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My frustration over upgrading my in-laws PC drove me to write “Integration and Simplicity Upgrades “. I wrote it as a Radio “story” instead of a rant, because I hadn’t used that feature yet
http://www.simplegeek.com/permalink.aspx/85

Since Doug mentioned me doing lots of GUI stuff, I thought I’d mention an interesting UI design book - About Face. It’s worth a read, although I think that Cooper goes a little bit far in saying that the “File” menu should be nuked. There are some things that don’t always follow a rational model, but get ingrained into the system so deeply that you shouldn’t try to change them. I agree with probably 80% of the book though - self describing UI, error messages with intelligible text (and solutions), etc… basically stuff that MS typically does poorly… although hopefully we are starting to show signs of improving.

The question for Doug is - are you going to J

avaOne this year?

http://www.simplegeek.com/permalink.aspx/40

I recently ran into an issue with using Silverlight 2 on a production web server.   Basically the Silverlight 2 application worked great on my dev machine, but when hit from the production web server I found the page has the Silverlight control, but just a white canvas, nothing else.

The problem was that the web server was not set up to handle the.xap file extension that Silverlight 2 uses to encapsulate the code for the application. 

A few options for fixing this issue:

1. For IIS6, simply add the.XAP filetype.

2. For II7, this should just work as IIS7 enables them all by default.

3. Other web services such as Apache, lighttpd, etc.  Just make sure the server is configured to allow access to.xaml,.wmv and.xap files and you should be all set

4.  Sometimes you can’t easily go in and change the setting on the server.   So the solution I actually used was none of these.  I just renamed the.XAP file to.ZIP, changed the reference in my applications.Xaml file and it ran fine! 

 

Hope that helps!

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/14/using-silverlight-2-on-a-production-web-server.aspx

So if you read my career history (which isn’t mandetory to understand the rest of this post) you will see that I spent a bunch of time working on Microsoft’s WFC and then WinForms for.NET. In the later part of this, I got the chance to meet Chris Sells. Chris wrote, debugged, and deployed what I believe to be the first real over-the-web Windows Forms application (wahoo ). In the process he continued to find bugs and issues with our deployment and security model. Hopefully with the release of Everett (.NET 1.1, should be out “soon”) most of these issues will be resolved. Just had to give chris props… you rock!
http://www.simplegeek.com/permalink.aspx/26

Phil has some good thoughts on ASP.NET MVC preview 2 and beyond.  

A couple of key things that I think are very cool with this project.

CodePlex builds — The team is very excited to be  able to ship out the source code and unit tests for ASP.NET MVC through it’s release cycle on CodePlex.    We will still do regular CTPs and Betas and RTMs, outside of CodePlex in the normal way.  But CodePlex allows more frequent releases if you want to watch the evolution of the product more closely. 

Unit test integration — We are very exited to be working closely with the TDD community on the ASP.NET MVC framework.  In fact the MbUnit   folks have already released updated installers that integrates support for MbUnit into ASP.NET MVC..   I am sure the others will add support shortly.  Joe Cartano of the Web Tools team posted an updated streamlined walkthrough on how to do so using NUnit and Rhino Mocks as an example.

Read more on Phil’s blog

Thanks for your feedback on ASP.NET MVC… 

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/10/asp-net-mvc-in-codeplex-and-extensible-unit-testing.aspx

One of the great things about Silverlight is that the controls are very skinable.. that is you can make them look just the way you want to! 

Corrina is the lead designer on the Silverlight controls… she has already gotten board with the (very cool) default skin we shipped at Mix08, so she cooked up a few others to keep things interesting.

All the source is posted so you can easily include them in your own projects to make your Silverlight apps look cooler, or tweak and make your own skins!  It is very easy to open them up on Expression Blend and tweak them to look just they way you want!  I’d love to see what you can come up with.

Also, check out Karen Corby’s Creating Rich, Dynamic User Interfaces with Silverlight 2  session from mix for more details

I gotta say, Red is my personal favorite..   how about you?

Bubbly

View Live Download

Red

View Live Download

Flat

View Live Download

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/12/great-new-silverlight-control-skins.aspx

As I am sure you have heard, we just published the Silverlight 2 Beta 1.  In addition to all the other cool stuff in Silverlight 2, we have included the ASP.NET support for Silverlight…   Just install Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 to check this out. 

Check out my recent post for more information: Islands of Richness with Silverlight on an ASP.NET page

 

Check out our quickstarts , and the new ASP Silverlight forums.

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/05/asp-mediaplayer-and-asp-silverlight-controls-update.aspx

Wow, it feels like old times…  I am happy that we are posting a new proposal for additions to the framework design guidelines.  Mitch has worked hard on these, and we have reviewed them internally and now it is time for your comments.   Please do chime in!

LINQ Framework Design Guidelines

 

Thanks!

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2008/03/13/framework-design-guidelines-linq.aspx

I am really looking forward to my Mix08 session this year… It is going to be fun to building an Ajax application from scratch on stage with VS2008 and ASP.NET 3.5.  

 

Update (3/07):  The session video is now posted.  There is even a place to discuss the session.

Here is a play-by-play if you want to follow along and help keep me in line…  This Mix08 folks should have the video up tomorrow… I will link to it when it is up.

Everything I will show can be done with the free-and-always free Visual Web Developer Express edition of VS… Go grab it and play along! 

Download the completed sample or just the starter files to play along at home.  

Part I:  CSS and HTML Designer

I started a brand new project and selected.NET Framework 2.0 as the target runtime.  This allows me use VS2008, but target servers that have not been upgraded to.NET Framework 3.5 yet. 

I then showed off the new Split view that is an excellent way to find out what markup goes with what UI element.  Notice as I highlight the text in the markup, it is tracked and highlighted in the designer.  I can also do two-way editing in the designer or the code source view. 

Next, I used VS 2008’s great new CSS support.  I used the Manage Styles panel to create a new CSS Selector…  Notice I use ".photolist li" this rule will apply to any li inside an element with the class photolist. 

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I’m not sure if this is a universal truth or not, but I suspect it is.

People can’t manage their email.

This isn’t a spam problem or tool problem. This is about people that don’t understand how to deal with mail in a timely fashion and manage their time. I have seen people that proclaim proudly that they have 4,000 messages in their inbox with 1,000 unread items. It must make them feel important to be so popular?

It is time to take a stand. We must demand action.

Jeff Bogdan (a coworker) and I have been trying a new system. We basically compete with each other to keep our inbox as small as possible. We read mail several times a day and try to respond, file, or delete each mail as we read it. The goal - less that 20 messages in your inbox.

It’s amazing - Once you get your email under control the frustration you feel when someone isn’t responsive to your mail is even worse. We are hoping that we can use shame and humiliation as a tool to convince others to follow our lead on agressively managing mail.

This is such a huge deal at a company like Microsoft. We communicate almost exclusively through email. It is not uncommon for people to get 200 mails a day, with some people toping at over 500. I’m sure that many other large companies out there are the same way. People get bogged down in mail, stop responding, and next thing you know you are always walking down to someone’s office asking them to read you mail right away. Or, even worse, you start tagging every mail with a !

1. Read mail several times a day (not continuosly, but also not only in the AM or PM)
2. When reading mail try to respond, file, or delete the mail when you first read it. The goal is to touch each mail only once.
3. Use Outlook (or whatever program is your favorite) to auto-file large mass mailing lists into folders so that they don’t pile up in your inbox and hide important mails.
4. Keep less than 20 mails in your inbox.

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