For the next few days (Friday - Sunday) I am taking a long weekend with the family.  I am going to "un-plug" as much as possible.  I am going to surprise Jodie by trying not to power up the laptop, not blogging, creating no tweets (the new technical term for a Twitter message) and only occasionally glancing at the e-mail on my Blackjack.  Wish me luck!

TechEd 2007

Next week I will be at TechEd 2007.  With the PDC being postponed, I am really starting to look forward to TechEd as an opportunity to get some great information (and see some fantastic presentations) on Visual Studio Orcas and Silverlight.  I will try and post a couple of blog entries from TechEd.

I have been very busy over the last few weeks with the ArcReady tour, presentations, and customer commitments and have not had a chance to starting playing working with any of the new technologies that Microsoft seems to be releasing at break neck speeds.  I really need to carve out at least 4 hours per week where I can start working with the new technologies.  So here are some of the technologies that I am thinking about tackling and I would like your input on projects that I can work on (feel free to leave a comment):

Silverlight - Silverlight 1.1 (Alpha) has the ability to call Web Service endpoints.  I was thinking about putting together something that used the public web services exposed by either Flickr.com or Amazon.com.  I think you could do some real interesting data visualizations with Silverlight and public web services.

Facebook - Microsoft announced a Facebook Developer Toolkit just last week.  Jon Rauschenberger and Clarity Consulting put this toolkit together.  What I like about this toolkit is that it is a great example of taking an Open API and wrapping it in managed components so that it is easy for developers to work with.  This might even get me to create a Facebook account.

Popfly - Popfly (Alpha) is a mashup creator that allows "drag and drop" style programming to create interesting applications using blocks.  Mashups are a becoming increasingly popular (more on that later).  If you sign up for a Popfly account, add me as a friend (User name: Bottom9th Home Page: http://www.Popfly.ms/users/Bottom9th).

These along with the other projects (AJAX Web Site and Vista Sidebar Gadget) that I have on the back burner will keep me busy while I wait to be able to create applications for the Surface. 

I came across this in the local paper (the dead tree version) today in a job listing for a web designer.  It is with total irony that the opening is with the local paper that advertisement appeared in:

Requirements

Qualified candidates must demonstrate a proficiency in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash as well as HTML, XHTML, and CSS. You should feel comfortable without using WYSIWYG editors.

I was really take aback by the wording of the job posting.  I will give them some benefit of the doubt that what they meant to say was that they want someone who understands HTML / XHTML / CSS and not someone who realizes solely upon a tool to work magic.  Of course it could be that they are saying that they are so cheap that they will not be providing you any tools other than notepad and paint to do your job (but I doubt that).

Do we really want people to work without WYSIWYG Editors?

I can remember a time when it was a badge of honor to say that you coded HTML in notepad and did not rely upon commercial tools like FrontPage or free tools like hotdog (man am I dating myself by mentioning that tool!).  There is something to be said for picking a tool based upon the quality of the markup that it produces.  Example:  FrontPage created web sites that required special extensions to be installed on the server for some features to work, thus limiting the portability of the code.  Another Example: DreamWeaver has a bad reputation for creating heavy HTML code that is hard to pull into development tools like Visual Studio or Eclipse (I even saw a contract once that forbid the design agency from turning over HTML that was created in that tool).  Many tools will tend to put formatting code code in the markup itself instead of the more modern style of external CSS files.  All these are reasons to pick a better tool, but not reasons to get comfortable with not using a tool.

I for one can no longer do much coding without a tool.  I am still "old school" in that I do much of my coding in the HTML view as opposed to the design surface.  My productivity is still greatly enhanced with auto balancing tags, autocorrection when I fat finger something (or at least a warning) and intellesense.

As for that job listing....I think I would rather hire someone who can work magic in a WYSIWYG editor and is highly productive than someone who is comfortable in plain text and their work product looks like it was created in plain text.

