Shawn's Technical Blog

I have already blogged about my thoughts on Surface RT (Surface RT: To Be Or Not To Be (Part 1)).  Much of the same things apply to the Surface Pro such as how it was announced & launched, price & marketing, so I will not rehash those in this post.

So the Surface RT has been out for 9 months and Microsoft just declared a $900 million dollar write-down. So how did this happen and what does it mean for Microsoft’s efforts to break into the tablet market? I have been thinking a lot about most of the information below since the Surface product line was released. If you are looking for a “Microsoft Is Dead” story, then don’t read any further. But if you want an honest look at what I think led Microsoft to this point and what I think can be done to make Surface RT devices better, then please continue reading.

After watching the video of the announcement about the new Surface tablets and comments by other users I wanted to add my thoughts to the discussion.  Balmer stated that sales of the surface tables will only be a small percentage of tablet sales.  I personally think that how the Surface tablets sell will be a big indicator on how successful Win8 is going to be on tablets (Unless MS overprices it).  This is similar to how people will look at Nokia WP8 phone sales as an indicator on how successful WP8 will be.

I just downloaded Expression 4 and expected to see some improvements in the Web4 SuperPreview application.  The one main function I was expecting to be in this release is the ability to enter data and click on links so pages of the sites could be assessed.  There a many use cases where this functionality is needed and there were quite a few people vocal about it when MS first released the application.

Use Case

I recently can across a site that had a “anti-spam” field at the bottom of the entry from.  The first issue I had with it was that at 1280X800 you could not read the value you were suppose to enter (see below).  You tell me, should you enter div, dlv, piv, or plv.

When you try to call a web service that uses a self-signed certificate from a client application you get the following error:
The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.

From my limited experience with the EF and “LINQ To SQL” I have to agree that “LINQ To SQL” is the way to go if you application or web site only needs to connect to SQL Server databases.  “LINQ To SQL” pretty feature rich as it is and although there will not be any major new features added to it, that does not mean it is not a viable option for .Net developers to use.  “LINQ To SQL” is already used by to many people so it will be a part of the .Net framework for quite some time.  And now developers have a way to get more features using “LINQ To SQL” by using PLINQO.