Tuesday, July 22, 2008
copy and paste files when remote desktop'ing
- click ‘Options >>’ button after you run Remote Desktop
- go to the ‘Local Resources’ tab and click ‘More…’ button
- check one of your drives
two things will happen: you’ll see the drive you picked listed as a drive on the remote computer’s list of drives, and you’ll be able to copy files to the clipboard on the remote computer and paste them locally--
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
wpf/silverlight links
scott guthrie’s silverlight 2 intros are here
some silverlight references/articles i’ve found very helpful:
Silverlight User Interface Controls - Silverlight
Working with Animations Programmatically (Silverlight 2)
Excellent Data Binding Overview
End to End DataCentric App <-- VERY GOOD OVERVIEW OF LOTS OF STUFF
asp.net mvc overview:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx
wpf and mvc:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/MVCtoUnitTestinWPF.aspx
some good blogs:
http://geekswithblogs.net/wynapsetechnicalmusings/Rss.aspx <---- DON’T MISS THIS ONE! it’s a compilation of others’ relevant blog posts
http://blogs.msdn.com/delay/rss.xml
http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/rss.xml
http://blogs.msdn.com/corrinab/rss.xml
http://blogs.msdn.com/silverlight_sdk/rss.xml
http://www.drwpf.com/blog/Home/tabid/36/rssid/1/Default.aspx
regarding reflector, app is here: http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/. msft also released a bunch of their source code recently, you can find the silverlight-related code here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ea93dd89-3af2-4acb-9cf4-bfe01b3f02d4&DisplayLang=en
Friday, March 7, 2008
Mix08 days 2 and 3
http://msstudios.vo.llnwd.net/o21/mix08/08_WMVs/UX09.wmv
the ASP.NET MVC talk was also very interesting. MVC will live side-by-side with WebForms, and it gives a really clean (java) way to build test-driven web sites. it definitely has a future with us (it's in somewhat early beta now). you can watch or see slidedecks of it and others here:
-----
What's New in .NET 3.5, Rob Reylea, MSFT
- hardware-accelerated bitmap effects
- performance improvements
o cold-startup speed improvements of 15-40%
- easier install process
AOL Silverlight Mail Client Lessons Learner, AOL
- poorly attended, bad speakers, AOL irrelevant to this crowd even with ~50 million users
Silverlight 2.0, Karen Corby, MSFT
- design-ability improvements from 1.0
o user controls (encapsulation, re-use)
- derive from UserControl
o events at element level, as opposed to application level
o tabbing works automatically (like it does in html)
- custom controls - derive from Control
o use generic.xaml to specify style and template
- Parts Model for template support (override visual tree) - easy way for template designer t o say "these are the parts i'm expecting"
o ElementParts
§ Named elements in template
o StatesParts
§ Storyboard that controls the parts
o specify [TemplatePart()] attributes for each parts element
- Blend 2.5 has built-in support to build UserControls from selected set of controls
Steve Ballmer Keynote
- he's crazy and he loves developers
- silverlight is part of msft's long-term vision of web/desktop fusion
o 1.5 million silverlight downloads (did he say per day? possible?)
- in response to msft's diversity of businesses: you either broaden or you become irrelevant
- heathfall -> msft investment in healthcare
Social Networks, panel with Garret Camp (msft live) Marc Canter, Allen Hurff (MySpace), David Morin (business sn), someone from Facebook
- openId - relies on URL, not consumer friendly
o major players (facebook, msft live) are watching, but not adopting
- facebook charges $.50/app install
- privacy is the biggest issue, bigger than security and pedophiles
- lack of data portability is major issue, users need to preserve anonymity at times and share data across the web at other times
- 4/10,000 click through an ad
ASP.NET MVC, Scott Hanselman, MSFT
- implemented using HttpHandlers and HttpModules
- release expected later this year/early next
- side-by-side with WebForms
o more control over <html> output
o makes possible unit testing and test-driven development
o SEO and REST friendly url structures
o ideal separation of tiers
- request engine
o "route" is determined (routes specified in Application_Start) from specified URL (by default "/Controller/Action")
§ routing engine handles friendly url parsing and is decoupled from MVC
o controller method is invoked
o controller optionally talks to model
o controller passes off something to view
o view knows what its getting and how to render it
§ view can spit out html (WebForm, xslt, etc.), rss, json, etc.
§ view engine can be replaced (e.g. NHaml)
- to test controller, use empty view engine that implement IViewEngine
The Office Ribbon, Jensen Harris, MSFT (http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh)
- easily the best presentation of the conference
- lots of prototyping; can we buy time in the UI lab?
