October 2008 - Blog Watch

Twitter is a marvelous thing. Without flying to Los Angeles, our crack DBVT Staff can deliver, via the #PDC Twitter Stream, each and every PDC2008 highlight for you without ever having to get off our fat asses taunt, shapely buttocks. All hail "ScottGu Mode!" This is probably one of those "had to be there" tweets, but if each of us had a ScottGu Mode this ol' world of ours would be a much better place. The Gu always has the cool toys.. Aren't the other kids jealous? "The...

Two good screencasts on passing parameters to a Silverlight 2.0 Control are available on Silverlight.Net. The first from Mike Taulty demonstrates InitParameters as a property in the ASPX Silverlight control. The second from Tim Heuer demonstrates using InitParameters as well as how to pass in Querystring parameters. Both are worth a look. The approach to passing Querystring parameters to a Silverlight 2.0 Control that works for me is pretty simple. We check for the presence of Querystrings in the...

This will be the last Silverlight 2.0 Immersity post because we've arrived at the portion of our show where it's all .NET all the time. Now that the datagrid is pretty much in place, we're back to supplying the Business Logic to populate lists, update, insert and delete data on the back end of the Web Service, same-old-same-old. Then again, this is the beauty of Silverlight 2.0 as I always anticipated it since my first look at ReMix07 Boston. After some initial orientation, it's just...

One of the good things about being older and typing out code for so long is being able to appreciate how far Microsoft's great development tools have evolved. The intellisense in VS2008 seems much improved over VS2005, and VS2005 intellisense was good! Take this little example of populating a new data object. Of course, what I need is a CodeSmith template to bang this out for me, but intellisense still makes it a snap. I'm going through the properties alphabetically, get to my 3rd item where...

The Silverlight 2.0 period of Immersivity continues with today's keywords being Silverlight 2.0 Datagrid; Silverlight 2.0 Two-Way Data Binding; 2-Way Data Binding; No-Way Data Binding. (Just joking with the last one. HA! HA!) For good or bad, I stuck with my master plan of not spending resources on Silverlight until 2.0 went RTM, so I have no experience with anything that came before. I've learned quickly however that Silverlight 2.0 DataGrid data binding was changed in RC0 from the betas...

I have the opportunity to immerse myself in Silverlight 2.0 for a week or two. The immediate objective is to replace a bandwidth-intensive custom Community Server form with a Silverlight 2.0 version. The long-term objective is to move the interactive quality of the apps I write to the next level. It's difficult for freelancers like me who live and die by the billable hour to dedicate blocks of time to get up to speed on new technologies. There's no corporate training support structure and...

One of the best features of Community Server of Olden Times was the home page Content Part. You might've been clueless about Community Server, but when you loaded up your new community site for the first time and logged in as "admin," it was immediately apparent that you could double-click on the home page and begin the process of making your community site your own. That's a big deal, or at least it was, and it served as a powerful introductory metaphor to Community Server. What...

Crawling out of the subprime-ordial slime. I haven't done an Everyman for over two weeks. I have to be in a positive frame-of-mind to Everyman, and as you can probably relate, it's been a rough two weeks with all of the financial turmoil going down. Zuning Friday's Marketplace podcast during my daughter's soccer game on Saturday morning helped me turn the corner. Marketplace reporters drove around the country on an Interactive Road Tour for two weeks talking with regular folks about...

Are you part of the TV generation? Then you might want to try the 12seconds beta . New SoCal Developer Evangelist, Daniel Egan seems to like it: News News News | 12seconds.tv (alpha) Read More...

From the demo shown at the Microsoft BI conference last week.  This gives me lots of ideas about data visualization possibilities for BI - what about you? Also if you've not seen a Microsoft Surface device and you'd like to - let me know.  If you weren't able to attend the conference but would like to get updated on all of the BI announcements made there, then listen to these podcasts . THE BI Blog Read More...

I really wanted to do an Everyman tonight, but I have to get this political bookmark monkey off my back first. It's that damned Palin. She drives me frigging nuts. I feel like Jenny's angry boyfriend in Forrest Gump. He runs around frothing, treating Jenny like crap, then falls back on "It's just that lying son of a ***, Johnson!" in apologizing for his violent outbursts. When a client asks me, "Dave, do you have that report online yet?" and I respond, "I was...

I enjoyed this book a lot. Get Slightly Famous: Become a Celebrity in Your Field and Attract More Business with Less Effort by Steven Van Yoder presented a practical approach on how to grow your business. The key to "Slightly Famous" success as described by Yoder is to establish a niche specialty as the first priority, then promote that expertise by employing marketing strategies in a variety of media and communication venues. 4-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. ----------------------- p...