In the new building...

Amazon Cleverness

2009-01-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

Amazon does a cute trick to give the user a visual-cue that their logo in the upper left links to the homepage for amazon.com.

As you mouse over they decorate the logo with the word "homepage" which tells the user---hey click here for the homepage.

As any web savvy user knows sites typically do link their logo to their homepage--but this is a nice touch for those less experienced users.

FCKeditor running on the desktop

2007-04-10T16:23:00.000-07:00

I've always loved FCKeditor and I used it ever since the pre 1.0 days. We had a requirement at work where we needed to allow users to edit HTML and our solution was for them to type the markup by hand.

So I had a crazy idea to try to use FCKeditor on the desktop. The general idea was to host the FCKeditor html files inside the WebBrowser control. So one night I hacked together a

prototype and it worked! Eventually another developer at work took my hack and built a working component using it as a reference. It worked well for him and I was surprised it turned out so nice.

A while back I saw a post on Channel9 where someone was asking about using FCKeditor in a desktop scenario and they got some replies like: "you can't do that...FCKeditor is written in html and javascript, it's for the web."

I posted about my experience with it and I'll get emails asking how to do it; so I decided to do a quick demo. Eventually I think I'd like to see an open source version that is robust and exposes much more functionality. My demo only allows for saving and retrieving html documents.

The demo application running WinFckEditor. The magic is in the ability to call JavaScript methods from C# using InvokeScript like this:

I've posted a sample project: WinFckEditor.zip

WPF CornerRadius

2006-12-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

In WPF there is the Border type which simply puts a border around any UIElement. I find myself using this alot to create cool rounded corners. The blue rounded rectangle to the right is what we'd like to see...

Well it doesn't work so well if the thing inside your Border element doesn't have rounded corners, it's edges simply bleed over the rounded corner.

And this is what you get (I lowered the opacity so you could see how it bleeds over):

<Border CornerRadius="15" Height="50" Width="50" BorderThickness="1"
BorderBrush="Black">
<Rectangle Fill="Blue" Height="50" Width="50"/>
</Border>

Okay you've seen the "ClipToBounds" property which MSDN says: "Gets or sets a value indicating whether to clip the content of this element (or content coming from the child elements of this element) to fit into the size of the containing element."

Sounds like that will work great!

<Border CornerRadius="15" Height="50" Width="50" BorderThickness="1"
BorderBrush="Black">
<Rectangle Fill="Blue" Height="50" Width="50" ClipToBounds="True"/>
</Border>

Unfortunately it does nothing :) I am not sure why ClipToBounds even exists because if I restrict the Border element to 25,25 the rectangle cannot be larger than 25,25...at least from what xaml I've been able to crank out.

So the trick to get this to work is not to use an element inside rather a brush on the background, if you have a visual you could create a VisualBrush. Pretty simple:

<Border CornerRadius="15" Height="50" Width="50" BorderThickness="1"
BorderBrush="Black" Background="Blue" >
</Border>

The other solution isn't as nice but setting the clip property on the containing element works as well.

The New Desktop Wars... (part 2)

2006-08-18T18:30:00.000-07:00

I blogged earlier about Novell and the new desktop wars. I've been playing with Mac OS X and love it. Leopard is coming out and it looks like it's taking user interface concepts further with Time Machine, which makes backup intuitive to a user. If I need an old version of a file I just enter the time machine and locate it by flipping through snapshots of my application (iPhoto) or my folder. Wow...so simple but it works.

Miguel blogged about people that think wobbly windows are just eye candy...they would be wrong. Sure it looks great but it's more about "feeling great." It's about user experience. Somehow I just feel better when my windows have some physical properties to them, it makes the computing experience feel more real-life.

I've used Ubuntu and SLED with XGL enabled and I do miss my wobbly windows and virtual desktops that spins on a cube. Hopefully Apple starts building in things like this into their OS.

And well Windows XP just isn't enjoyable at all but it's so old....I'm sure Vista will be better.

Honestly of the three next gen desktops I think an XGL enabled Linux distro is in front in this area.

