Monthly Archives: February 2005

ahh – I can blog it now -Microsoft scoops up Shawn Van Ness

Community Cheerleading

I loved meeting Shawn finally at the WMA conference in San Francisco. While we chatted at the Varnish Gallery (where the Tablet party was being held – excellent choice, by the way, Elliot!) I let him know that I had started pestering my MVP leads (plural because I refer to my current and my former) that he should be an MVP, maybe C#. Although he is known for many tablet pc development articles, he is a whiz bang developer and I’m always impressed by his wealth  (and depth) of knowledge in responding to many questions on the Developmentor list that I am a voyeur on. Well, I guess we can say “great minds think alike” – because he told me that it’s a little late for MVP since he had just committed to swallowing the red pill. He is going to work at Microsoft and will have a very very cool job – as the PM on the team responsible for integrating Tablet PC platform into Avalon and WinFX.

Although I’m a little embarrassed (though highly flattered) by something he says in this post, I need to link to it anyway so you can read more…

Congrats Shawn!

http://www.AcehAid.org

BizTalk – For IT Pros? or for Developers?

Just Rambling

I heard this dialog in a conversation:

BizTalk guru (who is also a.NET Developer) : “developers just don’t understand BizTalk:

.NET Developer: “yeah, but why should I? BizTalk is for IT Pros”

BizTalk guru (who is also a.NET Developer): “See, that’s because you don’t understand BizTalk”

I could have very easily been the developer in that conversation, and it’s true, I don’t understand it at all. Unfortunately, I’ll have to leave it to the BizTalk guru for now.

http://www.AcehAid.org

XMLRPC samples

Just Rambling

When I wrote my blogging application, I had a few learning curves to get over: new ideas for tablet UI, working with blogger and metablog apis, learning how to ftp in the background. But the most challenging thing I had to deal with was coding with XMLRPC for lack of samples. What was out there was in C# so I ended up also doing a LOT of C# coding which was the most I had ever done at that point.

Dave Burke just went through the XMLRPC learning curve as well, but he did something very smart (and very kind). He posted his code, which gets some more sample code out there. Here it is.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Thinking about mass market appeal for tablet pcs

Tablet

I don’t use my tablet on an everyday basis and I am hardly a tablet power user. I am a programmer who is curious about the tablet as a way to extend my user’s relationship with their applications.*

However, for mass market ink appeal, I don’t understand why Josh Einstein’s extension to Outlook isn’t getting people more excited. Everyone uses Outlook (please don’t take that literally). The market is already there. This may not be the killer app that will drive people to purchase tablets, but once they are using them, they should be damned glad to have a tool like this.

Eventually people won’t be choosing between tablet and not tablet. They’ll just be buying their mobile pc and one of the common features will be ink. And don’t forget, another will be speech recognition. Believe me, Josh is thinking about this too!

*If you have ever had to do tech support for your applications, you probably know why “relationship” is an appropriate term here. 🙂



http://www.AcehAid.org

My first .NET article printed on real paper

Just Rambling

I just realized that the box sitting in the corner of my office which came while I was out west was filled with copies of the Mar/April 2005 issue of Code Magazine. EPS is kind enough to send issues to Vermont.NET. (We also get mags from ASPNetPro)

In this issue is my first .NET article that has been printed on paper – not just online. I did have a few FoxPro articles in FoxPro advisor many years ago.

The article is “Creating Debugger Visualizers with Visual Studio 2005” a very cool and underplayed feature in the next version of VS.NET. You may have noticed that I have written quite a few blog posts on this topic in the past so it was fun to formalize it as well as to update it for some of the nice changes that were made as of the November CTP bits.

The article has all samples in both VB and C# because of the big differences between creating attributes, inheriting objects, etc in the two languages. In fact, as far as I know, these are the first VB samples for debugger visualizers in print. Even the MSDN Library still only has C#.

There were two articles written on this previously – Scott Nonneberg wrote one on MSDN Online based on Beta 1, and Morgan Skinner included visualizers in this early article which based on pre-Beta 1 bits.

I was hoping to get a chance to drill into this and a few other of the new debugger display attributes at TechEd but it looks like that won’t be happening. I see only 29 developer specific topics in all of TechEd2005 and it’s not one of them.

Anyway, I hope the article is useful to many. There are also articles in there by Juval Lowy, Deborah Kurata and Dino Esposito as well as a few others. It’s nice to be in such fine company. 🙂

My second in print .NET article is coming very soon – though in a different magazine.

Thanks again Rodman!



http://www.AcehAid.org