The PDC that was scheduled for October of this year has been postponed (no reschedule date has been announced).  I have been asking a lot of people "Hey are you going to TechEd this year" and the answer that I have gotten from a lot of people has been "I am skipping TechEd this year because I am saving my training for the PDC".  So I am sure that a lot of people are disappointed, because the PDC is such a special event for developers.

I was talking with Joe Stagner about the PDC just last week at PHP|Tek and one of the customers we were with asked "What makes you decide to have a PDC?".  Joe said "We have a PDC when we have something to say about future technology".  There is no set schedule (although it looked like it was lining up to happen every other year).  Does this mean that Microsoft has nothing to say about future technologies?  We have said a lot about future technologies is just the past few weeks, primarily with all the announcements about Silverlight at MIX07 (go here and here on Josh Holmes' blog).  It just means they need a little more time to make the PDC the event that all developers expect it to be.  I can wait, especially when we have so much new stuff to play with right now.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jodieandlarry/508905947/
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

We kicked off the spring ArcReady tour a couple of weeks ago and it is off to a great start.  I had some concern that we would be able to fill a full 3 hour program just sticking to the topic of User Experience.  Boy was I wrong!  We are having trouble keeping the conversation to only 3 hours!  Part of that is our guest speaker, Chris Bernard, who has many great insights to tell the architects in the audience about how professional designers think and operate.  The other is that the audience participation has been very good, clearly the topic of User Experience resonates with many people.  There are still several cities that the ArcReady tour will stop at, including ones that I will be at in Indianapolis (5/24) and Milwaukee (6/12).  Check out http://www.ArcReady.com for the complete list of cities.

I am also working on a couple of blog posts about some of the points that Chris has brought up in our discussions at the ArcReady events.  Stay tuned (tonight I am catching up on all the photos stored on my cameras).

I have done several presentations over the last couple of weeks and overall I am very pleased with how they have gone (they could always go better).  However it seems like there are always things that pop up when giving a presentation or a demo.  So I thought I would share a few of the gotchas with you so that you can avoid them happening to you.

Plug in your laptop - no matter how charged you thing your battery is

I get about 2 1/2 to 3 hours of battery life when my Dell is fully charged - very good considering that it is powering the Bluetooth, wireless and a second hard drive in the modular drive bay.  Chris Bernard and I were doing the ArcReady event in Downers Grove last week.  Chris was going to do the first hour and 1/2 on my Dell and I was going to do the second hour and 1/2 on an ACER machine that is set up for demos.  No need to plug in the Dell......Wrong!  Chris had set the laptop into presentation mode (a best practice), we had plugged in a presenter's mouse, we had an external drive hooked up that had Chris's presentation on it and finally it was plugged into the overhead projector.  All of which draw extra power over when I am just banging out e-mail on the laptop.  The battery did not last an hour and we got no warning that it was going to shut down because PowerPoint was in "show mode".

It is okay to be late to a user group meeting - unless you are the presenter

On Friday night I had the opportunity to present to the Web Design Meetup group which is also the Milwaukee Area Adobe User Group.  I was grateful that the user group leader, Luke Kilpatrick, would allow me to present Silverlight to the group.  I always want to put on a good presentation, but I especially wanted to make a good showing for the Adobe group.  I live about 15-20 minutes from the user group meeting, so I left 45 minutes before the meeting start time.  I ran smack into a huge traffice jam going to Miller Park for the Twins @ Brewers game.  The game was a sell out and to complicate matters all the parking lots were closed, so all the cars on the freeway had nowhere to go.  I had to call Luke and tell him that I was running late.  In the end I was only about 5 minutes late to the meeting and everybody understood.

Sometimes it pays to run late.  About 1 hour and 15 minutes into the presentation a guy walked in to the user group (so over an hour late).  He only got to see about 10 minutes of the presentation and most of that was the Q&A period.  We ended with a raffle of Vista Ultimate that I brought as a give away.  The guy that came in late won the copy of Vista.

