You've reached the internet home of Chris Sells, who has a long history as a contributing member of the Windows developer community. He enjoys long walks on the beach and various computer technologies.
Wednesday, Jul 6, 2005, 7:24 PM in Fun
Old Man's War
I read Old Man's War today (no better way to avoid writing than to read). I enjoyed it very much. I'm off to check out the author's web site now.
Tuesday, Jul 5, 2005, 12:00 PM in Fun
Taking a break from writing on Saturday to see FF
Rich is tired of me blowing off the local nerd events, so he set up something he knows I can't stay away from: an afternoon showing of Fantastic Four. I'm an FF fan from way back (every time Don signs his emails " 'nuf said " I get a little tingle of nostalgia). I'm been loving the Ultimate Fantastic Four trade paperbacks (that's what adults call comic books that have been collected into a bigger, more expensive book).
I don't have much hope that this movie will be any good, but the Brothers Sells and I can't not go. Feel free to join us! Rich has picked the 12:25pm showing on Saturday, July 9th, at the new Century 16 Cedar Hill Crossing theater that I love, just to make sure there would be no way I could say "no." Plus, I'll be deep in the throes of finalizing the Avalon book chapters that day (along with every other day this week -- what a way to burn vacation days), so any excuse to avoid the writing will be good. Come one, come all!
Tuesday, Jul 5, 2005, 11:43 AM in Tools
Register for COM Interop and VS05b2
I was helping a colleague work through a .NET COM interop issue. He'd found my article on the topic ("Hosting Windows Forms Controls in COM Control Containers"), but couldn't get it to work. He'd set the Register for COM Interop setting and adding the Guid attribute to his .NET type, but nothing was registered at build-time.
The problem was that, unlike VS03, the wizard-generated AssemblyInfo.cs has the assembly-wide ComVisible attribute set to "false" which causes regasm (the command-line version of what VS is doing to register your .NET assembly with COM at build-time) to skip the registration of all of the .NET types in your assembly, defeating the purpose of the Register for COM Interop option pretty thoroughly.
The trick, of course, is to set ComVisible to "true".
Tuesday, Jul 5, 2005, 11:04 AM in Tools
Grid: The King of Avalon Layout
The Grid is by far the most useful, powerful and general purpose layout tool in Avalon. As a demonstration of that, Amir Khella, a Microsoft PM on an Avalon-related team, plays with the Grid to build a fish eye effect, duplicating the behavior of the scaling OSX toolbar with 8 lines of C# code. He then goes on to implement the trick in 2D to scale images as you mouse around. Cool stuff.
Tuesday, Jun 28, 2005, 12:34 PM in Tools
Avalon and ASP.NET, Together At Last
"What we’ve set out to do is to make it dramatically easier for anyone to build AJAX-style web applications that deliver rich, interactive, and personalized experiences. Developers should be able to build these applications without great expertise in client scripting; they should be able to integrate their browser UI seamlessly with the rest of their applications; and they should be able to develop and debug these applications with ease.
"For this work, we’ve been working on a new project on our team, codenamed 'Atlas.' Our goal is to produce a developer preview release on top of ASP.NET 2.0 for the PDC this September, and then have a website where we can keep updating the core bits, publishing samples, and building an active community around it.
Then Scott says:
"We see Atlas as the best way to write a whole new generation of richer, more interactive, more personalized experiences in browser applications. Avalon is the next generation presentation model for Microsoft, and will let you build the richest user experiences on the Windows platform. Avalon will deliver phenomenal graphical experiences that use the latest in media integration and hardware acceleration. And Avalon will also let you provide persistent, immersive experiences that go beyond the browser.
"Of course, when you’re building Avalon applications, you can reuse the programming model investments you make today with ASP.NET and Atlas. For example, the ASP.Net Building Block Services and Client Building Block Services will also be accessible from any Avalon client. This model gives you a smooth path to the next generation of applications."
And then I say:
"Cool!"
Tuesday, Jun 28, 2005, 9:43 AM
Portland Code Camp, July 23-24, Reed College
I'm going to be spending my July 23-24 weekend at Reed College attending (and hopefully participating in) the Portland Code Camp. The manifesto speaks to me:
"Code Camps are (1) by and for the developer community; (2) always free; (3) community developed material; (4) no fluff – only code; (5) community ownership; and (6) never occur during working hours."
Code Camp is looking for speakers and attendees. Come one, come all!
Monday, Jun 27, 2005, 9:10 PM in Fun
The scientists never survive this kind of thing...
I can't believe nobody* blogged about this today! Isn't this the beginning of most sci-fi horror movies?!? By the end of the movie, all of the scientists die and only one good-looking male/female pair are left, having barely averted the Apocalypse (no one every expects the Apocalypse...). Since I identify with the scientists and barely know anyone good looking enough to survive, I'm not so sure reincarnating dogs into zombies is such a good idea...
*by "nobody" I mean "nobody" I read, of course -- I sure it was all the news amongst the "dear diary" set : )
Monday, Jun 27, 2005, 12:25 PM in Tools
New Monad Build Available
You have to stand on one foot, wait for 48 hours and wave a dead chicken over your monitor, but assuming you have the foot and the dead chicken, it don't cost nothin' to download the latest beta of Monad. Enjoy.
