Developer Community

Expression Blend Training Resources

Frank — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:22:00 GMT

The Expression Blend Team has put together a blog post of all the training resources and materials out there to get you up to speed on it.

From the post:

Training Resources from Microsoft

Expression Blend and Design Blog: Tips & Tricks
Expression Community
Expression Blend (Online) User Guide
Expression Blend Tutorials

MIX 07/08 Video Sessions

Building Rich Client Experiences with Blend and WPF (by Celso Gomes and Christian Schormann)
Building Rich Web Experiences (by Celso Gomes)
Applications = Designers + Developers (by Celso Gomes and Kirupa Chinnathambi)
Designing Next Generation User Experiences (Johnathan Lansing)

Tutorials (Videos)

A Lap Around Microsoft Expression Blend (Steve White)
4 Visual State Manager Videos (Steve White)
Animation and Media (Peter Blois)
Blend for Programmers (Jesse Liberty)
contentpresenter.com - WPF Video Tutorials (Lee Brimelow)
Lynda.com - Video Tutorials 1, Video Tutorials 2 (Lee Brimelow)

Tutorials (Articles)

Nibbles Tutorials (Celso Gomes)
Collection of Visual State Manager (VSM) Resources (Steve White)
Electric Beach (Christian Schormann)
kirupa.com - Blend + WPF, Blend + Silverlight (Kirupa Chinnathambi)

If you know some that aren't on this list, then email Kirupa (kirupac[at]microsoft.com) to get them added.

Technorati Tags: Blend,Expression Blend,Silverlight,Devigner

Updates to the Community Megaphone Plug-in

Frank — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:44:00 GMT

Here's an update to my Community Megaphone Event Plug-In.

The new version (v 1.0.0.0) has a few new elements, namely the Browse button and an "Include Images" checkbox.

Based on the checkbox, the plug-in will either output links with or without images.

The new version also has an integrated web browser that takes you the to Community Megaphone homepage.

Just click on the event you want to link to and the plug-in is smart enough to figure out the Event ID.

When you've found the event you're looking for, click Choose This Event.

If you get stuck on a page you didn't want to be on, just click the CM Homepage button to get back to the homepage.

Installation

Installation remains the same as before.

First download the DLL file and copy it to the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins directory, assuming it's installed in the default directory.

Make adjustments if you've installed it in another location.

Let me know what you think!

Please send bug reports, feature suggestions, gratuitous praise, etc to me via my contact page.

Release Notes

Aside from the changes noted above, there's a fancy new About Box.

In case you're wondering about the Battleship Gray UI, the Live Writer Plug-In API only supports .NET 1.1 and 2.0 assemblies.

Meaning that WPF and LINQ are not available.

Hopefully, that will change that in the near future, but until then, no slick UI's or LINQ queries chopping through RSS.

Technorati Tags: Community Megaphone,WLW,Windows Live Writer,Plug-In

Community Megaphone Plug-In for Window Live Writer

Frank — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:44:00 GMT

Community Megaphone is a great site that Andrew Duthie put together.

Recently, the site has gone national and Andrew has been working hard at improving it.

His latest feature: geocoded RSS, which Glen Gordon put to good use by making an app that find developer events nearest you based on your location.

Here's my addition to the CM utility kit: a Plug-in for Windows Live Writer.

The plug-in adds an entry onto WLW's sidebar and Insert menu:

Once you click on "Insert CM Event," this dialog box comes up:

Browse to Community Megaphone to see the EventID the site assigned to the event you wish to blog about and enter that number in the text box.

Click OK and you'll see the following added to your blog post:

For instance, CMAP's August 2008 meeting has an EventID of 320, so if I plug in 320 to the dialog box, I get:

[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]

Future versions of the plug-in will eliminate the "browse to Community Megaphone site" step.

But for now, this is a fast and easy way to provide a link to a map and iCal file for events.

Installation

First ~~download the DLL file~~ download version 1.0.0.0 of the DLL and copy it to the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins directory, assuming it's installed in the default directory.

Make adjustments if you've installed it in another location.

Let me know what you think!

Send bug reports, feature suggestions, gratuitous praise, etc to me via my contact page.

Technorati Tags: Community Megaphone,WLW,Windows Live Writer,Plug-In

Silverlight Control Builder Contest

Frank — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:59:00 GMT

Speaking of contests, Page Brooks and Dave Campbell have put together the Silverlight Control Builder Contest '08.

The prizes are amazing!

Check out what the 1st place winner gets:

1-Year MSDN Premium Subscription
Practically every piece of software that Microsoft makes, available for download for 1-year.
Your choice of one book from the entire O'Reilly catalog
Contributed by O'Reilly Media
Choose from a huge selection of books in the O'Reilly catalog!
Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX + WinForms + Telerik Reporting
Telerik's most comprehensive component package.

