Archives
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You don't know Microsoft culture
I'm closing in on a month now at Microsoft. OK, not really, because with the holidays and a week out for a pre-hired trip, I'm obviously still in a bit of a ramp up mode. Although I checked in some code last week, which is very exciting.
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Why Facebook didn't really change anything, and people are zombies
Calacanis wrote a rant about Facebook that causes me to question his credibility. Seriously, is he a lucky entrepreneur or just full of it half of the time? Like many "pundits" in the tech field, he tends to jump into the fray with whatever fashionable rant is the rage. These days it appears to be Facebook, probably because it's a big target. (I work for Microsoft, and I have a growing appreciation for being a big target.)
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Starting at Microsoft
I had my first "real" day at Microsoft today (the first day is mostly an HR thing). There's still a great deal of stuff to do to really get settled, as anyone who has ever started a developer job knows, but it felt like I actually worked there today.
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Google Maps: They have humans!
The last refresh of Google Maps messed up my street. I live two houses down from an intersection, where on one side the street has one name, and a different name on the other (two subdivisions started years apart). In the last refresh, they had the name from the other street extending half way down my street. I noticed a "report problem" link on the map, so I did. Here's what I got...
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Interview to start: Six and a half weeks
Trying to wrap your head around leaving an area you've been around for 36 years for a destination and job 2,400 miles away is one of the single most bizarre things that I've encountered in my life. The time between my arrival in Seattle to interview at Microsoft (I was in town for just 27 hours) to my start date is going to be about six and a half weeks, or a month and a half. I'm not sure if that's making good time or not, and I'd love to hear stories from other current Microfolk who have relocated. The only unknown variable left is the move scheduling.
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The animated featured content box: Critical design issues
I saw this post from Ken Cox about his displeasure with the preview of the new VB developer site, specifically the animated box at the bottom. You've seen these before on a million different sites, where a number of featured content items are previewed.
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New MSDN preview from Hanselman
If you haven't seen it (or don't otherwise subscribe to his blog), do check out Hanselman's peek at the new MSDN.
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I'm joining the mothership
As I mentioned previously, I interviewed in Redmond for a position with Microsoft in the Server & Tools Online group, specifically Community Applications & Services (Codeplex, MSDN forums and other stuff in that area). I got the word Friday that I had an offer, today I verbally accepted it, and pending a background check and move, I should be starting some time in early November! I posted a few words about the interview experience on my personal blog.
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Redmond bound, dismal job market at home
I'm coming out this week to Redmond again to visit Microsoft and interview, this time for a developer gig.
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Dependency injection, providers and ASP.NET MVC
I've been thinking a lot about all of the frameworks we have now to use with our, uh, frameworks. There's a framework to solve every problem. Dependency injection frameworks are of particular interest to a lot of people because they make unit testing ridiculously easy. They're also well suited to something like ASP.NET MVC, where you're trying to make as few dependencies as possible between the various concerns.
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On constant connectivity and information overload in the online social age
There was a solid post on the Mix blog about just letting go of all the stuff going on in the online social world and getting back to work. It's a subject that I've thought a great deal about lately for a lot of reasons. With a baby on the way, balancing life is important to me. I see friends who can't got five minutes without checking Twitter. Sometimes I worry about whether or not I'm learning the right things. The presence of information itself causes worry.
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Snow Leopard impressions
I was one of the nerds that went to church, er, the Apple Store, yesterday to pick up Snow Leopard, the OS X update. For $29, I think it's a pretty reasonable upgrade price (are you listening, Windows 7 pricing people?), considering it's an evolutionary upgrade and not feature heavy.
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Twitter: I begrudgingly get it
More than two years ago, I made a post on here about how I didn't get Twitter. It's one of the most popular posts I've ever made for some reason, which perhaps I'm not proud of. I been meaning to follow up on that for, well, at least a year, because obviously things have changed a great deal.
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Under the covers of HTML helpers in ASP.NET MVC
Coming from the Webforms world, the thing you might miss most when using ASP.NET MVC is the ability to create rich Web controls that generate all kinds of markup and do nifty things. HTML helpers do similar work, even if their plumbing is different, and because we can see the full source code of the MVC framework, we can explore their innards. Keep in mind that this isn't a straight analog, since there are no events to worry about. The helpers have one responsibility, and that's to display the right data as HTML. The truth is that you don't need to know any of this, as the existing helpers probably meet your needs 95% of the time. But in the event you want to build your own helpers for the purpose of encapsulating some kind of common, reusable markup (or keep your views cleaner), you'll benefit from understanding what goes on inside the black box.