Displaying a Log4Net log file on an ASP.NET website

2006-08-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote a simple web page to display the log file in a textarea from a data synchronization application that logged all it's juicy details to a Rolling log file.

I fired up the page to see my creation and it worked... until the sync service was fired up and started writing to the log file. After that the blasted page just threw a IO exception at me--another process has an exclusive lock on the file and I can't READ it! Turns out it's the default locking mode for FileAppenders but you can configure whatever you are comfortable with.

<appender name=\"RollingFile\" type=\"log4net.Appender.RollingFileAppender\">
<layout type=\"log4net.Layout.PatternLayout\">
<conversionPattern value=\"%d [%t] %-5p %c{1} - %m%n\" />
</layout>
<file value=\"Application.log\" />
<appendToFile value=\"true\" />
<maximumFileSize value=\"500KB\" />
<maxSizeRollBackups value=\"5\" />
<lockingModel type=\"log4net.Appender.FileAppender+MinimalLock\" />
</appender>

The element configures the Appender to use a MinimalLock which only will acquire a lock while it's writing. It appears that it also uses FileShare.Read which will not lock others from just reading it.

It's amazing that this information was so hard to come by, or maybe I was just having a bad google day. At anyrate I thought I'd be a good netcitizen and blog about it so hopeful some poor sap can find this and speed up the troubleshooting--even if that poor sap is me :P

Open Source Graphing Library!

2006-08-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

Yea! I learned from Joe Audette on the Mono list about Zed Graph.

I have been looking for a long time for a good C# graphing library that was open source so it could be used on leaner budget projects and just because I don't believe much in paying for SDK and APIs--I have had too many problems with proprietary SDKs and developer APIs that just don't work and their vendors don't support them (e.g. fix or listen to customers) once they have your money. For some reason community based efforts are much better at this. And if they don't listen you can fix it yourself! Sorry, I'll get off my soap box now.

http://www.zedgraph.org

ZedGraph can be used in Web / and Client applications. This looks promising.

Making the pitch

2006-06-15T06:55:00.000-07:00

Phil blogged on pitching your ideas to Venture Capitalists here:

Phil801 - Geek Blog » More on Pitching

Brillant way to attract good talent

2006-06-06T21:42:00.000-07:00

Finding really good developers is tough... this is one interesting way to catch a driven smart person:

http://www.bindows.net/jobs/

Your application is to build an small application! Wow... now that would really show what you can do. Most interviews / application processes include: talking, talking, and well more talking. Sometimes you'll be asked to write some code on the board. A lot of the time it's some obscure syntax question that doesn't really prove a whole lot other than you REALLY know C++ or Java or C#.

The other thing this type of job application does is get people that REALLY want to work there to apply. It probably won't work for every company, but for companies like Bindows that have a name for themselves, they can get away with this. I would be interested if anyone has done this before to blog about it or a hiring manager's experience with this kind of application process.

Web 2.0 Office -- getting there

2006-06-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

Reading more about Web Office Applications and how they are starting to become more viable. There are definately some cool applications that exist right now.

My favorite of the bunch right now has to be Zimbra...

their idea of pluggable "Zimlets" is very powerful. Arbitray bits of data become hot (clickable) and integrated with 3rd party services like VoIP, maps, shipping and shopping services... Some examples are Skype click-2-call support by clicking on phone numbers that become hot inside the AJAX client, Yahoo! Maps simply appear when you mouse over an address.

The reason I think Zimbra has something here is they are integrating with services that are best on the web (think google maps, online shopping, shipping tracking, wikipedia, etc...) these are all services that don't make much sense on the desktop because they require too much data / collaboration etc...

Then I found this quote on Ajaxian....

"What I really want from Ajax apps is for them to do stuff that it’s too hard to do with binary apps. I want them to be sensibly integrated with online resources; I want them to support realtime collaboration. I want them to do different stuff from Word/Excel/Powerpoint, not just do the same thing with a different engine under the hood.