Telerik RadControls License for Silverlight (after release)
A new generation of UI controls for building Rich Interactive Applications.

Xceed Upload for Silverlight with 1-year Subscription
Quickly and easily add upload capabilities to any Silverlight 2 Beta 2 application!

$150 Amazon.com Gift Certificate

Second and third place prizes aren't too shabby either. ;)

Best of all, the submitted entries will be made available as open source and licensed to re-use.

Everybody wins!

Be sure to check out the rules.

[found via fellow AISer Pete Brown]

UPDATE: Developer Express has added the following prizes to the prize pool:

First - Dxperience Universal and $500 gift cert to something

Second - Dxperience Enterprise $250 gift cert to something

Third - CR/R $100 gift cert to something

Maybe I should enter the contest :)

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Contest,Devigner

The Night the Lights Went Out in Rockville

Frank — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:41:00 GMT

Last night's meeting of RockNUG was canceled after the power went out just as we were about to start.

The DIY User Group Session is set to take place at next month's meeting on August 13th.

I did, however, win a book in the swag drawings that were held while we waited out the power outage.

My prize? Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 24 Hours.

Since, I already know ASP.NET, I've decided to give away the book (a $29.99 value) to someone who needs to learn ASP.NET.

If you're interested, write me a paragraph on why you want to learn ASP.NET.

Here's some legal mumbo jumbo:

This giveaway is only open to US residents who are 18 years of age or older.
All contestants must be able to provide a valid U.S postal address. Prize cannot be mailed outside of the United States. Unclaimed or undeliverable prizes will be forfeited.
Contestants agree that event organizers reserve the right to disqualify any contestant for any reason.
Each person may submit one entry. Additional entries will be ignored.

If no one claims the book, I'll donate it to the swag collection at the next user group meeting or the local library.

Technorati Tags: RockNUG,ASP.NET

Presenting at RockNUG Tonight

Frank — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:56:00 GMT

I'll be doing a presentation on "Graphic Design for Developers" tonight at RockNUG's Mid-Summer DIY User Group.

Details from the site:

DIY (Do It Yourself) User Group
presented by:

Scott Lawrence: ReSharper 4.0
Angel Filev: C# 3 Features: Extensions and Lambda Expressions
Sai Daliparti: Dive into MOSS 2007
Matthew Podwysocki: Functional C#
Frank LaVigne: Graphic Design for Developers
Paul Bhorjee: MyGeneration with EntitySpaces O/RM
Vladimir Bychkov: Podcasts and Programming
Jason Fabritz: The Swaginator
Dean Fiala: WCF? WTF? FTW?
YOUR NAME HERE: Your Cool Topic

Have something you want to show everyone -- an idea, a tip, a trick, a time saver or just something cool? Tonight is the night to show it to the world (for some values of world). In five to fifteen minutes, you can become a RockNUG legend and/or have a chance to experience your own projector malfunction. As an added bonus everyone who presents gets two swag numbers!

[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]

Technorati Tags: RockNUG,RockvileMD,Devigner,Graphic Design

Software Development Meme

Frank — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:42:00 GMT

Pete Brown called me out on the Software Development Meme, so here is my response.

How old were you when you first started programming?

I was eleven years old (in sixth grade) when my parents got me a Commodore 64.

We got it on April Fools' Day, which that year happened to be Easter Sunday, on sale at Crazy Eddie's for an "insane" price. :)

How did you get started in programming?

This was in the days before pre-installed software, when you fired up the C64 and it did nothing.

The following week, my folks bought a word-processor and a spreadsheet program.

Naturally, I wanted games for it.

My mom told me to write my own games and the rest was history.

My first game was a moon lander clone and my last game on the C64 was based on the film 2010, which sold 2 copies.

I would get sued today.

What was your first language?

Commodore BASIC.

This was a simpler time, when filling up a screen was enough to impress people.

Two lines of code = big payoff.

10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10

What was the first real program you wrote?

I suppose it depends on how you define "real."

I hated math, but loved programming. Go figure.

I wrote a program to calculate the area and circumference of a circle. The C64 had a predefined value for Pi.

I also wrote a program to generate all the possible combinations of a phrase for a contest at school, where the one who came up with the most words out of a particular phrase won.

My C64 put me over the top and I (we) won.

Who says you needed a Mac to crush the other kids. :)

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Since 1984, I've used:

Commodore Basic
PL1
Pascal
C/C++
Assembly (for VAX VMS)
FORTRAN
COBOL
Prolog
Informix-4GL
Visual Basic (starting at VB3)
Perl
Lingo
PowerScript (for PowerBuilder)
ActionScript
Java
C#
Javascript
SQL (SQL-92, PL/PQL, T-SQL)

Most of the obscure and/or ancient languages were for coursework in college and I'm sure I'm leaving a few out.