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Windows 7 in Parallels on a Mac
It's no secret that I'm all about Mac hardware and living in OS X when I'm not developing .NET stuff. It's also no secret that I thought Vista was too much of a dog to use, and have been sticking to Windows XP because of that. And in all fairness, I suppose some of that bias is rooted in the fact that Vista was a nightmare on my wife's old laptop, but I did experiment a little with it in a Parallels VM, and it just felt clunky. The outright bizarre dialogs with a chapter of text for everything also threw me for a loop.
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Be more than a developer
I do love a spirited debate. It seems that everyone I've had a relationship with suggests that I should have been a litigator because I love to argue. And hey, if practicing law wasn't 95% research and 5% arguing, I'd be all over that.
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Silverlight vs. Flash and other pundit fodder
Yet another blog post has hit the airwaves and become all atwitter about Flash and Silverlight, the competition, Adobe vs. Silverlight, etc. While this makes for interesting pundit fodder, I just think that the people observing the situation don't really, well, get the situation.
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Charity fund raiser: Give Kids The World
It's hard to ask people for money when a lot of folks are having a hard time even looking out for themselves, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. CoasterBuzz, one of the sites I run, is teaming up with Cedar Point (a huge amusement park west of Cleveland) to raise money for Give Kids The World. As described on the CoasterBuzz event page:
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Book project follow up
I'm still getting e-mail about the book I started to write and posted chapters for. Now that ScottGu has formally announced the progress on v2 of ASP.NET MVC, hopefully it's more obvious now why I put off the project. As I said previously, I had to prioritize with some other projects that would yield income sooner, and I was concerned with the speed to market with which I could get it out there (read: not fast enough). I also knew about the second iteration in the pipe, which made it a no-brainer to put it off.
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CoasterBuzz Feed: A Silverlight 3 story
A few weeks ago, I decided to jump in and do a "science project" with Silverlight 3. My prior experiences with Silverlight involved a simple DeepZoom viewer that happened to use a Web service as its tile source, and a file uploader that cut up multiple files and sent them to the server. The latter is being used as a part of a plugin to the forum on CoasterBuzz, and it has served me very well. With the out-of-browser option on Silverlight 3, I figured it was a perfect chance to give my audience another reason to stalk the site, using a small "feed" app that they could run on the desktop.
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The Silverlight 3 development experience, ups and downs
I started a little science project for CoasterBuzz about a week ago or so. I wanted to build a little Silverlight app that sucked down updates of all kinds, and make it live outside the browser. There are constantly new posts, topics, news items and photos hitting the site, and anything that encourages people to keep coming back is a good thing. It's not a giant community, but big enough that people like to be involved as much as possible, even if they're "readonly" types.
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Silverlight 3: Calling a WCF service without a proxy using Binary XML
David Betz has a really solid (and really, really long) post on calling a WCF service from Silverlight, without using a Service Reference. I'm certainly not going to try and top that or duplicate it, but I wanted to share my experience using the same methodology only with Binary XML as the medium. I'm not interested in the politics over whether or not it should be used, as I'm using WCF and Silverlight. Interoperability beyond that is not important to me.
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Do you ever get the feeling that XML configuration is out of control?
I decided to take a break yesterday from my efforts toward a new site to "enjoy" a little science project. The short description is that it's a little Silverlight app that I'd like to run out-of-browser, talking to the server via a WCF service. Before I knew it, I felt like there was XML configuration everywhere.
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VisualSVN for the win
A very long time ago I set up Subversion on one of my servers, and did it the old fashioned way... mucking about with config files and all of that with an instance of Apache. Yuck. I remember it taking a few hours because I hadn't seen Apache since, well, since long before I would've called myself a professional code monkey.
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Silverlight 3 and Twitter
The Twitterworld or (Twittersphere or whatever silly shit someone made up today) was all abuzz about the release of Silverlight 3 today, and I was shocked at how quickly it made the trends and how overwhelmingly it was positive.
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304 Your images from a database
I was reading somewhere about some anecdotal evidence that Google doesn't like to index images that don't have some kind of modification time on them. When I relaunched CoasterBuzz last year, I moved all of my coaster pr0n to the database, and I've since noticed that none of the images are in fact indexed. Bummer.
