Jim Wang's Blog

Recently I’ve been playing around with Knockout.js, and one of the features I wanted to implement was a Facebook like button inside of the details view of a master-detail. Facebook provides the following code snippet for their JavaScript SDK:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>
    (function (d, s, id) {
        var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
        if (d.getElementById(id)) return;
        js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
        js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1&appId=10349446178";
        fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);
    } (document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));
</script>

I was reading a Facebook post by a friend today inviting others to try Bing (which currently offers a rewards plan for using it where you can get gift certificates for searching and clicking on sponsored links). I’ve also recently heard about duckduckgo.com, another up and coming search engine.

You would think that working on the ASP.NET team you would eventually get jaded by the novelty of the Internet and come to accept it as a fact of daily life. And to some extent this does happen because you’re focusing on the task at hand: pumping features out the door and ensuring that they rock.

As I’ve been preparing for my talks at DevConnections next week, it’s struck me how talk preparation is one of those things that is immensely enjoyable yet incredibly frustrating (read: time-consuming) at the same time. 

For those of you who have heard about it, Mark Berryman and I are taking over the CodingQA podcast from Matthew Osborn and Federico Silva Armas.

Last week I posted about looking into the keyboard locking up issue in Visual Studio.  So far it looks like not a lot of people have replied to provide concrete repro steps, which confirms my suspicion that this is somewhat of a random issue.

One of the initiatives I’m involved with on the ASP.NET and Visual Studio teams is the Tactical Test Team (TTT), which is a group of testers who dedicate a portion of their time to roaming around and testing different parts of the product.  What this generally translates to is a day and a bit a week helping out with areas of the product that have been flagged as risky, or tackling problems that span both ASP.NET and Visual Studio.  There is also a separate component of this effort outside of TTT which is to help with customer scenarios and design.

Recently, I’ve been playing around with the Windows Phone 7 Developer experience.  Quick tip: I tried to deploy my application to the phone, and got an error: “Zune software is not launched. Retry after making sure that Zune software is launched.”  This wasn’t particularly helpful for me since I did have the software launched, and my phone was connected through wireless sync (didn’t remember this at the time).