Monthly Archives: February 2007

Millahseconds

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 I heard some very bad news the other day. Coding and comedy genius Mark Miller has decided to stop producing Millahseconds.

For all of you who are total unaware of what this is. Here is the official description:

Millahseconds is a weekly voyage into the manic mind of Mark Miller of Mondays fame, a manic paranoid schizophrenic software developing sex-addict (and part-time ditch digger for the county).
Millahseconds is a comedy podcast designed for men, but hot chicks can listen in too.
Be advised: Millahseconds is *not* for government agents, feminist Nazis, or prosecuting attorneys in any current or future litigation.
Mark likes to spend his spare time thwarting the imminent alien invasion, keeping the monkey menace at bay, and trying oh-so desperately to get laid. Not necessarily in that order.

MillahSeconds are brief rants of comedy genius from Mr Miller who happens to be a top level architect for DevExpress who make a fantastic plug-in for VS.NET called CodeRush. You may have heard Mark on .NET Rocks! before talking about discoverability and things or, if you know what good for you, on Mondays which is a comedy show produced by the same team behind .NET Rocks.

I think the developer community and in fact the community at large should show Mr Miller he is loved and wanted and should download his show in hugh number to convince him to carry on. I also think everyone would benefit from tuning into Mondays too. Which is made a lot easier by the fact that the entire back catalogue is available to download and stream.

Anyway, support Mr Miller in MillahSeconds and in his fight against the Monkey Menace.

All hail, Millllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

ASP.NET AJAX and Beyond

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Well ASP.NET Ajax is out and has been for a little while now. I have been using it in apps off and on since about March last year. I have to say, Update Panels are the simplest way I have seen to get AJAX going on whatever application you want. They are soooo easy to plug in and get working its insane. The rest of the framework is also powerful and used in conjunction with other controls, especially on Intranet applications makes some really cool things possible.
Going forward there is also XBAP which although isnt exactly a web based technology ( I think its a windows based technology delivered over the web, like ClickOnce smart clients) it does, for windows users, look like a really super powerful web application and will make intranet development a very powerful concept when its really here and in use. It effectivly allows you to deploy a WPF XAML application to the client in a browser window.
Also in the future for web applications is WPF/E. This is a cross platform/browser (via plugins) technology that allows web developers to make things that look real clever like flash, but using .NET technology, making it easier to localise and integrate into large schale business and ecommerce systems. This is a real cool technology that I am definately going to be watch.
 
I think the landscape for web development is going to change a great deal for MS developers over the next few years and while it seems a bit daunting at the moment when you think about all the new things there are to learn, I’m sure it is going to be easy to move from one to the other and benefits that can be gained from a UI point of view seem to be enormous. I think we are on the verge of the web becoming a really useable and simple platform for integration of services web xml and webservices allowing systems to talk, and these new presentation technologies which will allow people to interact with it easily and will enable us as developers to make UI’s that people will want to use.
 
Let me know what you guys think about these new tools.
 

Windows Live Writer

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This is my first post through Windows Live Writer. Its a test as much as a demo of the software. It seems like a handy little tool. It has spell checking and basic layout options and of course enables you to edit you blog posts offline. This is handy for me as I spend 3 hours a day on the train and can always think of things to blog when I’m on my laptop coding, but I don’t have Internet on the train.

Any, test complete, tool is cool.

 

Wooooooooow!

 

I was just looking for the download link for Live Writer to add it to the above post, when I came across another cool Live Spaces feature : "Blog from your phone". The sales blurb says:

"Blog from your mobile phone. Enable “email publishing” under Settings. Get your unique email address for blogging. Email blog entries from your mobile phone to this address from anywhere in the world where your phone has Internet access."

That is also cool as I have a Windows Mobile 5 phone with full keyboard and things, this will make blogging even easier.

 

Ciaran

Happy New Year

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Well its a new year. In fact it has been for a while but I have been very busy this year so far with a development project I have been working on. It has made my spare time suffer a lot which has reduced the amount of time I have been able to spend in the communities. I have some things I am going to post up here soon, little tools to use while developing.
 
Well thats all I have time for now, just a ping to confirm I’m alive.