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Caught in a flesh storm, with a 90% chance of satisfaction
This makes me laugh, in light of tech pundits who overstate the importance of Twitter.
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Webforms vs. MVC, the desire to rewrite everything, an unexpected benefit
I read a good post today about the silly wars that go on in versus debates, in this case the arguments about whether to use Webforms or MVC for ASP.NET. I kind of saw this storm coming when people started describing themselves as part of the alternative "movement" in the ASP.NET community.
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Silverlight request: Make it work for iPhone apps
Obviously Silverlight runs on OS X. That much we know, since developers like me use it for non-development tasks instead of Windows. How difficult would it be to adapt it to stand-alone apps on the iPhone? Even if it had to include the runtime and base library (at a few megabytes), it would still be pretty cool, and we wouldn't have to use Xcode (which I'm not impressed with).
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The joy of learning and surprise
I just read the JJ Abrams essay in the previous issue of Wired. This essay really struck home about where we get joy out of life, and how we seem so eager to overlook it. This quote sums it up for me:
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ASP.NET MVC book: Not going to happen (for now)
After a great deal of soul searching (and a PDF draft of chapter 1 posted), I've decided that I'm not going to follow through on this book. I've got a total of four chapters, two of which are at 75%, but there are a number of reasons that I've decided to focus my attention elsewhere.
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Personal blog moved, powered by ASP.NET MVC
I moved my personal blog to a more appropriate domain name, JeffPutz.com. Hooray for vanity names! I'll continue to keep technical and programming junk here. It seemed appropriate though to have a central location for me stuff, including my resume and various media samples, so this is it.
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Can you afford to blow off a part of your audience?
The other day, me and Diana were talking about the concept of "supported" browsers, and how big corporations often restrict their online applications for use only with certain browsers. This is a throwback to the days when you needed ActiveX or certain IE-only features, and is rooted in old school corporate IT nonsense.
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Twitter FAIL
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Google Ad Manager: FTW!
It doesn't seem like there are a lot of .NET developers out there who build their own stuff for their own sites, and if there are, they don't blog. But I know they're out there!
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ASP.NET MVC book: Chapter 1: Plumbing
ASP.NET MVC: From Webforms to MVC
by Jeff Putz
The following is a barely-edited draft from the forthcoming book
that will explore Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC framework from the
view of a traditional Webforms developer. This chapter goes over
the basic plumbing of the framework, while subsequent chapters
will be more focused on the typical use cases that every developer
encounters, and how they relate to their Webforms analogs.
Again, this is a draft, so read with caution. You can find updates on
the status of the book, which will likely be published early summer,
2009, at the following locations:
http://weblogs.asp.net/Jeff/
http://twitter.com/jeffputz -
ASP.NET MVC, front-to-back advantage revisited
A couple of month ago, I wrote a post about the surprising advantage of MVC as an enabling technology for front end folks. The more I work with it, the more I feel that it's the key advantage to using MVC. Given my rants on why I think the user experience is so important, you can understand why I'm so excited by this.
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Job recruiting turned to spamming, staffing firms marginalizing themselves
The poor economy has had an interesting (and unfortunate for people in my position) side effect for the business of matching employers and people. The staffing agencies themselves have become so desperate to fill so few jobs that they've gone to the point of spamming prospects with irrelevant "leads." It's literally the same approach that spammers take, feeling that e-mail is cheap, and send out enough and something will stick.
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Empower for ISV's: FAIL
I was just thinking back to Mix when I remembered some mention of the ISV program, where a couple hundred bucks a year gets you MSDN and such. The catch is that you have to release some kind "packageable" software. Seriously? Does this make sense from the company moving all of its stuff to Web-based solutions and driving the developer community in the same direction.
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ASP.NET MVC: From Webforms to MVC - Introduction
This is the introduction for the book I've decided to write. I'm not at all sure how it will see paper yet, and I'm OK with that. I've been looking into self-publishing or on-demand publishing and I'm fairly convinced that it's a real option. I'm still willing to talk to "real" publishers as well, and as usual, I can be reached at jeff at popw dot com.
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Hanselman on dicketry
Read Hanselman's post on what happens when you break social contracts.
