I'm digging the http://www.nbcolympics.com site in Silverlight. I can see sports and interviews that I'm interested in and review close plays as much as I like. I've shown this to the wife and the extended family over the weekend.

One thing that really keeping this from being the best thing ever is the user experience. For example, the Control Room is a place where I can select up to four videos to watch at once; one large and three side videos. That's really cool. However, the extended family was the real test; and they were a little frustrated.

The sucky part of the Control Room is the search interface. Here, I'm given a tiny up/down arrow at the bottom of the thumbnail stack. This is something visitors will do many times, every time they visit the site to see the next six or previous six videos in the stack. Why not make this click experience really easy to hit with big, phat arrow overlay icons? Maybe even advertise key strokes that do this. Its just really frustrating for non-technical people to use.

There's too many obfuscated clicks like this in the app. Just a few slight UX improvements would have gone a long way here. NBC Silverlight team, I give you a straight B here. Good job on the insight to give us what we want (choice in viewing Olympic events), but a "meh" job in giving me to the tools to make that choice.

There's a really cuil set of photos showing the Large Hadron Collider being setup in Europe. Very high tech stuff.

Just a little bit down from the top of the photo stack is an image of someone way down the aisle in the server room. You get the idea that there are just racks and racks and racks of servers with a mind for effective use of power consumption, space utilization, heat and all the other green elements.

The person at the end of the aisle is working on a server. They're sitting at a workstation, typing on a keyboard... looking at a monitor. Not a slick flat screen, but a huge honking cathode ray tube monitor from 1994! Hah! That thing probably takes up the space of three or four servers and gives off as much heat!

Joel Spolsky (of http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) and Jeff Atwood (of http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/) selected my audio question on their new podcast, episode #6.

Stackoverflow is a new property created by a joint venture between these two blogging juggernauts.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/

So far, their podcast is interesting like Paris Hilton. She’s famous for just being herself. Nevertheless, I am now famous.

I really do look forward to each new episode. Its a nice change of pace from the others that decorate my new iPhone. It's a little like a Seinfeld episode too, its a show about nothing, but in that span of 30 minutes, something interesting always happens. I love the history that Joel sprinkles in and the minutia that intrigues Jeff so much.

My question picked a little bit on Jeff, but hopefully the core of it came through. It was essentially a version of the eternal buy vs. build issue, or in this case "use what's in the box" vs. "build your own" scenario. Jeff had a respectable answer that centered on what he felt was important and what he was happy to inherit from the .Net Framework.

These are the types of debates I have every day building software. Its fun to ping someone outside your normal group every now and again and see what they have to say about it.

I spent a little too long on this rainy Sunday afternoon tripping over myself. I'm using the SqlDataSource and the FormView controls in a quick prototype. I clicked the "Use optimistic concurrency" field in the SqlDataSource configuration page so it would compare the original values before updating the database.

I was going along fine when I realized the updates didn't work, but the insert was OK. After several repeated attempts with zero rows updates, I fired up the SQL Profiler and saw my update query right there, plain as day. Why wasn't the update working?

I even grabbed the SQL out of SQL Profiler and ran it through Query Analyzer - and then bam! I could see it on my screen. The milliseconds for the date time fields were all set to zero, and the actual values in the database were non-zero values. Who was loosing the milliseconds?

Finally, it hit me. I was losing the data.

I was trying to be real smart about setting the hidden "Created" and "Modified" DateTime fields during the updating event of the SqlDataSource control. I would do a similar assignment during the update event for just the "Modified" DateTime field.

          protected
void SqlDataSource1_Inserting(object sender, SqlDataSourceCommandEventArgs e) { DateTime
now = DateTime.Now; e.Command.Parameters["@Created"].Value = now; e.Command.Parameters["@Modified"].Value
= now; } 
        

As I was peering at this method, it struck me that I was inadvertently setting the fields to a value that was too granular for my SqlDataSource object. It wasn't passing back the millisecond value, so I compensated by making sure the value is always zero milliseconds, like so:

          protected
void SqlDataSource1_Inserting(object sender, SqlDataSourceCommandEventArgs e) { DateTime
now = DateTime.Now; now = now.AddMilliseconds(1000 - now.Millisecond); e.Command.Parameters["@Created"].Value
= now; e.Command.Parameters["@Modified"].Value = now; } 
        

With this adjustment, my inserts and updates are playing nicely. Yay!

So, now that i works, I'm still not real happy with it. I'd much rather have the code check a single timestamp column named "Version" than see all that bloat in there.