We need to find our way with Ajax applications. Let’s not just port over to the web way, with a poorer version due to the limitations. Rather we need to embrace the differences and do as Paul says. Do things that suit the web better."

This got me to thinking about presentation software. It really works okay on the desktop but usually you want to show your presentations to people all over the place. So now we have a bunch of services that allow us to share our desktop and applications like GotoMeeting etc... This seems like a perfect Web 2.0 application (presentation for the web) but not much has been done with presentation software yet. I found a couple: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ and Gliffy.com which isn't really Powerpoint like but more like Visio. There has to be more presentation software that is web based. I'd really like to know what else is available.

Creating a Web 2.0 company

2006-05-21T11:45:00.000-07:00

10 ideas for creating a Web 2.0 company:

http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2005/08/10_steps_to_a_h.html

Really useful people...

2006-05-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

It's interesting... I've had chats about this exact topic with other people as I've started to work in Agile environments. The need for specialists is decreasing... the smaller the team the more efficient the project. An interesting article about Agile SDLC and how it changes people's roles: http://www.ddj.com/dept/database/187203749?pgno=1

Novell and the new desktop wars

2006-03-27T22:42:00.000-08:00

It's interesting... Novell is rising from the ashes. They are showing some great leadership in the Linux world and creating one compelling desktop.

Miguel blogged about the new desktop release (SLED 10, I am glad they are getting rid of Novell Desktop Linux moniker, Suse is a much cooler)

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Mar-21.html

Take a look at the first presentation by Nat (Official Presentation), it's freaking cool. It's nice to see all the pieces they've worked so hard on the past couple to three years at Ximian and Novell come together.

Mono has REALLY started to pay dividends and they are building cool applications quickly for linux. (F-spot, Beagle, Banshee, etc...) Diva (video editing) has just started to release and it's looking good.

Xgl is the final part of the solution giving Linux a modern desktop. I am blown away by the coolness this brings to the linux desktop and makes me want to use Linux again. I am sick of waiting for Vista. :)

KISS

2006-03-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

I read a very interesting comment about complexity in software design... it was in response to the latest Vista slip, now shipping in 2007 (ugh...)

"Complexity in the design for complexity sake is the kiss of death. Complexity without a clear, or even muddy, picture of the problem you are actually trying to solve for the actual customer is the kiss of death. Not having customers involved at every step of the design and development process is just arrogance. Believing you know better than the customer is just stupid."

I can't agree with this more. Software should be designed to solve a customer's problem and nothing more... if you don't have a real use case for it then you don't need it. I've made the designing for flexibility mistake myself many times--and still do, it's a real talent to learn what to include and what not to include. I guess why TDD is so popular / successful, you write code in simple small steps to get working code ASAP.

Writely is part of the google family...

2006-03-09T19:54:00.000-08:00

Okay... back on this Web 2.0 companies don't run on Microsoft's platform thing. Well it ain't so.

I was interested when I heard that Writely got purchased by google... great for them. Good for google.

http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub/interview/writely/

Writely is runing ASP.NET / C#. I find this very interesting because google is a linux shop. I wonder what they are going to do with this company, rewrite it all? Run it on mono?

I appears something is going to happen: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/writely-so.html

And I quote "...until we've moved Writely to Google's software architecture." Sounds like a rewrite to me. But heck who would blame them if google has like 25,000 linux machines and no windows licenses :)

Web 2.0 Startups

2006-02-25T08:52:00.000-08:00

If you were going to startup a new web company providing software services in a browser what would that company look like? What is it's culture, what does it's first year look like (and it's second etc...)? What type of technology do you build with?

Meebo is an interesting company, they've become very popular and started a company in a way that I think is very smart... low overhead and created a special relationship with their user community. How much money did they get and how?

I was interested in what technology / platforms these new applications are being built on and I did a netcraft on all the top Web 2.0 companies and they ALL use Linux (saw one BSD) and almost all using Apache.

