I just found out about Channel8 which is in Beta and was launched recently. it’s aimed at students – from kids to PhD’s.
There are arlready some great videos – interns at Microsoft, PhD students describing their research projects; blog posts and more.
I’ve been emailing it to all of my pals who are teachers and profs related to all things nerdy.
Finally, you can draw a simple line on a windows form, just like in the old VB6 days. The VB2005 Power Pack has lines and other shape controls. It also has a compatilibity tool for leveraging VB6 printer code. Read more here!
[A New DevLife post]
I have dynamically generated XAML in a few of my apps. It’s not easy to debug so I wrote a post sharing how I go about tracking down problems that might be in this code.
[A New DevLife post]
Mom and the kids (who I first saw in July) have been hanging around the neighborhood most of the summer. They didn’t do too much damage to my flowers or veggie garden.
Today I saw them all under the apple trees. There are about 10 old trees by our driveway and this year all of the apple trees around here are filled with billions of apples. Ours are not great – since we don’t spray them, though I might make some applesauce.
There are already lots on the ground, so the deer were having a mini-feast. Unfortunately it also attracts Porcupines and we HATE porcupines. (They hurt our curious pets.)
While looking for the porcupine post, I came across one entitled “G.B.s big night out” from almost two years ago. Sadly, G.B. had his last big night out about a month ago. We haven’t seen him since.
Tatiana pushed up two more essays this morning and mine is one of those.
It’s not quite as serious or challenging as some of the more thought provoking essays have been, but it is definitely from the heart!
Hey, so I’m not a walking encyclopedia.
I thought it would be cool to try to build an xml file from a Silverlight object – namely the StrokeColleciton of an InkPresenter.
I coded it up in what I thought was a very nice way:
XElement XMLStrokes = new XElement(“StrokeCollection”);
//create stroke then add to collection element
XElement mystroke;
foreach (Stroke s in mystrokes)
{
mystroke = new XElement(“Stroke”,
new XElement(“Stroke.DrawingAttributes”,
new XElement(“DrawingAttributes”,
new XAttribute(“Color”, s.DrawingAttributes.Color),
new XAttribute(“OutlineColor”, s.DrawingAttributes.OutlineColor),
new XAttribute(“Width”, s.DrawingAttributes.Width),
new XAttribute(“Height”, s.DrawingAttributes.Height))));
//create points separatly then add to mystroke xelement
XElement myPoints = new XElement(“Stroke.StylusPoints”);
foreach (StylusPoint sp in s.StylusPoints)
{
XElement mypoint = new XElement(“Stylus Point”,
new XAttribute(“x”, sp.X),
new XAttribute(“y”, sp.Y));
myPoints.Add(mypoint);
}
mystroke.Add(myPoints);
XMLStrokes.Add(mystroke);
}
It compiled fine, but then the strangest thing happened. The code would never get called. If I put it in a method and had a click event call the method, the method would not get hit. I put it in a new static class but still it did not get hit. Then I put the code right in the click event and then the click event stopped getting hit.
I thought for sure it was me being stupid with C#. But finally I had a new idea and I googled “LINQ to XML” and Silverlight and the first hit was a post by Fabrice Marguerie saying that LINQ to XML was not supported in Silverlight, with a link to a post by Aaron Dunnington on the XML team.
Not supported, eh? Well, it’s just not quite yet. it’ll be there. (I knew that from reading Aaron’s post, but totally neglected to point that out. Thanks for Scott Guthrie’s reminder in the comments.) Either way, it sure had a funny way of showing it. Sheesh!
I suppose I could put it into a WPF project and test it (I still don’t know if my logic is correct) but I’ve got better things to do at the moment.
Note: I did think of using a webservice for this, but a StrokeCollecton is not serializable, so it would be redundant to find another way to get it across the pipe just to see if I can pull it off in LINQ to XML while still in the context of a Silverlight app. I’ll just be patient.
Even though i am on the INETA speaker committee (responsible for the NORAM Speaker Bureau), I didn’t really know this was public yet but I’m starting to get some emails and see some blog posts that people are announcing their addition to the speaker bureau, so I guess it’s okay to blog about it now!
Must be that the email I got wasn’t a “how does this look before we send it out to the world?” but it was the official email.
Fifteen, count ’em 15! new people were added to the speaker bureau. They are all on the website already so you can start ordering them up!
Rod Paddock – Rod has spent his kid’s college fund travelling on his own dime to speak to user groups all over the u.s. and canada. he’s been to VTdotNET and he’s a great presenter. Rod is also editor of CoDe Magazine.
Markus Egger – Markus is the publisher of CoDe, so he keeps Rod in line! Markus presents at conferences all over the world. I am always amazed at the ease at which he explains some difficult concepts in a easily understandable way. Even with that Austrian accent!
