Monthly Archives: September 2004

Hurricanes, the Red Cross and .NET

Purely Personal

A connection? Yes. Scott Lock, who runs the www.caparea.net user group in the D.C. area is the man behind the American Red Cross’s e-commerce donation system. Everytime there is *bad* stuff going on, Scott is on-call 24×7 just in case – since they want to make sure that nothing gets in the way of people making donations. The current system will soon be replaced by a .net app by the way.

One thing I know these hurricanes are wiping out the ACR’s funds and they can always use more help. It’s quick and easy and painless.

When I hear of the DNC and RNC spending 100’s of millions of dollars on  adverstising, it makes me sick.

I think that a new law should be instituted that for every dollar spent on political adversting, one dollar should be put into a charity of the same locality. So if it’s a national campaign – give to a national charity, like the Red Cross. A state campaign? Give to that a state-wide charity in that state. A local campaign? Give to the local homeless shelter or the local library or SOMETHING.

Tablet App design

Tablet

Please, don’ t make me use menus in my tablet applications.

One of the big revamps I did while dogfooding my blogging application was in the place where you can draw and change things like colors, pen width, ink or erase, etc I made everything available to just click on right on the screen. I got sick of the extra clicks. It’s really beautiful. Similar to what Paint does. (yes I’m still working out my stupid 24×24 icon problem…)

I did something similar in the doodling app on the web. Even if you can’t ink, you can see what I’m talking about here: www.thedatafarm.com/doodle.aspx.

Shawn Van Ness wins the day

Community Cheerleading

Shawn rocks. He just explained something to me in the newsgroups that I think is really cool which is an internal windows thing.

A little background. The TabletSDK has clipboard functionality. You can use it to copy ink data from one ink object to another. You can also use it for a few other formats. However, I saw in the samples that you can select multiple formats to persist to the clipboard when you copy (one of them being BMP so you can paste into PAINT, for example). I didn’t understand how, if you said okay I want these three formats, how PAINT gets the one it needs.

Pretty simple – this is what Windows is designed to do. You program an application to grok different formats and look for a default format (PASTE) or choose another format (PASTE SPECIAL).  Therefore if I know I want my end user to be able to paste into some generic windows graphic application, I need to ensure that I choose at least the BMP format when I send my ink to the clipboard. But heck, they might have another ink enabled application on their computer, so I should also make sure the special ISF (ink serialized format) is in there too. So after they copy, they would be able to paste in a variety of applications whether ink-enabled or not.

Shawn is a real expert with Tablet PC development and just wrote an article on ink enabling your web apps on the Tablet PC Dev Center.

call me crazy

Just Rambling

Lately, each time I achieve an understanding of yet another previously daunting topic in .NET, I have thought it would be great to collect all of this in one place to share with all of the other poor souls who are equally fearful of the bigger .NET concepts that are so new to so many of us. Things like reflection, CAS, security, WSE, streaming, threading (although I am not there with threading yet…), etc. Then I start thinking chapters…book.. and then I just slap myself a few times and make that stupid life sucking you couldn’t pay me enough idea go away.