I really wondered about why they are all using Linux... Then I found this blog entry from a Microsoft guy (Robert Scoble)... cool someone did the research already! A very good read...
Why Web 2.0 companies aren't using Microsoft's platform.

Avalon and XAML

2005-11-16T04:52:00.000-08:00

It's about time... Avalon and XAML are pretty much where UI should be. I am learning more about XAML and not sure it's the absolute simplest markup for designing GUIs in but it works and is 1000% better than writing imperative language such as C# / Java etc...

I really wonder if the Sun guys are going to build something similar...they'd probably use something like SVG but the concepts would be the same. Flash would work well as a rendering engine but probably better off building on OpenGL.

Microsoft needs to understand Open Source

2005-06-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

I just got done reading a very interesting thread over on TheServerSide.Net about James Newkirk releasing a conversion tool from NUnit units tests to Team System.

This got me to thinking and stewing about how I love C# and entire .NET platform and I hate the fact that it isn't as open as it should be. I know about Mono and it's the saving grace for .NET but the tools and developer infrastructure isn't quite here yet.

Recently when talking to partners about interoperability, Steve Balmer was quoted lately as saying "we can't support open source--but we can support interoperability." Microsoft will either eat crow here or die. There is just NO reason why all developer tools and frameworks shouldn't be Open Source. The old way of developing software where you wait for the "elite developers" give us the tools and frameworks we need are gone. It's just too powerful to have a living breathing community behind a framework or tool.

Do you know what the most exciting technologies are in .NET right now for our team at work? No it's not VS.NET 2005 it's not running CLR code inside SQL Server or HTTP Endpoints (which seem useless to me unless I really want BAD design and put my business logic in the database).

No, what we are most excited about using are things like NHibernate, Spring.NET and dotLucene. These are all great Open Source driven projects. These are just some of the frameworks we are excited about.

On the developer platform side we've been using NUnit / MbUnit, CruiseControl.NET and NAnt to provide our own "Team System." The thing is Microsoft isn't really innovating anything here... and there already exists a nice base from which they could have built on or supported via their excellent VS.NET IDE.

Sometimes I really wonder if Microsoft doesn't get it--or they just pretend to not get it because they cannot see how they'll replace the income that comes from selling developer tools instead of open sourcing and providing a truly powerful platform that anyone can contribute / fix / extend.

I understand why open sourcing Office or Windows may not be in Microsoft's best interest but open sourcing developer tools and frameworks only makes your MORE competitive and invite more applications to be written for your platform.

Major issues would be solved quickly by open source:

- Bugs in the framework libraries and half implemented libraries. The classic example is Windows Forms, everyone goes out and buys third party controls to make really nice looking Windows Forms applications. Why should I have to buy third party controls to get decent GUI widgets? Ever tried a Windows Forms Toolbar, DataGrid, or TreeView? Half implemented libraries? Take a look at System.Collections and compare it to Java's collections or better yet Jakarta Commons Collections.

- Adoption rate, (.Net has had troubles with a lot of VB6 and C++ developers) Open Source is just a magnet for developers cause they know that the project will be there as long as people are interested in the product. Open Source projects don't get canned or orphaned because they aren't making money. I am more willing to use an open source product than a commercial product because I know that it'll be around!

- Lack of some important key libraries out of the box or at least available as extensions. Java has a TON of libraries that simply missing on .NET (e.g. application servers e.g. JBoss, lightweight containers (ala Spring), PDF parsing and creation (iText), Imaging, BarCoding, etc... in .NET the only way to get them is to pay some closed source vendor big bucks. Open source developers write software they need. Commercial companies write software they think their customers will buy. Open source comes closer to the target of what actually is useful and pragmatic for real developers to use because it provides automatic dogfooding in real world situations. You can tell that Microsoft isn't building many applications with .NET right now. They are building frameworks for their customers, but not real applications. (Somebody prove me wrong!)

The nice thing is people are creating this open source projects without Microsoft's support but it would sure be nice with more corporate support like Sun does for Java.

