It took me a while but I finally am having fun using Expression Blend after some initial trepidation. But suffering through a bunch of XAML hand coding actually helped! Read more here…
[A New DevLife post]
Monthly Archives: June 2007
Vermont IT Jobs: ASP.NET Developer in Colchester
.NET Job Description:
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CONTACT:
Paul Mewis BSc (Hons)
Senior Recruiter, S.Com
Suite 2525, One Post Street
San Francisco
CA 94104
Tel: 415 627 1892
Fax: 415 989 0450
globalpeoplesolutions
Email: Paul.Mewis@scomusa.com
www: www.scom.com
Speaking at two Michigan .NET User Groups in July
Okay, I lied. I thought I was staying home all summer, but it turns out that the Greater Lansing User Group had a request in to INETA and it just so happens that their July meeting date falls the same week as the famous Ann Arbor Art Fair that I have always wanted to go to. So, I will be doing an INETA event on Thursday, July 19th in Lansing and as long as I’m going there, I will speak on the previous night at the GANG (Detroit) User Group.
Thanks especially to Bill Wagner and Darrell Hawley for their help in coordinating. Darrell runs the user group in Ann Arbor but their meeting date is weeks before.
I’ll be doing a session on the ADO.NET Entity Framework at both groups.
Embedding Silverlight Annotation in my dasblog post
This was easier than I expected! Go ahead, draw in my blog post! 🙂
(note – If you do not see the drawing surface it’s because this doesn’t seem to work when the blog post is viewed individually. View my entire Silverlight category and it will be rendered properly. I guess I need to keep working on this one…)
This is the Silverlight setup that I used for my tests on this particular page.
I put the javascript and xaml files in the relative folders in my dasblog application:
thedatafarm.com/blog/xaml
thedatafarm.com/blog/js
Then I added the javascript references that are in the header tags of my html page into the header tags of the homeTemplate.blogtemplate file in my blog/themes/myfavetheme folder.
And it just works!
So far this is just letting you draw on the blog page. My persistence code in the later pages of the above mentioned tests use asp.net ajax and I’d have to do some major customization to my dasblog app to incorporate that right now. I pretty much use dasBlog out of the box, so I’m not ready to go down that road. I have lots of other stuff to learn, but this was a fun little exercise!
My Silverlight Ink Experiments: Next Step… try to look like a silverlight application
Inspired by the Scribbler app (part of the Silverlight 1.1 Gallery), written by Daniel Cook & Pete Blois (with some inspiration from Laurence Moroney) I decided to spiff up my own drawing application.
Why is it that a black background seems to be the way to make apps look cool?
I even finally opened up Microsoft Expression Blend to help me since I was getting sick of working in raw XAML and having to test each visual change by debugging the app. Last time I looked at this product, it frightened me and I closed it quickly. But now that I have done enough of the hand-coded XAML, it was not a huge leap to comprehend how to use Expression Blend and what I could do with it.
One thing that I discovered is that the Background property of the InkPresenter element, while necessary, is not recognized by the designer. So to do the design in Expression, I had to remove that property, then replace it when I wanted to test out the app.
Since my app is still using the v1.0 of Silverlight (and javascript, not .NET), I can’t pull off the slick color picker that is in the Scribbler app. But when it’s time to move to v1.1, I’ll know where to find the code!
Lenovo X60 Thinkpad Battery problems – will there be a new battery recall?
The battery on my 3 month old Lenovo X60 is dead and I am getting the dreaded notice in the power manager “Irreparable damage to the battery has been detected. Replace the battery with the new one.”
In addition to the message in the Power manager, I have the following symptoms:
- Battery Indicator light is blinking orange
- Power status says “Plugged in, not charging”
- Computer shuts down immediately when unplugged (since the battery is dead).
This is not atypical of old batteries that need replacement, but this battery is fairly new and has not been abused in any way.
I attempted a recommended BIOS update but this requires a fully charged battery.
I checked the March 27th battery recall, but my battery was not on the list.
Luckily, I found a comment thread in the LenovoBlogs under a post that is a few months old called “Power Manager.” There is a new string of comments that began a few days ago with other people having this problem. An IBM technician from Vancouver has joined the thread, identifed the problem and is currently seeking a solution.
So if you have found my blog post via searching for a solution to this problem… keep an eye on the comments on the tail end of this post’s comments: http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=52.
I like having found the www.LenovoBlogs.com site. It’s a mini “blogs.msdn.com” and a good stab at corporate transparency and accessibility. The product manager’s direct phone number is even published there!
Is “Ink” cooler if we call it “annotating”?
There are a few silverlight demos that use the InkPresenter, though two of them don’t refer to Ink at all…:
The page turning demo has it. You can annotate the pages and that gets remembered during your session. As you flip the pages back and forth, the annotations are incorporated into the effects.
The scribbler demo has it. This is straight drawing. What I love here is the cool pallette.
The Ink Tattoo Studio demo has it. This a fun demo. On a tabletpc, the pressure of the stylus can be registered by the digitizer.I saw a version of this app that said “Ouch!” if the pressure got too high. Otherwise, the tattoo tool buzzes.
Dan Wahlin’s Silverlight/ASP.NET AJAX Album Viewer
Dan Wahlin and Matt Gibbs have a book just coming out about ASP.NET AJAX (Prof. Asp.NET 2.0 AJAX) from WROX. So Dan has now spent a LOT of time with AJAX and is very knowledgable. Then Silverlight comes out and boom – he’s got a Silverlight ASP.NET AJAX app that is VERY cool. I’m supposed to be writing an article on Entity Framework right now, but boy do I want to continue playing with Silverlight.
Going to TechEd? Visit Eric at the SourceGear booth
Since I won’t be at TechEd, I want to make sure Eric Sink is well-entertained! Of course, he’s a pretty entertaining guy, so do yourself a favor and go visit him, get a cool t-shirt, get a chance to win a Wii and see some awesome developer tools like my favorite source control program.
[The fine print: I was not asked, paid, cajoled, bribed or otherwise to make this post, but I admit that I was definitely flattered!]
Microsoft Surface – life imitates art….
It’s always entertaining to laugh at the unrealistic things people do with computers in television shows – most often shows like CSI. I remember seeing one of the early demo apps for WPF that Carter Maslan created in early 2004 and thinking that it looked like the fantasy computing scenarios from t.v. coming to life.
Now another of the Microsoft Research projects that looks like life emulating art is coming unveiled… Microsoft Surface. Considering that I recently publically declared my love of using a touch screen computer, this looks like the best of that combined with the best of WPF and then blown up to a huge surface. It’s very cool and promising and apparently coming at the end of this year. There will be a unit in a NYC Sheraton starting next week and then another will be at a tech show in San Diego later this summer. Check the FIND IT page for more details. I highly recommend watching some of the demonstration videos on the site and exploring the history as well. COOOOOOOOOL….