- small buttons close to cursor or large buttons far away
- side vs. top
o people felt more comfortable on top in testing
o fear that sidebar would devolve into scrolling list
- evaluate
o longitudinal visibility - usage over time (i.e. 2 months, not 2 hours)
o feature affinity - how people use things together
o command loops - eliminate tab switches
o get fresh eyes!
o eye tracking - heat map, gaze tracking
- ask users where they think items should go
o some features like header/footer had 50/50% split
- iterate!
o account for iteration in dev schedule
o 5 major revisions, 4 later in the cycle
- when is a ribbon appropriate?
o real estate tradeoff, so make sure to take other things out
o lots of commands
o galleries, visual representations of features
Next Gen User Interfaces with WPF, Electric Rain
- workflow, design, build
o workflow = goals, foundation
o research, prototype, functional not pretty
- avoid monolithic specs in favor of rapid prototyping
o developers ask for product design specification when needed
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Mix08 day 1 notes
Key Note Addresses
- ray ozzie spends 30 minutes describing something we've all heard before and unfortunately have to hear more about once again, aka "cloud computing"
- msft still without a legitimate strategy to transform desktop monopoly to a web one
o connected pcs/devices
o web presence
o business apps
o virtualized servers/horizontal apps is key
- scott guthrie recounts his blog postings
- dean hachamovitch (ie8 general manager) reads too much from his script
o ie8 key focus on standard compliance and interopability (as opposed to ie7's focus on security)
§ w3c spec itself is vague and open to interpretation with regard to standards
§ css 2.1 support
§ poked fun at ie7's differences from firefox and safari
o looks more or less like ie7
o ie7 "compatability mode" controlled by developers
o html5
§ back button can work as expected with ajax
§ smooth experience when connectivity is lost
o integrated developer tools similar to firebug or webdevelopmenthelper (script debugging, css inspection)
o "activities" allow in-place right-click actions on selected text (i.e. select address, right-click, view map); very cool
o subscribe to "webslices" (slices of web pages); richer content/simpler implementation than rss
o ie8 beta 1 released
- scott guthrie returns to discuss silverlight 2.0 beta 1 release
- media and advertising
o adaptive streaming
o windows media services 2008 – scalable media hosting and delivery
o bandwidth savings: iis 7 bitrate throttling allows you to specify distinct bitrates for different downloads, so you deliver initial burst, then slower follow up
o jon harris discussed rich advertising: tracking with atlas admanager, iis7 playlists to force ads before video, ad overlays with xaml
o ari paparo from doubleclick discussed doubleclick/silverlight integration vs template
o perkins miller from nbc described silverlight for 2008 Olympics (2200 live hours plus broadcast coverage)
- wpf features
o almost full wpf control library
o sockets support
o protected isolated storage
- controls shipped with OPEN source and test code; you can modify and resell
- roy ben-yoseph and eric hoffman from aol described aol’s next mail client in silverlight 2.0
Lou Carbone, UX Guru – Experience Management
- effect vs. function: manage how users feel as opposed to what you are doing for them (fedex, airlines, rotorooter, etc.)
- think about the details! users remember how they felt more than they remember what they did
Nathan Buggia, MSFT, Live Search – SEO
- 30% of all traffic to web sites is from search engines
- html tips
o <title> and <h1> tags are the 2 most heavily weighted; <h1> is actually SUPER important on live.com since it’s used to parse organization of content
o semantic html is impt (i.e. <h1>title</h1> more easily read by robots <span class=’header’>title</span>);
o make text in href tags meaningful (i.e. not ‘click here’)
o <meta>: keywords is unused, description is used for snippet
o fqdn is important (i.e. x.y.com is higher than y.com/x) since rank is aggregated at fqdn, not at folder level (although google does consider folders)
o use RIA for spice within html pages, or at the very least have distinct urls for desired search rankings
- google is only search engine of the big 3 (google/yahoo/live) that will follow javascript redirects; need to use 301 redirect if you care
- yahoo site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) : see inbound links to your page
- prefer hyphen to underscores, since search engines are likely to interpret “_” as part of word, not as word delineators
- casing matters (since 50% of since run apache). links and links distributed to other sites need to always use the same case.
- link to the root, not to a specific page (i.e. http://www.blogger.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://y.com/items not http://y.com/items/default.aspx).
- http codes
o 304 – conditional get (useful for letting engines know your page hasn’t changed to save you bandwidth)
o 503 – down for maintenance
o 302 – temporary redirect (BAD! since “temporary” is ambiguous; always use 301)
- links and tools
o blogs.msdn.com/webmaster
o upcoming adcenter – msft competitor to google analytics
Silverlight 2.0, Mike Harsh, Program Manager, MSFT
- support for almost everything in WPF, plus some new controls
o MutliScaleImage – tool recursively splices a large image into 256x256 tiles, and the MutliScaleImage control automatically renders necessary tiles based on where on image the user zooms
- UserControl support!
- Local storage
o up to 1MB; if you want more, user must approve via prompt
o cross-browser “cookies on steroids”
- HTML DOM Interop
o make calls into the DOM and call javascript functions like alert()
o add items to browser’s history list
- OpenFileDialog support
Thursday, January 3, 2008
CTO interview on Microsoft's Startup Superstars
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
click to run an ActiveX control
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp
more info:
http://www.cssbeauty.com/skillshare/comments.php?DiscussionID=482
