April 2005 - Posts
Tonight at 9PM Eastern we'll be talking to Anand Rajagopalan and Richard Turner, Program Managers on the Indigo Team. We're expecting to dive a little deeper into the feature set of Indigo, exploring scenarios where you may be migrating existing code.
For live stream links as well as links to the IRC chatroom, go to
http://www.franklins.net/calldotnetrocks Again, the show is at 9PM Eastern tonight (Thursday, April 28)
See you there!
Dax Pandhi, creator of the borg skin for PwopCatcher, shows the step-by-step process of how he did it.
http://shrinkster.com/4x9
This article is great for .NET developers who are trying to read or understand the other language.
http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/vbnet_c__difference.asp
OK, I've been holding this in for a few weeks now and I can't take it anymore. Ever since we switched gears with The Daily Commute I've been thinking about a podcast client downloader app. This is really what's holding up the podcasting revolution. So, my posse and I set out to design a simple and powerful client app that we could easily skin to make it look however we want. We ended up using some Alpha Blending code from a CodeProject article, and figuring out all the intricacies of developing skins. What we've got now is a .NET 1.1 Windows Form derivative that does 32-bit alpha blending (a la Avalon), can swtich skins while running, has no jagged edges, draws a beautiful drop shadow on the windows beneath it, can fade in and out, and loads skins defined with an xml file generated from a typed dataset. We've been just in awe dragging them around on our desktops all last week, and we wanted to give everyone a look-see at what we're up to.
Here's a hi-res screen shot that shows two instances of the same app running. We've set it up so that you can switch skins by moving the mouse wheel. The top skin is a corporate looking skin that has the appearance of smoked glass. You can see through it in places, and it's opaque in other places. The skin below it actually started out as a piece of aluminium. The artist took a hammer to it, took a picture of it, added light and shadow, and it slowly took form. Both of these skins were developed graphically by Dax Pandhi at
Nukeation Studios. The guy is a frickin genius.
http://www.pwop.com/PwopCatcherSkins.jpg
Kim Tripp is back and more intense than ever. After talking about her famous USB Key demonstration of SQL 2005 partitioning, she gets into details of SQL 2005 that would make even the SQL team go "hey, that's cool!" This is one of those shows that you'll have to listen to several times to completely grasp. We know we will!
http://www.dotnetrocks.com
Next week we will talk with Anand Rajagopalan and Richard Turner, Program Managers on the Indigo team at Microsoft. Where we have talked about Indigo at only a superficial level we will try to dig in a little deeper next week talking about specific features.
http://perseus.franklins.net/wendys.mp3 (about 2 and a half minutes)
A little taste of what you're missing by not listening to Mondays
Feel free to share!
For more, check out
http://mondays.pwop.com
http://www.nintendo.com/newsarticle?articleid=aac722c2-fd99-493e-9d9b-e86b6edbe4b8&page=newsmain
Not really a podcast, but we're getting there. Nintendo's PR firm contacted me a while back, needing a place to put a recording of a speech made by the president. Note the URL of the speech mp3. :-)
Mark Miller and I made these videos the other day in hopes that Microsoft would use them on their page announcing the excellent refactoring support that Mark's company is providing for the VB 2005 language. Microsoft ultimately opted for a shorter video done by DevExpress. No biggie. We can still share the videos we made.
Here they are (flash is required):
Refactoring Part One: http://perseus.franklins.net/refactor1.html
Refactoring Part Two: http://perseus.franklins.net/refactor2.html
Enjoy!
Phil Weber sent this to me a while back and I have been stingy in not sharing.
His email said "Hey Carl, this is my new band"
http://perseus.franklins.net/apache.mpeg
Dax and I created a new website for
Pwop Productions over the weekend. We are targeting PR and corporate types, to that end we've redefined our mission statement which is to provide impact.
Before podcasting can work for the masses we need tools and services. Pwop is providing both. We obviously have the services to create the content, as we've been doing for years with
.NET Rocks! , and more recently the
MSDN Academic Alliance but we are now solving the tools problem for consumers of podcasts.
You may already know that I am a huge believer in
BitTorrent being harnessed for the powers of good where podcasting is concerned. The reason podcasting with HTTP doesn't work is scalability. BitTorrent provides that scalability. The more people use it simultaneously (a la podcasting) the faster everyone gets their file(s).
We are building a client application that incorporates a complete bittorrent client stack developed by David Smith called
btsharp. This is a complete stack written in C#. He is incorporating universal plug and play UPnP to automatically configure routers to open bt ports with the user's permission. The application (called PwopCatcher) is skinnable a la
WinAmp. Pwop will offer a service of creating a custom skinned and configured version of PwopCatcher for our clients to distribute to their audience. All the client has to do is install it and they will be receiving podcasted content (audio, video, binary, etc.) using bittorrent. We are not making a replacement for Azureus. It will not have lots of configuration options in the UI. The goal is simplicity and elegance. We strongly believe that this combination of software and services is exactly what companies need to harness the power of podcasting. I'll be unveiling a beta the application for .NET Rocks! and Mondays listeners later this summer. Trust me, it will knock you out.
But alas, we are stuck with the same old problem. We have to get the word out
to corporate types about Pwop and what we can do. To that end we are embarking on a direct mail, email, and phone campaign to PR firms. Unless the
right people know about us we won't be able to change the world. Right now we are mostly on the radar screens of amateur podcasters and bloggers.
So, do you have any suggestions? I'd like very much to hear them.
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