BinaryJam

Now I’m sure you’ve read about the new release candidate for Silverlight and the alpha refresh. But don’t forget that there is also an update to blend.

Many of the developer sites are quoting the RC but forgetting about blend. Now because they think that blend is a designer tool its being highlighted in the the designer channels but believe me as a developer you need blend I would not want to try to design animations in xaml. I like to see what I’m doing and pick colours and gradients not code them (unless of course that’s what’s required).

So don’t forget get the new blend as well as silverlight runtimes and sdks.

I am sick to death with the websense web filter. As of this morning wordpress has been added to the list of banned sites, so I can’t see my blog or scobles or any other wordpress.com user.

Just let the tool auto block everything.  Never mind that the tech team might find something useful on blogs.  So what’s next msdn blogs ? Hanselman.com, come on websense block them too. Hell just stop all internet access altogether. It’s not like I need to research what I’m doing. It’s all in the local help isn’t it ? complete with useable examples.

Getting beyond a joke lately.

Remember I posted the view from my window, well now we have a picnic area and flowers. 

Its a big improvement, this camera phone doesn’t do it justice really.

This is only our temporary project site the main office is glorious one of the best offices I have ever worked in.

Being an MS developer, well a sap developer of late (but I keep sneakily writing Sharepoint interfaces to it), I have used MS for a long while (86-90, 95-07+), I toyed with Linux having started my career in unix and had to work with “green screens” for 8 years and having a GUI in Linux just didn’t feel right.  So I been running Vista for a while now. 

Of course being the techie in the family all the family have windows too, many of them now happily working on XP SP2 all virus checked and firewalled up to the eyeballs.  And yes all the extra security on machines designed before SP2 make them run slowly.

Slow machinery is something my brother-in-law can’t stand, he’s worse than me for gadgets and tech and relies on me to advise him of what’s coming up.

Having been to PDC05 I got a Vista Polo shirt, it was great, a good fit, great quality, does exactly what I need it too.  Unlike Vista.  I’m a bit ashamed to wear it now everyone knows what Vista is like.

Getting back to the point.  My brother-in-law being the gadget hungry monster he is asked me about upgrading his PC (again) to vista as he is tired of the “slow” speed of his 3ghz P4.

I told him to buy a MAC.

I can’t believe the words came from my mouth.

I had to say them again, slowly to try and see how something so square came from a round hole,

“Buy …a…. MAC”. 

Yep there they are again. 

“You could try a Mac book”, Eeek another one.

I said the unspeakable again.

“Mac OS is far better than vista, Vista is a pain in the back-side”. 

OMG who stole my brain. 

“The only reason I haven’t switched already is the investment I have and I do a little development now and again”. 

Yeh, this feels good, a little cathartic, what to do about Office and that mouse button thing I’m a little unsure of still, but yeah MAC…..

I won’t be getting one myself too much Vis studio and silverlight to do, hang on silverlight runs on a Mac…..No, no I can’t can I ?

If you are selling your car in the UK then please, please go and visit Parkers.co.uk or buy a copy of the guide.  It will tell you how much your car is actually worth, then add a bit for bargaining perhaps.

What I don’t suggest you do is advertise your car with bugger all service history, chips in the screen, a spare type that doesn’t fit the car,  badly sprayed wings (so indicative of a home spray to cover up rust or your inability to park), lie about having it it recently serviced but the documentation is “at the accountants” (but not stamped in the book),  at £700 over the recommended sale price for your vehicle (£2300).  Then if someone offers you what your car is worth (plus car tax value) get in a huff and stomp about as if you’ve been slapped with a kipper.

Damnable time-wasting  son of a bitch.  I hope your car is written off then you will realise how little its worth you pathetic little man.

Hmmmm it all got a bit personal in the end there didn’t it.

In case your wondering I said on leaving, “Well never mind, thanks for your time” and shook him by the hand and bid him farewell.  When I actually wanted to say all the above and call him a dick.

Not having had the luxury of working in .NET 2.0 yet, a plethora of legacy 1.1 and Sharepoint 2003 and now SAP has prevented my migration I never knew about nullable types, sure I’d heard about nullable types, in fact I hated the idea, to me its just lazy, check your damn variables for DBNull I say.  Ok ok so sometimes you want to know something is un-set  e.g. a trisate  boolean of true or false or undefined (null).

But since we have them its worth knowing what they are and how to use them so in this article look for

int? varA =null;

And of course

int result1 = varA ?? varB;

Don’t you think it just looks nasty.

Rexiology@MSDN : C#: What does it mean about statement “int? varA = 3;” ?

Jay Kimble has an article on his Silverlight conversion and he manages to explain exactly what I had in mind when I said ‘….does anyone else think that Silverlight is “DHTML applications”…’

My comment was squarely aimed at those developers who suffered through the DHTML Application architecture introduced in VB6 (but you could frig it in VB5).  In this architecture you could, by having an activeX on the page, control and access the DOM.  It didn’t catch on due to compatibility problems with other browsers, but I tell you some times it was just great, when we created an “Ajax” web application back in IE4 having the speed of compiled code on your side to do the calculations and then manipulate the DOM and not have to worry ourselves with error handling Jscript, which just didn’t handle errors at all back then was marvelous.

Silverlight gives you all this again but cross browser and cross platform in a much better development environment than VB5/6.  In fact Jay is so excited by this he states it twice and in big fonts.  So in case you missed it here it is again here,

“Now we’re going to talk to the browser’s DOM directly from Silverlight replacing JavaScript with C#. (And then debug it from Visual Studio!)” .

Long live DHTML Applications (redux).

Technorati tags: Silverlight