Ask if there is anything you should know about the A/V Equipment

I was at the Microsoft Office in Indianapolis tonight for the first ever Team System SIG.  Paul Hacker started his presentation at about 6:10 PM (after the pizza and the introductions) about 5 minutes into his presentation the entire system shut down - the entire system!  It took me a minute to figure out that the A/V system had a shutdown time of 6:00 PM every night.  The clock must have been off by a few minutes.  The worst part of it was that you had to wait for the projector to shut down completly before you could power the system back up.

TV in Bathroom Mirror
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

My son and I went to a McDonald's on Sunday (we had to get a Shrek Happy Meal you understand).  I don't get to McDonald's very often on account of I am more of a Burger King guy myself.  I was surprised when we walked in and saw this McDonald's had 3 TVs in the restaurant.  And these were really nice flat panel HD models - definitely not the 12" black and white you used to see behind the bar at the local tavern.  They also had a nice sitting area with a couch and a couple of chairs in one corner of the restaurant.  Each TV seemed to have "theme" around which channel they were tuned to.  In one corner that seemed to be more family oriented they were showing kids shows, one had a news program on and the one near the sitting area with the couch had the National Geographic channel.

The real shocker was when Hunter and I went to the bathroom to wash our hands.  They had a TV built into the bathroom mirror.  The picture here does not quite capture what a cool effect it is.  It looks like it is being "beamed" onto the mirror like a hologram, but in reality where the TV is built in it is a glass pane and not a true mirror.  In keeping with the notion of the "theme" for each TV it was predictably enough tuned to ESPN's SportsCenter.  I wonder what the one in the ladies room was tuned to.

Media (of all types) seem to be finding us in more and more places and of course with all types of media comes advertisements.  How effective are these new forms of "media everywhere" advertising?  I am sure that it is hard to measure and only time will tell, but I can guess this is a trend that will not reverse itself any time soon.  I can tell you that I stood in the bathroom for at least 30 seconds longer than I would have otherwise to see who won the White Sox @ Cubs game.

I try to keep this blog as work related as possible, but this post will be an exception.  I am a big fan of podcasts.  I have a Zune that has 100s of songs on it, but I rarely use it to listen to music because I spend most of my time listening to Podcasts on the device.  I have an eclectic mix of podcasts that I listen to: lots of technology related ones and several news oriented ones, but one of my favorite podcasts is the Baseball History Podcast.  It is a podcast done by a baseball fan (not a professional broadcaster) named Bob Wright, who lives in California and is a die hard Angels fan.  He has done the show for a little over a year and does 2 episodes a week during the season and 1 during the offseason.  The show lasts from 7 minutes to 20 minutes depending on the topic and generally follows the format of talking about a player, a baseball term and then a ballpark.

Recently I traded a few e-mails with Bob asking him to do major league baseball parks (both past and present) during the third segment of the show (until the first of the year it was primarily done on minor league parks).  He mentioned to me that I could send him the information on one of the ballparks if I wanted to.  After procrastinating for a couple of months I finally sat down one Staturday night and pounded out the "History of Milwaukee County Stadium" - the abridged version of course.  Since I had listened to dozens of the episodes of the show, I knew Bob Wright's style very well and wrote it with him in mind.  I must have done a good job with it, because Bob recorded it word for word from the e-mail I sent him.  You can check out the episode at the following location or the iTunes Podcast directory.  My segment starts about 6:10 into the episode if you are not interested in learning more about Frank Howard (but give the whole episode a listen):

http://bhp.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=215312

Sorry for the late notice on this one.  I am going to be giving a short overview of Silverlight tonight at the Milwaukee Web Design Meetup group.  I am going to be showing some of the canned demos, but will also be slinging some code during the presentation.  I am going to try and show as little Powerpoint as possible (I promise).  I am going to be focusing on the 3 most ground-breaking things with Silverlight:

• The new designer / developer paradigm that XAML can bring
• The need for Rich Internet Applications in the next generation web
• The power of server side and client side coding