Mark Miller – You may know Mark from his crazy fun on Mondays! with Carl Franklin, but Mark is also a friggin genious who is one of the driving technical forces behind Developer Express. Mark is another one of those guys who speaks at user groups on his own dime all the time.
Nick Landry – aka Active Nick. Nick is a crazy and smart as hell guy from Montreal (though he’s now a New Yakah living in Joisey)who is a guru in mobile device programming. He has been presenting at conferences for years. Watch out for that Quebequois accent, shiny bald head, and most especially his super silly jokes that somehow make technology sound dirty.
John Papa – John writes the Data Points columns for MSDN magazine and speaks at VSLIve a lot and we’ve just snagged him to present at devconnections this fall (he’s doing 2 talks in the Data Access track that I coordinated and 2 in the Mobile Connections conference that Nick Landry chairs). Maybe if we keep him really busy on the speaker bureau, he’ll be lulled into slacking off on his MSDN Mag column and I can steal it away from him. Evil laugh.
Ambrose Little – Ambrose has written books for WROX on ADO.NET 2.0, ASp.NET 2.0 Hacks and has a book on silverlight coming out. He works at Infragistics and is an ASPINsider – and a really nice guy who will be a pleasure to host at your user group!
Oh, John Papa’s really nice too. You should all invite him to speak at your groups. Keep him really busy! 😉
DonXML – oh, wait, Don actually has a last name! It’s Demsak. But really, “Donxml”, need I say more?
Wow – 7 down and 8 to go. This is a lot of work and I have work to do.
I’m going to have to just cut & paste the rest. I know, that’s really boring. Sorry!
Todd C. Bleeker, Ph.D., is regarded as an innovative, resourceful, and competitive technologist with an intense desire to excel. Todd is co-owner of Mindsharp (http://mindsharp.com/), a company that offers top-notch educational opportunities on the SharePoint platform. Todd has architected many solutions for small and large corporations: P&G, Fingerhut, United Healthcare, itiliti (now PeopleClick), Air
Mark Dunn has over 20 years of experience in the disciplines of software engineering, database administration, and project management. For the past four years, Mark has been awarded MVP status for his contributions to the Visual Studio .Net community and he serves as Microsoft’s Regional Director covering the
Caleb Jenkins long time community leader, former Microsoft Developer Evangelist, training mentor and consultant with Improving Enterprises, Inc. Host, cameraman and editor for http://communitycast.tv/. Caleb lives in
Kevin McNeish is President and Chief Software Architect of Oak Leaf Enterprises, Inc, and a Microsoft .NET MVP. He is a well-know speaker and trainer throughout North America and
Mark Michaelis is the IDesign architect specializing in WCF and VSTS. Mark was recognized by Microsoft as a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio Team System and C#. Mark holds a MS in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology and he serves on several Microsoft Software Design Review teams including WCF, C# and VSTS. Mark speaks at developer conferences both nationally and internationally and has written several articles and books, in addition to maintaining a blog. His most recent book is Essential C# 2.0 (Addison-Wesley, 2006). [Hey, there’s nothing in this bio about riding roller coasters on top of tall buildings with Kathleen Dollard!]
Jeffrey Palermo makes his living making software teams twice and three times as productive by coaching executive managers all the way down to individual software engineers. Jeffrey is also a master developer, MCSD.Net, Solutions Architect MVP,
David Yack is the CTO of Colorado Technology Consultants, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner based in
I was happy to see Danny’s blog post this morning that he’ll be coming to DevConnections. He’s not even presenting. But since there will be an entire Data Access track (a day of 4 microsoft talks and then 2 days of third party speakers) and in that track there will be 8 talks that will either be about Entity Framework or will include info on it , AND I’ll be doing a 1/2 day workshop… he knows it will be the place to be to talk about Entity Framework with interested folks!
There will be plenty of folks from the team there and I am envisioning some engaging discussions!
Sept 12 at 6 PM meeting: Deployment Issues with Rails
Posted: 11 Sep 2007 07:07 AM CDT
We are going to have a User Group meeting on Sept 12 at 6 PM. The meeting is at Draker Solar Design, 22 North Street,Burlington, Vermont 05401.
As part of the Women in Tech series at OReillyNet, Lauren Wood writes about serving on standards committees and how the people who are there representing a great variety of interests, manage to make it all work.
Lauren is a Sr. Technical Program Manager at Sun – so she represents a BIG interest! I also read Lauren’s bio and my jaw dropped even more when I saw this:
Lauren holds a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear physics
“Gulp!”, says the gal who majored in History at a teeny tiny liberal arts college in Central New York.