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.
Friday, May 28, 2004, 6:02 PM in .NET
A 3-Part, 3-Day Weekend XAML Quiz
<FlowPanel xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/xaml"
xmlns:def="Definition" Text.FontSize="24">
<Text>This seems clear enough.</Text>
<Text>
<Text.ImageEffect>
<ImageEffectBlur Radius="3"/>
</Text.ImageEffect>
This is considerably less clear.
</Text>
</FlowPanel>
I've rewritten it using a more compact syntax:
<Text ImageEffect="*ImageEffectBlur(Radius=3)">
This is considerably less clear.
</Text>
- For 1 free UUID, is this legal XAML? Why or why not?
- For 2 free UUIDs, what other popular XAML construct uses the exact same syntax?
- For 3 free UUIDs, what popular C# construct has a similar syntax? How is it subtly different? (Hint: I'm not showing the difference in this example.)
Friday, May 28, 2004, 5:50 PM in .NET
Got Smart Client Development Questions?
Friday, May 28, 2004, 5:46 PM in Fun
Apparently .NET Is About Developer Love
Don Box always used to say that COM Is Love, although I'm pretty sure he'd agreed that we've long since given up COM for a new trophy technology .NET which, apparently, is about developer love. One guy spent 17 years doing COBOL. I think he needs our love most of all...
Friday, May 28, 2004, 5:43 PM in The Spout
Jury Duty
Here. The one where I spend a day at jury duty but don't actually get to serve on a jury (and realize that serving on a jury was pretty darn unlikely in the first place).
Friday, May 28, 2004, 5:40 PM in Tools
On Threat Modeling
Lately, when the subject about how to actually secure a .NET app or component comes up, a magic phrase is uttered: "threat modeling." Apparently, this is the thing that tells you how folks could use your well-intentioned code to do bad things. And on a mailing list with a fairly select membership (although not too select -- I'm on it : ), the Swiderski, Snyder book Threat Modeling was recommended. And the free threat modeling tool that goes along with the book is hosted right on microsoft.com, which I take as a sign of quality. Model those threats towards a happier, healthier you!
[via Pierre Nallet]
Friday, May 28, 2004, 12:00 AM in The Spout
Jury Duty
Friday, May 28, 2004
Today was the first time that I was called to jury duty, even though I've been eligible for almost half of my life. I always dreaded being called when I was a consultant because the $10/day didn't cover a day's meals, let along the revenue I would miss as the sole breadwinner of the family. However, much like the body puts off illness when you just can't afford to take the time (stress has its uses), my dread seems to have put off my jury duty 'til I had a full-time job with enough redundancy to live w/o me for a day or so.
Even when your job pays, most folks seem to want to get out of jury duty in any way possible. George Carlin says that the best way to get out of it is to admit to the judge that you know how to tell if someone is guilty, "It's all in the distance between their eyes..." Personally, I'm a believer in America's system of justice (I've often fantasized about a life as a prosecuting attorney and as a judge), so I didn't mind serving my turn on a jury. Unfortunately, it was not to be. While I went down to the court house, my number wasn't even called to appear on one of the two juries needed today.
Doing a little math, I found out that the overall odds of me actually being on a jury were actually pretty low. Here are the stats:
47 people showed as potential jurors on 2 juries
28 were called for the 1st jury, of which 12 were needed
15 were called for the 2nd jury, of which 6 were needed
According to the State of Oregon Washington County Jury Director, 70% of people that show up for a trial see the assembled jury and decide to take the plea bargain after all
Therefore:
Folks called to jury duty that were actually put on a potential jury: 91.5%
Percent of juries, once formed, that are used: 30%
People called for a jury actually placed on that jury: 42%
My chance of actually serving on a jury today: 11.5% or less than 1 chance out of 8
The opportunity to make the US justice system real for the brothers Sells w/o them actually committing a crime: priceless
Thursday, May 27, 2004, 5:06 PM in Fun
Can The Movie Be As Good As This Trailer?
