Thoughts about .NET. Thoughts about code.
Posted in Conference on Apr 27th, 2006
I had a great time at the VSLive conference.
I met a lot of interesting people. Most of the attendees I talked to were local to the Toronto area. Some of the projects they were working on sounded very exciting. The biggest take-away I heard was that they can’t wait to get started using the [...]
Posted in .NET, Conference on Apr 27th, 2006
Abstract
Creating your own controls is a great way to augment your UI development. There’s more to creating user controls however than dropping a few constituent controls on a designer and crafting a few properties or methods. This session illustrates the techniques you need to elevate your user controls to the next level. Since other developers [...]
Posted in .NET, Conference on Apr 23rd, 2006
Alright, I love giving this talk. I’ve always liked graphics programming, wrote my first animation piece on an Apple II. Avalon, now with BORING and DRAB name Windows Presentation Framework (WPF), is very cool. The places where Avalon touches your UI is everywhere.
Abstract
The next version of Windows (Windows Vista) will include a completely new graphics [...]
Posted in Programming on Apr 23rd, 2006
I am stunned at how many websites have absolutely dreadful credit card handling. Pathetic, unhelpful, and just wrong sometimes. I have a litany of gripes about existing sites. It’s embarrassing to be part of a group of software engineers that just can’t get the basics right.
Today’s example? United Airlines Easy Check-in page (see screenshot below). [...]
Posted in .NET, Conference on Apr 22nd, 2006
Time to explain what I’m doing with my second talk at Toronto VSLive 2006.
Abstract
AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) has been getting lots of press lately. It provides a very Windows-like experience for web applications. AJAX is a mixture of technologies (DHTML, script, XML and more) that produce highly-performant and scalable UI’s by leveraging [...]
Posted in .NET, Conference on Apr 21st, 2006
I thought I would write about each of the talks I’m giving next week at VSLive Toronto. My first talk is Smart Data Clients 2.0. It’s part of the Smart Client track, a track that focuses on building applications that run on your OS. Yes, I’m talking about Windows applications here.
Abstract
Working with data is a [...]
Posted in VisualStudio on Apr 21st, 2006
Five million copies of the Visual Studio Express Editions have been downloaded and registered. FIVE MILLION in only five months. The original plan from Microsoft was to have these editions free for the first 12 months, then to sell them for $49.00US. Not anymore
Yesterday Microsoft broadcast the good news that they will NEVER charge you [...]
Posted in .NET, Conference on Apr 20th, 2006
Next week I will be in Canada, more precisely I’ll be in Toronto. I’m going to be talking at the VSLive conference there. This is my second trip to the city. Last year, I was there and spent a a day hanging out with Jeremy Wright. Another night I wandered about the city with a [...]
Posted in .NET, VisualStudio on Apr 10th, 2006
I use the DeveloperExpress Refactor tool frequently when working in Visual Studio 2005. I suspect a lot of other developers use it too, especially since it is available for free - for Visual Basic programmers.
There is a consistent bug in Refactor that hasn’t been fixed yet. It’s more of a petty annoyance than a serious [...]
Posted in Programming on Apr 3rd, 2006
I’ve been saying for the last year that Microsoft would be including virtual services with Windows Vista. The first proof to surface is today’s announcement that Microsoft Virtual Server is now free. Is this because of the competitive offer from VMWare early this year? According to Ben Armstrong, Virtual PC PM, this is not the [...]