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ASP.NET MVC book proposal
I'm not sure if it's the fact that I'm not working or what, but I'm very seriously thinking about writing another book. Not only that, but if I do it, it will be an ASP.NET MVC book. Some have suggested to me that the space is already too crowded.
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Note to recruiters
You probably found a note with my resume on the various job boards indicating which markets I'd like to work in, and that I'm not interested in a short-term contract. That said, you'll also note that I don't live in Nebraska, Texas or Quebec. Because I love my wife, and I'm not yet starving, please do not send me e-mail for a two-month contract position in Billings, Montana that requires experience with VB6.
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Hilarious Gmail "detailed technical info"
I know that stuff like this causes outrage, but I can deal with the momentary down time. For now though, I find the error hilarious.
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Unemployed... again
I got home last night from my honeymoon and, wouldn't you know it, today I got laid-off. Again. I must have done something really wrong in a previous life.
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Paging links in ASP.NET MVC
Using the MVC framework on a real, if somewhat trivial, project has been a lot of fun so far. It's unlike me to wait for something to go final, but as I Google problems I encounter, it's good to see that I avoided a great many moving targets.
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Three years on the Mac, plus more thoughts on the new 17" MacBook Pro
A few weeks ago, I bought one of the new 17" MacBook Pros to replace my almost-three-year-old 15" model, the first of the Intel Macs. Hard to believe it has been three years! I'll get to the thoughts on the 17" momentarily.
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Mix09: Overall thoughts
As I mentioned during the conference, it suddenly seemed very silly to me to be blogging about the conference, when there was already plenty of that going on. I know I found it annoying that my RSS feeds were filled with posts about the same things, so there was little reason for me to add to that noise. But now that it's truly in the books, I think it's a good time to give my overall impression.
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Mix09, not blogging
I've decided that there's little reason to be blogging about Mix. It would just be noise. There are so many people already doing it that I don't feel I have much to add. Of course, I'll have my wrap up thoughts eventually.
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Mix09 Twittering
I've poo-poo'd Twitter before, because I haven't found it to be anything other than another channel to keep up with, but I'll try being active about using it whilst at Mix this week. If I make meaningful connections (and find fun people to hang with at the Tao party), I'll officially change my tune and see the value.
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Mix09, with Mac in tow
This will be my third Mix now, and what a strange road it has been for me. The first one I went to on my own dime, sort of, in that the conference was free but travel was my thing. That was a perk of just having a book published. Then the conference got super popular. I didn't go in '07, but I did go last year, on my former employer's bill. It was pretty spectacular, and I hoped that I would have the chance to go again this year.
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Message to the .NET world: Seriously, the UX does matter
The new gig I started in December as the company's technical architect ("technical" to make the distinction that it's not "information architect") has been an interesting experience for me thus far. My experience at Insurance.com was excellent in so many ways, because the processes were entirely solid and my peers were rock stars without the ego. Getting laid-off from there sucked, but it also presented an opportunity to find something where I could lead processes and have that "enterprise" experience applied to a place that needs it.
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Leaving for Mix09 in a week!
Wow, time flies, and it's almost here. I'm assuming that attendance is not sold out with all of the hotel and registration discounts, but I'm really looking forward to it. The quality of sessions was off the charts solid last year.
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First impressions using 17" MacBook Pro
I'm really impressed with the new laptop (and for what it costs, I suppose one should). I was just shy of using my old one, the first Intel-based 15" MacBook Pro, for three straight years, but as we speak, the old one is getting a fresh install so Diana can use it. Even at three, it's still a lot easier to use than her newer Vista Dell.
The thing that impressed me immediately is how solid it is. I've picked up and twisted the 13" and 15" models in the store, but I guess I still felt that the 17" just "had" to feel less solid. But it doesn't at all, it feels exactly the same. I give Apple a lot of credit for going to this machined solid block of aluminum. It makes a huge difference.
Also impressive was the migration app that pulls all of your junk over the wire from your old comprooder. It apparently is even smart enough to set the ethernet port to cross-over. Nice. It took a little over an hour to move the 50 gigs worth of junk, and when it was done, everything (mostly) worked as it did before. My browsing history and bookmarks were all there, all of the apps I installed, etc. Even keyboard preferences made it over (important for Visual Studio users, of course). It was even smart enough not to copy over older versions of iPhoto and such. The only pain was the serial numbers, having to re-enter them for the pro apps, and having to deactivate CS3 before activating it on the new one.