Thursday, Jun 23, 2005, 2:24 PM in The Spout
My Worst Job
Following Rory's example, my worst job was where I spent two weeks with a friend working for his dad where the best of our two duties was to mow the doll factory's lawn (we used to fight over who's turn it was). The worst of the two duties was to sort leather remnants from the manufacture of furniture and car upholstery by color and texture into giant boxes, from which the underpaid immigrant women would construct dolls.
Talk about mind numbing... It drove home just how important it was to have a college degree.
I quit after two weeks because the amount of money I got for labor of that kind was nowhere near the degree of pain and suffering I endured, especially when I could just hang out at home for the summer. My friend, however, didn't get that choice. Poor bastard...
Tuesday, Jun 21, 2005, 8:05 PM in Fun
On the road to the PDC via Twin Peaks
The channel 9 guy starts on the road to the PDC. Random fun (1 of 3).
Monday, Jun 20, 2005, 4:44 PM in The Spout
Theoretical Computer Science
accounting is to mathematics as engineering is to computer science.
I'm an accountant sitting in a meeting run by mathematicians. Unless I can use the math to do my double-entry book-keeping, I just don't care. A mathematician cares only for the power of ideas and never needs to see the numbers.
As an accountant, I've read papers written by mathematicians and applied their ideas sparingly, but I've never seen a quorum of them discuss things before.
Fun. : )
Monday, Jun 20, 2005, 1:39 PM in The Spout
My Weekend
Dear Diary, this is how I spent my Father's Day weekend:
- Friday, 7:30am, dropped my family off at the airport so that they could visit relatives in MN
- Saturday, 1am, sent around the check-in notice for my day job and went to bed
- Saturday, 11am, woke up in book avoidance mode
- Saturday, 3pm, started porting styles chapter to Avalon b1
- Sunday, 4:30am, heard birds chirping, thought it would be a good idea to go to bed, still not done porting styles chapter and my butt hurts from sitting, plan to bring in a butt pillow tomorrow
- Sunday, 4:31am, reflected on why I'm working so hard on a book when my readers feel the need to compare me unfavorably to certain rotund movie characters, resolve to stop writing books so I can have a life back that includes exercise (and doesn't include reviewer feedback)
- Sunday, 9:30am, woke up, called my Dad to wish him a happy father's day, called my kids to hear them do the same for me
- Sunday, 10:30am, back at it porting styles chapter (butt pillow in place)
- Sunday, 1:30pm, finished porting styles chapter, started applying reviewer feedback
- Sunday, 3:30pm, shipped out 2nd draft of styles chapter for 48-hour quick-turn review, started reading data binding chapter reviews
- Sunday, 10:30pm, went to bed with data binding chapter only 1/3rd finalized
- Monday, 5:30am, got up to make the trip to Redmond, didn't finalize both chapters as per this weekend's plan, but I'm so happy to not be applying reviewer feedback right now that I have a hard time caring
- Monday, 1:33pm, composed this silly entry and working happily at my day job where reviewer feedback is not currently a part of my life
Thursday, Jun 16, 2005, 3:17 PM in Fun
The logicial conclusion of spam
This one made me laugh out loud:
Tuesday, Jun 14, 2005, 11:50 AM in The Spout
The End of an Era
Today is Sara Williams's last day. Sara was the first Microsoft employee that I met. In fact, she was the first MS employee that a lot of people met. She's been at Microsoft for 14 years, which was long before it was cool for employees to talk to the outside world. She was a key part of MS's Developer Relations Group, whose job it was to do the outside world stuff while the rest of MS stayed inside and slid flat food under the door to each other.
Eventually, like others, Sara grew tired of Microsoft's insular-ism and specifically our developer network's unwillingness to embrace the community, so she launched GotDotNet which, inevitably, lead to her taking over MSDN altogether, which she developed Developer Centers and pushed a whole new way for Microsoft to embrace 3rd parties.
However, by far her most benevolent act was to hire me, a guy that refused to buckle to the pressure to move to Redmond and then she let me run roughshod over my colleagues putting up the Longhorn DevCenter and re-launching the Smart Client DevCenter. This set the stage for me proving myself in a remote-hostile environment and allowed me to eventually get myself onto an honest to gosh product team. It was all her.
Her departure from MSDN will leave an indelible mark on that organization and I can't say that it didn't play a factor my own decision to leave. Her departure from Microsoft is unbelievably sad. In many ways, Sara is Microsoft to me. She embodies each employee's personal responsibility to our customers. She's certainly not alone in her thinking at Microsoft, but that makes me no less sad to see her go.
Thanks very much, Sara. You made quite an impact on me. I wish you all the best and my undying adoration.
XXOO,
Chris
Monday, Jun 13, 2005, 2:25 PM in Fun
Me and the Star Wars Gang
The boys and I went to ROTS on the 2nd night and our local theater had some auspicious guests that I made stand around while my son took the picture (neither of them asked to be in a similar picture, btw : ).
I was at Episode IV in 1977 when I was 8 years old, so this has been quite the journey. You'd think I'd be bored, but I've actually been following threads on the web lately like the "3 more episodes" rumors and The Sith Explained on howstuffworks.com.