Erik Porter's Blog

My Blog Has Moved

2009-02-16T20:00:00Z

Unfortunately, I don't have control over the guts of my blog here so I can't setup any nice redirects or anything like that, but if you're still interested in following things I'm working on and sharing, head over to my new blog. If you're interested in the blogging platform our team has been working on (in our spare time) that's built on ASP.NET MVC called Oxite, be sure to head over to my new blog (running Oxite).

Bill Gates: Transitioning into the Future

2008-06-23T17:02:00Z

Bill Gates is leaving and Charles from Channel 9 has a great interview with Bill.

Bill Gates: Transitioning into the Future

Life at Microsoft

2008-02-12T22:29:00Z

I had the pleasure of "acting" with some fellow 'softies to create this fun video about the misconceptions that people have with Microsoft.

Life At Microsoft - The Truth Revealed

It was a lot of fun to run around with nerf guns, kick people, yell and scream. Tina, can we do it again? :)

ASP.NET AJAX BUG: $addHandler Can't Attach to Element Inside an IFrame in Internet Explorer

2008-01-17T09:32:00Z

I have an iframe on my page and an html page that's loaded in it (from the same domain) and an anchor tag is clicked in the iframe I want to execute some code on my page on the client. In the Initialize method in my client object I call $addHandler and pass in the anchor tag from inside the iframe, 'click' (to attach to the onclick of the anchor tag) and my delegate. I run the code in Firefox. Everything works great. I go to Internet Explorer and run it and when I click on the anchor tag inside of the iframe I get an error of "Sys.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: eventObject". A quick search turned up this gem of a workaround:

Bug with $addHandler applied to element in an iFrame

I hope the ASP.NET team fixes this in future versions of ASP.NET AJAX, but for now this will work.

CES: Bill Gates Leaving Microsoft Video

2008-01-07T22:22:00Z

This is a great video that was shown at CES

Bill's Last Day: The CES Keynote video

PDC 2008

2007-12-06T20:37:00Z

http://msdn.microsoft.com/pdc2008

It's official now. See you there?!?!

Accompanying Channel 9 thread discussing it.

IE 8 Exists

2007-12-06T20:32:00Z

Yipee!

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/12/05/internet-explorer-8.aspx

Ok, we all knew it existed and was being worked on, but this is the first time the IE team has talked about anything (even if there's no actual info here).

Accompanying Channel 9 thread discussing the "announcement".

Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista (using WPF) Preview Released

2007-12-06T18:38:00Z

http://on10.net/Blogs/larry/yahoo-messenger-with-wpf-goes-live/

Just installed it and while it's not feature complete yet and there are some performance issues, overall I really like it!

It kind of makes the Windows Live Messenger team look a little stupid for letting their competition use our technology to make a better looking IM client, doesn't it? ;)

Definitely check it out!

Facebook Beacon Now Lets You Completely Opt-Out

2007-12-05T19:04:00Z

This is great to see.

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=7584397130

Nothing better in this world than a company who admits mistakes, listens to customers and makes changes when needed.

Facebook Beacon

2007-11-30T18:26:00Z

Ever wanted something more powerful than just a "Share on Facebook" link on your site, but didn't want to write an entire Facebook app? Enter Facebook Beacon. With it, you can add a few lines of code to your site and your users can share actions they did on your site like (bought a product/service, changed their profile, posted a comment, etc) to Facebook so it shows up in their news feed and then travels down the viral highway that is Facebook.

We're considering integrating Beacon into our community web platform that runs (Channel 9, Channel 10, MIX Online, Channel 8 and TechNet Edge). Do you think this would get annoying? Would you like to share what you're doing on our sites with your friends on Facebook?

FYI, we're building a Facebook app as well for our sites (and all sites involved in Microsoft Communities), but we think this also adds value too. Thoughts?

.NET Web Roadmap for 3.5 (ASP.NET, Silverlight, IIS 7)

2007-11-29T18:08:00Z

Scott Guthrie posted some fantastic info on ASP.NET Extensions 3.5 to match up with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/29/net-web-product-roadmap-asp-net-silverlight-iis7.aspx

Highlights:

Silverlight 1.1 is now Silverlight 2.0
Silverlight 2.0 will start to get some of the great features that WPF has
Some of the ASP.NET AJAX Futures (like the browser history control) will be moved into ASP.NET AJAX
IIS 7 will ship early next year
There will be new ways to deploy to IIS 7 and do things like versioning and rolling back on single servers and web farms

Great stuff...check it out!

Rich Text Editor on CodePlex

2007-11-29T08:45:00Z

This is really great to see. RTEs are a pain to write yourself.

http://ledgards.com/blogs/josh/archive/2007/11/12/rich-text-editor-control-on-codeplex.aspx

My only requests are that they add Opera and Safari support, XHTML support, undo and better flexibility for customizing it (like hiding the view tabs and ASP.NET Themes).

Definitely worth checking out!

Popfly - Building Mash-ups, Blocks, Pages in a Fun Community

2007-05-18T17:26:00Z

I've been following Popfly for a long time. It's come a long way (and 2 code names) to where it is today and it's good stuff! They have a cool editor in Silverlight for connecting blocks to create mash-ups, a web page editor, social networking to share your creations. If you're into the nitty gritty you can even go in and edit all the Javascript yourself. Check out the intro video on Channel 9.

Building a Silverlight 1.1 DLL with Visual Studio 2005

2007-05-03T04:15:00Z

Hotness!

http://blogs.sqlxml.org/bryantlikes/archive/2007/05/02/silverlight-hello-world-in-c-from-vs-2005.aspx

Silverlight (WAS: WPF/E) is Official

2007-04-16T08:18:00Z

The official name as well as site is now out for Silverlight, which used to be called WPF/E. Lookin' good!