These days, nearly everything I do is C#, with a touch of Javascript now and then.

What was your first professional programming gig?

I landed a summer internship after sophomore year at the help desk for the investment banking division of a major Wall Street firm.

When things were quiet, we were asked to do typically "summer intern" work.

My world changed when my boss handed me the dozen or so disks to install Visual Basic 3 to build out some help desk related apps.

At first, I was shocked that the line numbers had gone away. ;)

Soon, I was second/third level support and coding nearly full time.

My first professional app was "Beep Mail," a program that let you send text messages to alpha numeric pagers from your desktop.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Absolutely, it's been a rewarding career that has taken me places, both literally and figuratively.

It's been a career that's constantly been fun, stimulating, rewarding, challenging, and occasionally exhilarating.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Don't be afraid to make mistakes, just try not to make the same mistake twice.

Actually, be eager to keep making new mistakes and you'll be delighted where you'll end up.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

There's nothing like that feeling when you finally figure something out or fix that bug that's been keeping you up at night.

It's also fun to work on cool personal projects too where you can try out new technologies/approaches/etc.

Who are you calling out?

Technorati Tags: Software Development,Meme,Commodore 64

Jimmy Hoffa and the Entity Framework No Confidence Petition

Frank — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 10:45:00 GMT

It seems that every few years, people in the development community get really upset about something and decide to start passing a petition around.

In 2005, it was the Keep VB6 Alive movement.

In 2008, it's the year of "Bash the Entity Framework,"

Earlier this week, some folks began passing around the "ADO.NET Entity Framework Vote of No Confidence" petition.

The words of the petition are strong and, even curious:

"The signatories of this letter are unanimous in expressing concern for the welfare of software projects undertaken in the Microsoft customer community that will make use of the forthcoming ADO .NET Entity Framework."

If you look at the list of signatories, you'll find some big names in the list.

However, if you look at the form where signatures are collected, you'll find no means of authentication.

In fact, none other than deceased labor leader Jimmy Hoffa counts himself among those opposed to the Entity Framework.

If you can get the list to work, you'll see Scott Gutrie's name in the list.

Clearly, this is flame-baiting.

My point is that petitions are somewhat pointless in an online world and anyone can sign anyone's name.

There's also a sense of grandeur (or delusions thereof) in the wording of the petition.

Something that Kevin Hazzard points out:

"I feel as though the signatories of the petition feel like they are playing Continental Congress against King George. But there's no Boston Tea Party here. Microsoft didn't raise any undue taxes from any of us. They simply put out a framework that's clearly a v1.0 product. Microsoft doesn't win with v1.0 products. It wins with version 4 products"

Well said.

"Let he whose V1 software is perfect cast the first stone"

The EF may not be perfect and chances are it's far from being perfect.

I won't pretend to know the ins and outs of the Entity Framework, as I've not had the time to get dirty in the details of it, but it's a v1 effort and v1 efforts are rarely excellent.

Anyone remember IE1? Windows v1? Netscape 1?

Even .NET 1.0 was quickly followed by version 1.1.

The point is that software development is iterative.

This is a point that you'd think that the proponents of the petition would immediately understand.

There's a Better Way to Get Results

A lot of folks agree with providing feedback to Microsoft, just not in the way these folks are going about it.

Josh Holmes has an excellent blog post on the controversy and puts it down quite simply:

What I disagree with is the way in which it's presented. The language of "Vote of No Confidence" is intended to start a fight and is long hand for "You suck".

The whole MVP program exists to solicit feedback from the developer community.

Microsoft's pretty open as to its inner workings and thought processes with newsgroups, blogs, even Twitter.

So much so, that even non-MVPs can get their ideas across to individuals on product teams.

Is there a back story to this?

Were their voices not heard in the normal feedback channels?

Is there a reason for this or is this just an attention ploy?

Name Calling is So Second Grade

Another strange thing about this controversy is the personal attacks and name-calling.

Let's all step back, take a deep breath and remember that software development is not about achieving perfection and there's always v Next.

Technorati Tags: Entity Framework,No Confidence

Community Megaphone Goes National

Frank — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:19:00 GMT

Congratulations are in order to Andrew Duthie for taking Community Megaphone national.

The site aggregates developer community events and separates in them into categories: user group meetings, Code Camps, etc.

You can filter events based on location or event type.

Each event has an "Add to Calendar" feature which adds the event to your calendar automatically.

There's also a gadget you can add to your site.

Best of all, you don't have to sign up or register for anything.

Technorati Tags: Developer Community,Andrew Duthie

Photos from Last Night's Geek Dinner

Frank — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:59:00 GMT

Photos from last night's Geek Dinner in Chantilly, VA.

Technorati Tags: Geek Dinner