Dare I ...

I have been reviewing some of the enhancements and the idea of a Compatibility View concept just makes me cringe. This concept basically lets you view the current site as if your browser were IE 7. Apparently the IE 8 team made a choice that would effectively break some sites, Joel Spolsky goes into some great details about the issue (somewhat verbose but very important for web developers).

I do like the the InPrivate browsing, the idea of not having to necessarily delete my cookies and offline content after purchasing and browsing the web is appealing. Key loggers aside this does make it much safer for people who use public PCs in public locations.

With that said, I am not sure if I really have a choice about downloading this, it will be my professional problem soon enough.

I love the HTC Touch, an easy to use cost appropriate smart phone that makes pretty good use of Windows Mobile 6. Unfortunately there are two really big problems with my particular version of HTC Touch. First there is no WM 6.1 upgrade for the Alltel version of the Touch. So my browsing experience, by all accounts, is not what it should be.

One of the things that really turned me on the Touch was its integration with the Windows Live Service cloud. My contacts and emails are made readily available on my phone, but there is simply no calendar synchronization with Windows Live Services, this is not even available with the WM 6.1 upgrade. I think it is misguided attempt to get me to purchase more Office software
(Outlook), but that is not going to happen.

NuevaSync is a a third party applications that I found that reports to provide calendar synchronization with Google Calendar, I would prefer to stick with the Windows Live services but I will do what is easy and appropriate.

I am really starting to grok the whole Silverlight experience. My desire to get involved in this was inspired by my initial push to develop a killer app for Windows Mobile 6, however, I am not sure if I have the time and patience ... we shall see.

Anyway, I wanted to start this whole journey off by getting familiar with Silverlight markup, so that encouraged me to start looking at tools that encourage you to manipulate the tags directly. I am not quite hardcore enough to use notepad but I did not want the dumb down experience provided by Visual Studio (drag and drop). So I came across Kaxaml which provides intellisense and a quick view pane and some choice samples. This allowed me to feel a little closer to the underbelly of the Silverlight markup.

So you are presented with the following blank slate to begin with which helps you define the overall parameters of the page.

<Page
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
  <Grid>  
  
  </Grid>
</Page>

You can define some basic shapes these include the ellipse, rectangle, and a Line. As I show in the following example each object can have a variety of properties which I could not possibly list here. The following examples are represented in the images below.

<Ellipse
    x:Name="e6" <!-- object name -->
    Width="150"
    Height="150"
    Opacity="0.8"
    Stroke="#80FFFF00"
    StrokeThickness="15">
    <Ellipse.Fill>
        <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="1,1">
            <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="Gold"/>
            <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="DarkOrange"/>
        </LinearGradientBrush>
    </Ellipse.Fill>
</Ellipse>

<Image
    x:Name="i1" <!-- object name -->
    Width="300"
    Height="300"
    Source=".\My Pictures\BancroftCeiling.gif"
    Visibility="Visible">
    <Image.RenderTransform>
        <RotateTransform>
        </RotateTransform>
    </Image.RenderTransform>
</Image>

The most compelling part of Silverlight came when I looked into the animation (remember I have not touched any C# code yet), you can define animation purely within the markup. Animation is defined based on Timelines i.e. I can define what happens from point zero in a timeline, to the end of that timeline.

So in the following example I have a time line that goes on forever and I have defined within that timeline an animation to be performed between 0 to 8 seconds based on one of the objects that I have already created. Effectively the 'Left' property of the image is moved between 0 and 600 on the canvas. It is  very simple to setup and you you can have quite graceful effects by animating several properties over various timelines. In my full example I chose to animate things like Opacity, Angle, Width and Height on a couple of objects.

<Storyboard BeginTime="0" Duration="Forever">
    <DoubleAnimation
        AutoReverse="true" 
        BeginTime="0:0:0" <!-- time to start animation -->
        Duration="0:0:8" <!-- time to end animation -->
        From="0"
        RepeatBehavior="Forever" 
        Storyboard.TargetName="i1" <!-- The name of the object as defined above -->
        Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Canvas.Left)" <!-- TARGET PROPERTY -->
        To="600"/> <!-- value applied to the target property -->
</Storyboard>

Here a couple of snapshots of what happens in my window. If you download the code ensure to replace the image file with a valid gif you have on your PC. During one of my tests I animated as many as 10 objects and my CPU did not seem to mind much, let me know if you see any performance issues.

Hopefully for the next couple of projects I can look at Visual Studio and take advantage of the event driven model that we all love. I am thinking along the lines of user interaction or maybe even collisions between objects.

The Olympics have always been a huge deal for me, it is a really exciting time when the greatest athletes in the world compete against each other and even history itself. I have noticed that since moving to the states that the Olympics seem to play second fiddle to the annual domination of North American Major League sports.

The quality and diversity of the Olympic coverage is critically important, and of course, the web continues to provide us with ever improving alternative. I heard some months back that Silverlight would be the flagship technology for video display (move over Flash).

You can check out some live videos now and probably observe some of the athletes training. I was a little concerned with the performance, I was watching a video with little or no updates and my CPU was starting to strain (50-70% for the IE window alone). They appear to be using version 2.0.30523.8 which is some kind of beta for Silverlight.

Now they are boasting that you can watch 4 video streams simultaneously. This will be pretty slick if it works. I can chose to watch the Basketball, Sprints and Soccer without having to sacrifice all my time.

With regards to the Olympics, the opening ceremony was the grandest and most impressive artistic display that I have ever witnessed. It was truly spectacular!!!

I have recently had issues with my AC Unit that forced me to work from home (WFH) for the duration the repairs. We have a fairly flexible policy for working from home, however, I try to limit the amount of time that I actually work from home because I am addicted to life with two monitors.

I use a T43 that automatically becomes my secondary monitor, and I use the Samsung 204b for my primary viewing pleasure (I actually like this monitor so much I purchased one for my wife). I usually position Visual Studio on my primary monitor and reserve the various communications (Live Messenger, Sametime, Outlook etc) for the secondary monitor. Throw in UltraMon to handle monitor management and you are in for a highly productive time.

Unfortunately the experience of working from home requires me to alter my work flow which is frustrating for at least the first hour. So I am advocating that everyone who wants serious productivity should petition their manager to support the 2 monitor life style at home and in the office ... good luck with that ;)

Excessive ... maybe. Productive ... absolutely!!

My Alltel contract finally allowed me to start looking at alternative phones and I settled on the HTC Touch. So far it is a very good phone, I now potentially have access to Email, IM and Web browsing whenever I chose. The touch screen interface is really easy to configure and use, and I have had no real issue writing brief texts to people. In fact I am already faster using the 'XT9' (Touch Keypad) than I was using my previous phone of 2 years. While I cannot imagine wanting to write a full email, for IM and text this phone is more than adequate.

My wife and I have successfully ported our contacts to our new phones, I am aware there are several services that can do this, but I opted to simply import everything into the Live service cloud (using Windows Live Mail) and then logging into Live Messenger brings the contacts to the phone. I am not sure I will need to complete any Active Sync at all as I have a data plan that makes pulling down updates to contacts and calendars a breeze.

My main complaint is an echo of the oft repeated issue with Windows Mobile, once you get into core Windows Mobile setup it is not really geared to a Touch screen with the fingers, and you are subsequently forced to get out the stylus. Thankfully that is not something I have to worry all the time.

Overall I feel I have been introduced to a new world of freedom from the desktop\laptop. I have always opted to bring my laptop with me for overnight trips now I feel much more comfortable just taking my phone! My next step is to find and maybe even write a cool application for the WM6. I am really interested in knowing what is going on in the Apple universe.