I get to read all of Eric Sink's pieces before we publish them, so I got to follow the link to the trailer for Commedian before you guys did (although the movie's been out for 2 years, so you had a bit of a lead...). While I like Jerry Seinfield and I've placed this movie next on my NetFlix queue, I can't believe that it'll live up to the trailer.
Thursday, May 27, 2004, 1:38 PM
The Friendliest Attack Fish
As Don pointed out, I missed one of the new companies spawned by DevelopMentor alum: Barracuda.NET, a training company founded by two of the friendliest and funniest instructors you will ever meet (and to whom the Visual Basic community needs no introduction): Ted Pattison and Jason Masterman. Right now these two are specializing in SharePoint training, including remote training (I want to know how they do that!), but I expect them to branch out into all kinds of interesting stuff.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 9:17 PM in The Spout
This Absolutely Boggles My Mind
Here.
Steven Edwards is an OSS guy working with the Wine guys to build a new version of Windows from scratch called ReactOS. They've got 20-30 people, they've been working on it for a few years and they're 6-8 months away from getting client-side of networking to work to the point that it supports HTTP.
Oh my god.
Why would anyone want to waste time doing this? I don't even like to build my own autocomplete listbox when it's already been done and that's only about 12 lines of .NET code! Why the hell would anyone want to build Win32 all over again, let alone Win16 (what the Wine guys do)?!? We have all these programmers with all this free time and all they can think to do is to clone OSes and applications that have already been built? Why not add something new into the world?
I just don't get it...
Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 6:21 PM in .NET
Microsoft Car .NET
If the reality is anything like the concept videos, I want it!
Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 11:22 AM in .NET
O'Reilly Takes A First Look At the WinHEC Longhorn
Wei-Meng Lee takes a first look at the WinHEC build of Longhorn for O'Reilly. It's a user-centric look at Longhorn, but I learned stuff. : )
Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 10:07 AM
The Andera That Caught A Wang
As another company started by a DevelopMentor alumnus, Wangdera is the union of two consultants so perfect together, they actually got married (I believe it was a marriage arranged by their respective clients, but they've come to love each other : ).
In addition to being an MIT grad (they turned me away), a DevelopMentor alumnus of great repute, one of the chief developers on the next-gen MSDN web infrastructure, Craig is also the official, self-appointed sellsbrothers.com grammar checker, which should be worth your business all by itself!
Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 9:15 AM
Adding Meaning To Your Work
And while we're on companies formed by ex-DevelopMentorites, check out Relevance, LLC, a software contracting and content creation firm founded by Stuart Halloway and Justin Geghtland, the former DevelopMentor CTO and Head of IT, respectively. Justin was the co-author of the VB.NET version of Windows Forms book and Stuart did some very cool Gen<X> work, so I'm big fans of both of them. Relevance has been around for a while and are already doing all kinds of interesting projects, but if you can get them for your interesting project, you won't be sorry.
Wednesday, May 26, 2004, 9:09 AM
Bringing More Than The Normal Pair Of Eyeballs
For of my most respected colleagues, Keith Brown, Fritz Onion, Aaron Skonnard and Mike Woodring, have split off from DevelopMentor to form PluralSight, a training and content creation company. Between the four of them, they've authored more than 10 books and 175 technical articles and have more than 50 years of collective experience in all many of technical pursuits in the Windows development community. Good luck, guys!
Tuesday, May 25, 2004, 9:21 PM in .NET
Wesner on XAML as Documents (Again)
As Wesner notes, the Longhorn SDK lists 3 distinct Avalon applications types: Windows/Forms apps, multi-page apps and documents. The beauty of Avalon is that it brings so many together, apps/documents, multi-window apps/multi-page apps, text/images/video/audio, 2D/3D, etc. And to answer Wesner, Microsoft will provide editing tools for Avalon beyond Notepad (someday...).