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.
Thursday, Apr 1, 2004, 7:44 PM in The Spout
Tune into .NET Rocks Live Tomorrow, 9am PST
On tomorrow's .NET Rocks Live, Rory and I will be interviewing Tony Bain, taking callers and, if tonight's sound test is any indication, talking a lot of smack. Tune in here or here from 9am to 11am PST, Friday, 4/2.
Thursday, Apr 1, 2004, 12:00 AM in The Spout
Let There Be Light In The Darkness
Thursday, April 1, 2004
I wrote this at the beginning of 2002 while channeling my energies into the Windows Forms book. I never published it, but I liked it (and I'm in writer avoidance mode as day #2 past my due date rolls by), so I thought I'd share it:
The Dark Ages, a period of five centuries beginning in 5 AD, marked a time of intellectual darkness and barbarity. A ruling feudal class kept a firm grip on their over-worked peasants in small enclaves eking out a meager living from the soil. Only lonely, isolated monks were able to record knowledge using primitive tools to painstakingly inscribing it into hand-crafted volumes, each unique and each unavailable to their fellow man. Only pilgrims and adventures, willing to endure long journeys and brave many hardships, had the chance of obtaining this secret knowledge. Finally, the Renaissance, brought on by the spread of knowledge in approachable formats using inventions like the printing press, was able to rejuvenate a weary world and bring about a period of intellectual growth and achievement that continues to this day (interrupted only briefly by the Reagan years).
The Browser Age, a period of ten years beginning in 1991, marked a time of user-interface limitations and lowest common denominators. A ruling standards body kept a firm grip on their over-worked participating members in companies large and small, eking out a meager living from IPO wind-falls. Only lonely, isolated web masters were able to record knowledge, using primitive HTML to painstakingly code it into hand-crafted pages, each unique and each unavailable to their fellow programmers. Only Perl programmers and regular expressionists, willing to parse tangled byte streams and scrape many screens, had the chance of separating the data from the presentation. Finally, .NET, brought on by the spread of the information available programmatically to rich client applications using inventions like Web Services and Windows Forms [ed: and soon, Avalon], was able to rejuvenate a weary software world and bring about a period of productivity growth and achievement that will continue until long after we retire (interrupted only briefly by the Internet Bubble burst).
Wednesday, Mar 31, 2004, 5:05 PM in .NET
Avalon Perf Tips: Properties, Resources & Triggers
Markus Mielke, a PM on the Avalon team, provides some performance tips on Avalon inheritable properties, centrally shared resources and property triggers.
Wednesday, Mar 31, 2004, 4:50 PM in .NET
*This* Is Why We Released LH to Developers Early
Marc Clifton, a concerned 3rd party, provides thoughtful criticism of XAML.
Chris Anderson, Avalon Architect, takes Marc's criticism and provides a thoughtful response.
Because of where we are in the Longhorn release cycle, i.e. a long way from a release, if the Avalon team agrees with Marc, they can make real changes.
As a result, Longhorn gets better because it's able to accept early, critical feedback. Perfect.
Wednesday, Mar 31, 2004, 4:18 PM
Ian on Service API Evolution
Ian's piece says to evolve an SOA endpoint that you're best off creating and running a new service along side the old one. He takes 2267 words to say what I said in 20, but it's still a joy to wind your way down Ian's road. : )
Tuesday, Mar 30, 2004, 4:56 PM in .NET
Avalon: From All Code to No Code And In Between
Today, Joe Marini, a Microsoft PM on a project that dare not speak it's name, posts a blog reader built entirely in XAML, i.e. no .NET code.
Last week, Chris Anderson, an Architect on the Avalon team, showed us that Avalon requires no XAML at all if you don't want to use it.
However, closer to the truth are Don and ChrisAn, Longhorn architects, on using a mixture of XAML for declarative UI tasks and code for handling events.
My own preferred model is to do just as much as I can in XAML, because I find declarative style coding more flexible, but to put into code what makes sense, e.g. most event handling. My line in the sand is this: if I would have to embed code in the XAML, I go to real code, otherwise, I use XAML.
Tuesday, Mar 30, 2004, 9:20 AM in Tools
Visual Studio 6 SP6
I used to live and die with Visual Studio Service Packs and the DevDiv Sustaining Engineering team has just released another SP for you Visual C++ 6 and Visual Basic 6 programmers. Millions of folks still use these products and it warms my heart that we're 2.5 generations past this, but still releasing SPs. I don't anticipate any more of them, though, so I recommend using this SP for your current projects and moving to Visual Studio .NET 2003 or Visual Studio 2005 on the next one, depending on the timing.
Tuesday, Mar 30, 2004, 8:42 AM
More on IE in XPSP2
Tony Schreiner has 2 more pieces on changes in IE in XPSP2 bringing the total to 3:
- Authenticode - No and never again!