Joe on PHP
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

One of my favorite sessions at the MIX Conference was "Partying with PHP" by Joe Stagner whose official title is Senior Program Manager, but would rather go by the title of "Microsoft's Opinionated Misfit Geek". Joe is one guys responsible for the large number of ASP.NET AJAX Videos that are are on the ASP.NET AJAX site.  If you have not checked them out, I would recommend them.  They are "bite sized" (some as short as 2 minutes) and a great way to learn the ins and outs of ASP.NET AJAX and the Control Toolkit.  But enough about ASP.NET AJAX, let's talk about PHP.

Humorous Moment

Part of Joe's presentation was on running PHP on IIS on Windows Servers (as opposed to the more typical scenario of PHP on Apache on Linux).  Joe wanted to address some of the typical concerns about IIS, so he asked the open ended question "What are the worst things about IIS?"  I think that Joe was looking for the typical responses of "Security" or "Hard to configure in a Web Farm".  Somebody shouted from the back of the room:

"It only runs on Windows"  Joe took the comment in stride. 

What is interesting about PHP?

I have been interested in PHP for a while.  I don't profess to be an expert on PHP in any way, shape or form (I can fumble around with the language itself and get the basics to work).  Most of my direct working experience has been working with PHP developers in interoperability situations (long story short I built an application for a customer that PHP sites could interact with - It was a REST based application before we were calling it REST).

Some of the best sites on the Internet are written in PHP

One of my favorite sites in Flickr and while it uses a number of technologies, but much of the site is written in PHP.  Read the book Building Scalable Websites by Cal Henderson if you want to get an insight into how PHP is used on Flickr.

PHP Shows the power of community 

PHP has a very rich community environment.  If I want to add a forum to my PHP site, I have several good options to choose from.  ASP.NET has a couple good community projects, but nothing on the scale of what PHP has to offer. 

PHP | Tek Next Week

Joe Stagner will be in Chicago next week speaking at the PHP | Tek conference. I was lucky enough to get into the conference, because it is now sold out.  I will try and post a blog entry or two from the conference and let you know how it goes (and of course report on any other humorous moments). 

I went to the Web414 meeting last night up at MSOE.  I heard about the group at Barcamp Madison last March (They were a sponsor of the event and had a large presence there) and this was the first chance that I got to attend one of the meetings.  The group has the feel of a Barcamp with a very relaxed and participatory feel to it.  The presentations are very informal and you are encouraged to participate in open discussions before, during and after the presentations. 

There were 2 topics covered and I learned a lot during each presentation:

iStockPhoto - Mike Rohde introduced a resource for web developers and web masters to get photos for use on their web sites at a very low cost.  He also demonstrated how he has used the stock photos on a number of customer sites.   

Ruby on Rails - Tim Bailen gave an overview and demo of Ruby on Rails.  This was a nice introduction to Rails that showed some of the power of the convention versus configuration philosophy of the rails framework.  This was the first time that I saw RadRails in action, which is an IDE for Rails.

If you are interested in web technologies or web design I would encourage you to attend a future meeting.  I volunteered to give an introduction to Silverlight and the Expression tools at a future meeting - but not the June 14th meeting.  I already have a commitment that night.  :-(

I thought one of the coolest parts of MIX was all of the people that you got to meet.  I got to meet Jeff, Scott and Whurley and a bunch of other great people.  One of my favorite people to meet was Erica O'Grady, who is part of the technology community in Houston, TX (but don't expect to find her just there - she travels far and wide to barcamps and other community events).  During our conversation at MIX, Erica told me that she is "the number 4 Erica on Google" and has the goal of becoming the number 1 Erica on Google.  I told her that I would help her out by giving a little link love on my blog.

