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Monthly Archives: February 2008

  • Scott Guthrie on Expression Blend 2.5

    As a follow-up to his introduction to Silverlight 2, Scott Guthrie just posted a great article on using Expression Blend 2.5 to create Silverlight 2 applications.I really like Blend, but I wish the Xaml editor had intellisense and a few other niceties that we as developers have come to rely on. Of course, that's not its primary target audience :)Some interesting tidbits in Scott's post ...

    Published Friday, February 29, 2008 | Tagged: , , , , | Leave comment

  • The WorldWide Telescope - Microsoft Research

    This is absolutely awe-inspiring.When I was little, my favorite show was Carl Sagan's COSMOS on PBS (WGBH Channel 2, Boston). I even remember one day when I was sick, my mum brought a small TV into my room so I could still watch COSMOS that evening. Back then, I used to go to sleep and dream about the stars and nebula and everything else they used to show on that show.One of the most compe...

    Published Thursday, February 28, 2008 | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 comments

  • Woodworking T-Shirt

    One of my other hobbies is woodworking (my whole upstairs is one big project right now). Thought this was funny, but I doubt I can wear it to any client sites <g>:

    Published Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Tagged: | 1 comment

  • Using Silverlight Isolated Storage for Local State Backup

    A recurring problem that both Silverlight and Flash developers have to deal with is the volatility of the browser. One place where this can really hurt you is if, for example, you want to pop up a donation page or other straight browser content at the end of your application workflow (or anywhere in between). When you popup a window from Flash or Silverlight in IE7 (and in most popup blocke...

    Published Tuesday, February 26, 2008 | Tagged: , , , | 2 comments

  • University &quot;Giving Away&quot; iPhones to Students

    This is something I just don't get. The iPhone is arguably one of the most expensive phones you can buy. Granted, it has a great user interface, but at $500-$600, it's pretty expensive for a locked phone. I personally find the phone (from my limited use) quite usable, very attractive, but by no means a revolutionary device in any way other than the user experience. Abilene Christian Univer...

    Published Tuesday, February 26, 2008 | Tagged: , , | Leave comment

  • Upcoming Silverlight 2 Talks and Webcasts

    I hope you're as excited about Silverlight 2 as I am! If you haven't checked it out yet, Scott Guthrie just posted a great article and a huge multi-part tutorial for building a Silverlight 2 application to pull Digg results back via REST. He shows off tons of features, and you can infer even more from the screenshots. I think it's great that Scott has been able to finally provide some real de...

    Published Friday, February 22, 2008 | Tagged: , , , , , , | 6 comments

  • Extension Methods D'oh! Moment

    Sometimes you get so caught up in the complexity of an overall problem or solution, that you miss the simplest error even when it is staring you right in the face. So, the other day, I was working on some c# code for a personal project I'll post here in a few weeks. In it, I needed to create a color based on HSL rather than RGB. HSL is very useful when you want to generate a number of colors...

    Published Friday, February 22, 2008 | Tagged: | 4 comments

  • Scott Guthrie on Silverlight 2

    Scott just provided some more details on Silverlight 2. This is going to be a great spring :)

    Published Friday, February 22, 2008 | Tagged: , , | 1 comment

  • WPF and Silverlight 2 Themes - Reuxables

    WPF and Silverlight applications cover a whole spectrum of application types and richness from incredible full-screen applications incorporating 3d and video to games to good old standard (but highly usable and attractive) business applications. It's the last category that I find of particular interest as while those applications don't always get the attention that the others do, they will be,...

    Published Thursday, February 21, 2008 | Tagged: , , , , , | 6 comments

  • Microsoft Buys Caligari

    The first real 3d modeling tool I used was one of the earlier Windows versions of trueSpace. While I was never impressed with the rendering engine back then (it has improved over the years) I really cut my teeth on modeling using that tool. The workspace was somewhat unique as far as modeling tools goes, encouraging a more immersive 3d editing experience vs. the usual 3-view approach.  Cal...

    Published Saturday, February 9, 2008 | Tagged: , | 5 comments

  • Using a VideoBrush in Silverlight 1.0 for a Magnifying Glass

    Michael Sherotter (Synergist) created a nice Silverlight 1.0 sample showing how to use the videobrush to create a zoomable magnifying glass over video. For more details on how it was built, be sure to register for his webcast.

    Published Tuesday, February 5, 2008 | Tagged: | 1 comment

  • Silverlight 1.0 Game - Zombomatic!

    This is an addictive Silverlight 1.0 game: ZombomaticTry it out, but make sure you have nothing else to do for a little bit first :)

    Published Monday, February 4, 2008 | Tagged: , | Leave comment

  • Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms, Ajax - Which One is for Me?

    Early in my programming career, we had a choice to make at the beginning of each project: do we do this as a command-line/console app (prompt and response), use a DOS windowing library, or do a Windows 3 native app?Eventually, it became the norm to do a Windows app by default, and fall back to command-line only if you need to call it from batch files. The idea of creating prompt & response ...

    Published Monday, February 4, 2008 | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 9 comments

  • Scott Guthrie on MIX08

    I always enjoy MIX; it's my favorite conference. I used to look forward to the PDC, but I'd only really enjoy the UI technology-related sessions there anyway. This morning, Scott Guthrie posted a couple of interview videos which cover what's coming up in MIX08 (no, don't expect to see any secrets revealed <g>) just to whet your appetite and keep the MIX excitement going. C...

    Published Friday, February 1, 2008 | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave comment