- Information Bar - Stopping the modal dialog madness
- Web Site Compatibility
I especially appreciate the Information Bar, which I'd describe as a status bar at the top of the window. I hate modal dialogs, so not stopping what I'm doing to inform me of something is nice. Plus, studies show that nobody ever looks at the bottom of the screen for info, so putting the InfoBar at the top makes a lot more sense.
Also, I've got XPSP2 RC1 on one of my machines that was plagued with pop-ups and web crap of all kinds. Now, all of that is gone and I've got a lot more info about things that sites were doing that no longer works, but I didn't want them doing that stuff anyway.
Tuesday, Mar 30, 2004, 8:25 AM in The Spout
Buy My Comic Book Collection
Here.
I've had 2600 comic books bagged and boxed in my garage since I've had a garage. These are comics that I collected as a kid and had always planned on turning into Benjamins. However, when doing a massive do-it-yourself Clean Sweep on my entire house, I figured it was time. But I couldn't sell them to a local comic shop, as they can only give me a tiny fraction of their worth, so I immediately thought about eBay. And that's why the comics have been sitting in my garage for so long. The mere thought of cataloging, assessing, photoing and posting all 2600, even in reasonable groups, was way more work than I was willing to do. And so they sat.
That is, until I was driving with a pack of MSLearning folks on our way to lunch recently in Redmond and came across a Bidadoo truck. I'd never heard of it, but they explained it as a new startup dedicated to taking your stuff, particularly your collections, and doing all of the grunt work to get it sold on eBay, including bringing in experts to help them figure out exactly what's what. So I spent 5 hours putting making a list of what was in my 9 long comic boxes, hauled them up to their "showroom" in Redmond and now they're getting ready to put my entire comic collection on eBay for 33% off to top. They've got 34 of my X-Menu comics up on eBay in 6 bundles now and they'll be doing the rest directly.
So, in summary, buy my comics and check out Bidadoo (if for no other reason than their fun name -- I'm a sucker for double meanings : ).
Monday, Mar 29, 2004, 6:24 PM in .NET
Rory Hosts .NET Rock While Chris Adds Color
The tables are well and truly turned from when I interviewed Carl with Rory acting as color man to where Rory is hosting and I'm just there to fill a seat. The guest is Tony Bain, who is new to me, and the topic is SQL Server apps, which, while I'm familiar with the technology, hasn't been part of my production quality app work since embedded SQL was the rage (and I miss it!). Should be interesting at the very most. : )
Monday, Mar 29, 2004, 1:11 PM in .NET
Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML?
Marc Clifton, author of the MyXaml open source project, publishes a series of articles exploring opportunities for improvement for the Avalon architects to consider:
- Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML?--a look at "tag names are class names"
- Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? -- The joys of VisualTree
- Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? -- The case of the missing collection
- Is Microsoft Bollixing Up XAML? -- Decorating the house of cards
I only wish that he would post his thoughts of how XAML should look.
Monday, Mar 29, 2004, 8:48 AM in .NET
HTTP.SYS, IIS, Indigo, and Windows XP SP2 oh my!
Don Box expands on his explanation of HTTP.SYS, IIS and XPSP2, including providing a .NET Whidbey sample that uses HTTP.SYS along side of IIS6 running on XPSP2.
Sunday, Mar 28, 2004, 12:09 PM in The Spout
Fun Meeting with a Longhorn UX Guy Last Week
Here.
He said, "Do you think we should support RSS in Longhorn?"
I said, "Well, there's that RSS Tile..."
He said, "Yeah, but shouldn't we do more?"
I said, "Well, sure, what we should really do is blah, but we'd also need foo to make that work."
He said, "Right. What if we did quuz to enable foo?"
I said, "Wow. That'd be cool. Can you actually make that happen?"
He said, "Yep."
Whoa.
Friday, Mar 26, 2004, 10:07 AM in The Spout
Time-Shifting Radio?
I was reading Paul Vick, who agrees with Carl Franklin that the "This American Life" weekly NPR radio program rocks (I'm paraphrasing : ). In addition, I really like Garrison Keillor, "Whad'Ya Know?" and a bunch of the financial programs on AM radio. However, unlike my time-shifting TV appliance, I don't have any good way to time-shift radio (the AM stuff is rife with commercials, so really needs a fast-forward feature). Anyone got something for me? Ideally, I'd be able to dump programs to an MP3 player for convenient playback.
Friday, Mar 26, 2004, 9:03 AM in .NET
Do Not Install VS2005 on Longhorn!
While it's true that a new preview version of Visual Studio 2005 is available for MSDN Subscribers, DO NOT INSTALL THIS BUILD OF VS2005 ON LONGHORN. It won't work.