When she told me this I instantly thought of the entry that Eric Sink made on how he had a higher Google rank than Eric Clapton (did anybody else notice the whole Eric / Erica connection?).  I started to wonder how it is that Erica O'Grady could have a higher page rank than say Erica Kane, who has been a character on the TV Show All My Children since 1970!  After all Erica Kane has a wikipedia article and Urge Overkill even wrote a song about her (titled Erica Kane).  Could it be that Erica Kane is played by the actress Susan Lucci, so when articles are written the links are split between Susan Lucci and Erica Kane?  Could it be some technical reasons about how sites are indexed?  Or could it be that technically oriented people are still the dominate creator of content on the Internet?

Notes 

1. Erica O'Grady got as high as number 3 on the Google rank recently, but lost some ground this week and is currently at number 5.
2. Don't ask me why I know the names of Soap Opera characters.

Scott Hanselman is starting an online pledge drive for the American Diabetes Association.  I am planning on donating between May 9th and May 11th, because Larry O'Brien is matching donations during that time period (many other people are offering to match donations as well, not sure of the time frame or the amounts).  In addition to Larry's match, Microsoft will also match my donation as well so whatever amount I throw in will be tripled.  I urge you to consider donating as well.

Scott is a fantastic guy.  He gives back to the technology community in oh so many ways.  Want to see one?  Look at the source code for the page you are viewing and you will find his name in at least one of the javascript comments.  He is the lead developer for dasBlog, the engine that many of us use for our blogs.  He also is a frequent presenter at community events like Deeper in .NET last year in Milwaukee.  I ran in to him at MIX a few days ago and despite needing to find his room (long story), he took a couple minutes to chat with some of us.

Personal Connections

I give money to the ADA every year anyway, because my mom was diagnosed with diabetes about 23 years ago.  Joining Team Hanselman is just a way to give an extra shot in the arm to the donation that I would be giving anyway.  My mom has done very well with her treatments because she is very diligent about it.  The ADA is doing a lot to help people with education programs, early screening for high risk people and research into better treatment that helps everybody who is living with the disease now.  All this while keeping their long term goal of finding a cure moving forward.

I also want to take a moment to point you to a diabetes resource site: http://www.dia-log.com.  My friend Mike built the site from the ground up (with a little help from some of his friends).  The site will let you log and monitor your blood sugar level and it cost nothing to use (it is a labor of love with a few ads on the page to try and recover the hosting costs).  I know that he has people from all around the world using the site.  Check it out and point friends or family that may have diabetes to the site.

Chicago VSTS User Group

Last month I mentioned that there was a Team System User Group forming in Chicago.  Despite the freak April snow storm that kept some people away the first meeting was well attended and the group is off to a great start.  They are preparing for their second meeting coming up on May 9th.  Clark Sells a VSTS Ranger from Microsoft Consulting will be speaking at the event and his topic will be Continuous Integration with TFS and MSBuild.  Here are the details of the event:

When:
Wednesday May 9, 2007 from 6:00pm – 9:00pm

Where:
Microsoft Corporation
77 West Wacker Dr, Suite 2300
Chicago, IL 60601

Registration:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032339094

Indianapolis Team System SIG

Indianapolis is also starting a Team System group, but they are forming it as a Special Interest Group of the Indianapolis .NET Developers Association.  For their first meeting they will give an overview of Team System (VSTS and Team Foundation Sever).  The speaker with be Paul Hacker, who is forming the SIG along with Jason Stanke of Sogeti.  I will be at the first meeting helping to kick it off (I am also in town for the ArcReady event the next day).

When:
Wednesday May 23, 2007 from 6:00pm – 8:00pm

Where:
Microsoft Corporation
Parkwood Business Park, Building Four
500 E. 96th St., Suite 460
Indianapolis, IN 46240

Registration:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032340063&culture=en-US

Next City?

If you are not in Chicago or Indianapolis (Milwaukee or Madison or one of the other cities in the Midwest District) and are interested in starting a Team System Group (User Group or SIG), please let me know and I can help you get it started.  Starting a group like this is a great way to get involved in the community and meet some really great people.