No heat issues at all. Fans idle silently at 2000 rpm, and there are no hot spots. Screen is beautiful, and I'm not getting all of the criticism toward the glossy screens. Four-finger swiping to activate Expose is sweet. Parallels screams giving it 2 of the 4 gigs to work with. Keyboard is a huge improvement. The size for the 17" isn't nearly as troublesome as I worried it might be.
The battery, man, I don't even know what to make of that. I'm running in the better performance mode, using the better video processor, screen at full brightness, keyboard lights on, and it looks like it'll easily do five hours on a single charge. My guess is that you can easily get six or seven if you back off. I know Apple says eight, but honestly, I was hoping for five or more, and that seems easily achievable.
I suppose I'll post more after I use it, but at this point I'm not honestly expecting much to be different than what I've experienced for the last three years. Yeah, I know these things aren't cheap, but considering the time I spend on it, it seems to me that it's worth the expense to buy something I like better. -
ASP.NET MVC: The front-to-back advantage
In my current gig, I was surprised to find when I started that there were front-end and back-end developers. The front-side guys are mostly HTML, CSS and Javascript (actually, mostly jQuery) folks, while the back-end folks do all of the wiring up and heavy lifting on the server type stuff. Most of the places I've worked had developers touching everything, and if anyone was generating HTML, it was designers.
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Official .NET site FAIL
It certainly isn't the first time, and some how I doubt it'll be the last. The official ASP.NET site, where I was headed to read more on MVC, is down. And it's not just down, it's down with the generic error page. You know, the one with the notes about how to set your web.config.
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Nine years of CoasterBuzz
As I posted earlier today, CoasterBuzz has now been around for nine years. That's a fourth of my life! In that time I've been married and divorced, owned three cars, had eight jobs, wrote a book and God knows what else. It's a long time.
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What's so terrible about using software owned by a company?
I'm not sure I get the point of Mozilla wanting to push an open source video standard (see Ars story). They're pusing for an open platform for video. So why exactly does everything have to be "vendor-neutral, standards-based?" I don't care that Flash is from Adobe. If it works, and everyone has it, what difference does it make? And hey, with Silverlight making some inroads, it keeps Adobe even more honest and working to innovate. Everybody wins.
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State of the platform: Are we losing? Does it matter?
Ars Technica launched a redesign today. I seem to recall that they were on ASP.NET before in some custom made CMS. Now they're on Movable Type.
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Lessons in building an uploader in Silverlight
I mentioned previously that I was working on a multi-file upload control for Silverlight. Yes, it has been done, but it's a good practical thing to get your head around. I feel like I've managed to get to a good place with it in terms of the "hard" parts (that is, getting to know Silverlight). I haven't fleshed out the back end part as much yet.
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FJCore updates... perhaps coming soon
I had an exchange with one of the guys from Occipital, who maintain the FJCore library. For those of you not playing along, this is a pure C# implementation for basic JPEG manipulation. It doesn't depend on the .NET Framework in any way, which means it's ideal for use in Silverlight.
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My first real experience with Silverlight
Back in 2004, when I was writing my book, I was all over everything new in the .NET world. It was partly out of never ending curiosity, but partly because I had to know what was in the pipe to avoid making the book obsolete before it was released. These days, I'm a bit more measured. I still watch carefully (really guys, seeing ASP.NET MVC final would be awesome!), but I'm a little more content to just let things evolve and be released as final before jumping in.
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Facebook flaw ignored: Chat system not secure
Well, despite getting some leads on who to contact after my previous post, Facebook has otherwise ignored me. I even sent a message Mark Z. just for fun, and he (or someone who monitors his account) wrote back and indicated he would pass along the info to the right people.
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Is most software development really as bad as I think?
Following my lay-off over the summer from Insurance.com, I've been around quite a bit doing contract work and other sub-optimal things. Now I'm finally in what I hope is a solid job with an online marketing agency that also does app dev. As the company's technical architect, I'm not writing as much code myself as I have previously, but I do get to see a lot of stuff inherited from other places.
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How do you reach humans who work at Facebook?
I just happened to stumble on a pretty serious flaw in their chat app, to the extent that I wouldn't be comfortable using it on a public network. I feel like I should do the right thing and tell them about it, but they lack contact information in a fairly enormous way. I assume the suggestion box just goes into a black hole somewhere.