign a petition?

It seems number 10 has got tired of recycling all those paper based petitions people used to deliver, and now it is all done electronically.

Virtual Earth Interactive SDK

An interactive SDK for Virtual Earth.

OpenID

I signed up for an OpenID account.

"OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity."

It is supposed to mean that you don't have to register on web-sites that are OpenId enabled. You register with your OpenID account and it lets you share just the details you want to, you can set up different personas (personae?). You can use your own name, or your own URL as your OpenID.

There is more information on OpenIDEnabled, and a list of enabled sites at myOpenID.

Company info on emails and web-sites

The Register has an article on the new regulations about including company details on web-sites and in emails.

MSDN Magazine

The March issue of the MSDN magazine online.

Accessible Image Replacement

A simple technique for providing alternate text for images accessible to screen readers.

Scott Guthrie's slides from Reading

Scott Guthrie's slides and code from WebDD at Reading available here.

China week

China Week in the Times

SEO

James Crowley has some good advice on Search Engine Optimisation.

Wow

1. Download wpfe

2. Go to this site

Don't worry about the non-englishness, but wonder how long did this take?

And, why did Microsoft take so long? ;)

Project Glidepath

Project Glidepath is "everything you need regarding the technical and non-technical aspects of starting and succeeding as a MicroISV"

WPF/e

Tim Sneath has a lot of useful links to information on WPF/e including a list of blogs

WPF/E is a cross-platform, cross-browser presentation technology that is based on a free dowloadable package from Microsoft. The download is about 1MB in size.

Examples on Channel9

Google Webmaster central

Google's blog for webmasters.

C# a functional language?

Is C# becoming a functional language?

WebDD1

WebDD1 was an excellent event.

I think this was the best of the developer events at Reading so far! Having Microsoft speakers made it very different from the previous DDD events. Not surprisingly, there was a huge demand for the sessions presented by Scott Guthrie, even though his presentations were all being filmed.

I went to two sessions that were not presented by Scott:
Zhivko Dimitrov on Usability tests and Dave Verwer on Ruby on Rails. These were both good sessions.

The free copy of Microsoft Expression was most welcome.

Thank you, to the organisers, Phil Winstanley and Dave Sussman.

webdd1
webdd

MS Expression web

Expression Web installed... :)

Quick starts tutorials

Solar power

Our solar pv meter shows we have generated our first megawatt.

WebDD

Looking forward to WebDD tomorrow. I am still trying to decide which sessions to attend... The problem is, every single session on the agenda looks good.

Difficult decisions.

CSS Floating

MaxDesign.com has a very good tutorial on floating with CSS with some nice examples and effects.

Hot hot hot

2nd warmest January on record, but still not a good reason to go swimming

Business startup advice

The Site Doctor, Tim Gaunt, has a series of articles on starting a business.

Google Testing blog

Google wants everyone to do more testing.

Dream.Build.Play

The Dream.Build.Play competition. Build an XNA game and win a prize.

Musical Dice Game for Composing a Minuet

Mozart's Musical Dice Game for Composing a Minuet

NHibernate

A DNRTV (.Net Rocks TV) show on NHibernate.

ASP.NET AJAX resources

Scott Guthrie's blog. The source for AJAX information.

ASP.NET AJAX

ASP.NET AJAX version 1.0 is available.

Also, free hosting for 3 months...

sIFR

sIFR stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement.

At first I thought this was meant to be a replacement for flash, but it turns out to be a way to replace text in the browser with a flash movie that shows an image of the text in whatever font you choose. The font doesn't need to be installed so the page will always appear exactly as designed.

It seems like rather a Heath-Robinson approach, but the idea is to improve accessibility without sacrificing the design. The text is still there, accessible to screen readers and search engines.

I think it's a better approach than using images, even with Alt tags.

Programming haiku

The MSDN Magazine programming haiku challenge

Kim Cameron's blog

Kim Cameron's Identity weblog

Simile Timeline

Here comes the Semantic web...

"SIMILE is focused on developing robust, open source tools based on Semantic Web technologies that improve access, management and reuse among digital assets."

"Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. "

"Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code."

BBC Climate Change Experiment

The first results from the BBC's Climate Change grid computing experiment have been announced.
The BBC are not accepting any new participants at the moment, but it seems there will be another non-BBC project. My climate model is still only 47% complete, but the site says to let it continue to run and it will send in the results on completion.

The overall result so far is: a 4 degree rise in temperatures in the UK by 2080

Not good news.

MicroISV on Hanselminutes

Scott Hanselman talks to Secret Geek Leon Bambrick on How to start your own MicroISV.

It has to be better than starting someone elses.

Hmmm, I can think of a few large companies that could easily turn into MicroISVs. No, that can't be the best way to go about it...

I just hope one of the 25 steps is "How to have a good idea no-one else has thought of yet". Although, I think you don't actually have to have a unique idea.

Chongqing Strange Taste Horsebeans

The Engrish language is wonderful...

Star Ferry

This is old news, but what on earth are they doing to Hong kong harbour?

Carbon neutral houses

All new houses in the UK are to be carbon neutral by 2016. There is no mention of doing anything for existing houses. I don't understand why.

Web development, colour contrast checker

An online colour contrast checker.

Or you could just look at the screen...

Channel 9 video

Scott Guthrie Video on Channel 9.

And, WPF and WPFE examples on Channel 9

Real Climate blog

Real Climate blog, written by climate scientists...

"RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science."

Tabbed dialog

Jon Hedley has an example of a tabbed dialog in html, css and javascript.

Mandarin resources

很多人学习中文。. (Many people are studying chinese.)


我喜欢Chinese Pod。(I like chinese pod)

Other useful resources include:
InputKing for pinyin text to character conversion.

Zhongwen.com for translation.

Micro-ISV

Secret geek(Leon Bambrick) promises a series of posts on setting up an ISV.

WebDD

WebDD is "a free conference in Reading specifically targeting web developers and web designers".

There are some excellent sessions listed, (including four presented by Scott Guthrie).

Register now, later will be too late.

Firebug

Firebug looks very useful, amongst other things it has a JavaScript debugger. I have always struggled with JavaScript, having treated it mostly as a "copy from the tutorial" language. I might give it another go now...

Mashups

A rather large matrix of mashup web-sites.

200 million stop blogging

200 million people have stopped blogging according to the BBC.

I think I shall carry on regardless...

CSS Optimiser

An online CSS optimiser.

Open Source Web Design

Open Source Web Design has 1694 templates for web sites. Some of them must be good!

MS Expression Web

Microsoft Expression Web is now available as a free trial.

It would be nice if it was just free. Anyway, I haven't tried it yet...

Wind Power

An interesting article from the Guardian on mini wind turbines.

I think these are only an option if you are about 30 feet above any other houses nearby. Turbulence cuts down the output.

It would be nice though, to have something that generated electricity at night or in stormy weather to fill in the times when the solar panels are not generating.

Solar PV 2006

This chart shows our Solar PV electricity production for 2006. In total we generated 885.55 kilowatts. We consumed 2,728.9 kilowatts.

So, the solar panels produced almost one third of the amount of electricity we took from the grid.

As we don't have an export meter we don't know how much we actually used, but some of the solar output would have been exported.