If Microsoft could sit down with developers like myself and figure out what our frustrations are rather than trying to get us to write software that is tied to the Office or SQL Server platform they might just beat Linux / OS X. If they don't, they'll see developers leaving in droves to find friendlier pastures and as developers leave so will the need to run Windows.

ORM vs. DataSet

2005-06-30T12:56:00.000-07:00

I have been doing a lot of ORM research and prototyping lately. I am convinced of the importance of a real domain model, one that is designed with OO concepts in mind.

Found a really nice gem here:

http://srsmoot.blogspot.com/2005/06/datasets-vs-or-mappers-aka-apples-vs.html

Sam explains it better than I've heard anywhere...

Picasa UI Magic

2005-06-01T22:37:00.000-07:00

Picasa's UI is just too interesting. In a world of applications where they all work the same and rarely improve on anything Picasa has done some awesome things with their GUI.

Here is an awesome blog on it:

http://www.secretrobot.com/blog/archives/2004/11/the_beautiful_p_1.html

This leads me to think that the same UI should be able to be created by using SVG or Flash instead of just loading up static images.

I'm very interested in projects like Neoswiff and Xamlon. Anyone that has experience with this kind of stuff let me know I'd like to speak with you.

Java Swing vs. C#

2005-05-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

Currently I am developing on the .NET platform using C#. We've had a TON of problems with Windows forms and how immature and hacked together the API is. Bascially it's an object wrapper around the win32 api and not even all the widgets are the best win32 api widgets. Example the toolbar provided in Windows Forms is weak. It supports 8-bit color images so when you put a 24-bit color icon / bmp you get a downleveled image that looks like crud.

At any rate we've got a lot of Java programmers on staff and a lot of the tools we are looking at are direct ports of successful Java projects. We use NAnt, Spring.NET, etc... I've done enough Java to know a lot of it's strong points but my desktop / rich-client experience w/Java is limited. Most of what I've done was pretty server side / distributed system.

So there is a lot of talk about Swing / Java Web Start etc... I'm warming up to the idea. I'm a little concerned with these types of comments from someone like Slava.

http://www.jroller.com/page/slava/20050206

and then the comments from here:

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/joshy/archive/2005/03/why_dont_you_sh.html

Which leads me to the question -- are there any Java developers that have switched to C# or vice versa. And if so why was the switch made and what problems has it solved. I am talking about rich-client applications so keep that in mind.

Longhorn 5048

2005-04-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

I just installed Longhorn 5048 build from WinHec 2005. Holy crap... it's crap! I never did get the PDC 2003 builds to check it out, but the screen shots looked awesome and it had a lot of new features (sidebar, glass effects, etc....) but 5048 was WINDOWS XP but uglier.

Right now I am running Windows XP with the Tablet pc theme and it's pretty smooth looking. It makes Longhorn 5048 look like 3 years ago.

I ran into a couple of weird things. I added a user and then switched the logon method to show the welcome screen. I logged off and got a the Windows XP welcome screen. Huh? They also used a Windows 3.1 hour-glass icon during the install process... wow!

I cannot believe how unpolished this build is. Why show this crap off at Win HEC, maybe it's more stable just for hardware engineers to produce the drivers and not meant to dazzle but wow it sucked. It lasted about 15 minutes on my machine and then I removed it.

Microsoft is seriously going to loose the desktop if they don't get their stuff together. BTW I am a developer and have been doing C# for the last 3 years so you can't call me a MS hater. I really liked Windows XP when it came out and loved C# / .NET and still do mostly except I've been doing Windows Forms development lately and found how crappy that part of the .NET Framework is.

DANGIT! You're pretty much ruining my life!

2005-04-26T21:30:00.000-07:00

kyle gray (http://corbin.blogspot.com) stole my preferred blog address. Oh well I've lived with a goofy last name my entire life I guess a goofy blog address isn't too bad! Humm... I wonder if he'd give it back, he doesn't seem to be harnessing the power of his blog right now.

I am going to try out this blogging idea because everyone else is having such a killer time doing it. I will probably post mostly geeky stuff here but who knows I may get in a word or two about something else...