Who are you?

Wow. Sitting in WCF Master class.

16 (excellent developer) dudes. No ladies here.

Here's the link to my slide deck and code that I presented at the Portland Code Camp. Organizing this content and presenting it was a ton of fun and great way to dive into WCF and CardSpace. My laptop had some problems chatting with the projector (guess it wasn't using WS-* protocols) so my backup plan of toting my own projector around all day proved worthwhile. I did have to run a bit and scraped a message level encryption demo and all of the OpenID demo due to time constraints. :(

Jason Mauer recorded the session though, so I'm curious to see how well it looks from the tripod.

Now I'm on the east coast and 8:30am comes a little earlier in the morning here than it does on the west coast. Its the first break in the Master WCF class with Brian Noyes and we've already had one Carl Franklin siting. Booya!! I'm hoping I can get a tour of Pwop Studios sometime this week while I'm in New London.

I had a need attach a JavaScript function to the window.onload event today; I was fairly constrained in what I could do. This was an existing system and I couldn't go mucking around in anything I pleased.

Simon Willison came to the rescue with an excellent blog post on just what I needed - a way to register functions for window.onload that wouldn't trample those who came before me. Simon's code is brilliant!

function addLoadEvent(func) 
{ 
   var oldonload = window.onload;

   if (typeof window.onload != 'function') 
   { 
      window.onload = func; 
   } 
   else 
   {
      window.onload = 
         function() 
         { 
            if (oldonload) 
            { 
               oldonload();
            }

            func();
         } 
   } 
} 

addLoadEvent(nameOfSomeFunctionToRunOnPageLoad); 
addLoadEvent( function(){ /* more code */ } );

The PDX Code Camp is next weekend, May 19th and 20th. I've been preparing a talk on how to create and use X.509 certificates. Developers need this technology for local testing of plain old ASP.Net sites, Web Services Enhancements (WSE) or Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) code.

The Windows SDK and Visual Studio.Net have some good tools for helping developers use certificates. I'll show some certificate basics, common examples of certs in action and tools that help us along the way. My goal is to get the session attendees comfortable with creating & installing certificates on their local machine in a variety of code scenarios - that seems like a reasonable task for a 60 minute presentation and 15 minutes of Q & A.

Just for fun, I worked on a local checkout of DotNetOpenID and implemented SSL for the authentication steps. A lot of the other code in the presentation is based on the excellent examples from Michele Leroux Bustamante. She does a great job of providing info on these topics for the developer community.

I have to leave for New London, CT on Sunday so I can only attend one day of this developer event. Normally, that would suck big time, but I'm also gearing up for a week long IDesign WCF Master Class at Carl Franklins house. When it rains, it pours!

Wow! This is a pleasant surprize. The DotNetNuke site posted one of the sites we built in their showcase. It has a handsome number of stars lit up in the rating field too! The Los Angeles site is nice, but I think one of the other sites gets my vote for favorite. This is a partial list of the sites, including thumbnail images.

In 2006, Pop Art built new sites for SelecTruck dealers located all over the United States. about 24 sites in all; we did one for Pluto too (the moon er... object) since we built up so much steam. The sites share the same backend components, connect to a content syndication service as well as hosting their own unique content. Each site has a custom skin that promotes the ideals of the given dealership.

A great job by the entire team!

There are tons of blog entries like this one explaining how to get intellisense for WPF/e using the February 2007 CTP. The SDK for that release has a file named wpfe.xsd and you drop it into your VS.Net schema folder here:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas

I'm using the Silverlight 1.1 alpha bits, and the 1.1 SDK doesn't have a file named wpfe.xsd, so I was baffled for a minute. The Silverlight 1.1 SDK is laid out quite differently and comes in a handy zip file instead of a chunky MSI file like its predecessor.

Perhaps its just too early on a Sunday morning, but it took me a few minutes to realize that (A) the 1.1 SDK does have a file named Silverlight.xsd and (2) dropping Silverlight.xsd into my VS.Net schema folder does the trick. I'm going back to bed.

Hey, did you ever have a booger on your nose and walk around for a while before anyone told you about it? Maybe no one told you about it at all?

That's how I feel right now.

For some reason, I had Trackbacks enabled in my blogging software. So idiots all over the Internet were taking pot shots at my blog and adding their links to posts on my site without my explicit knowledge. I had barnacles all over the damn place. Damn!!!!

Shame on me.

I've disabled this cool feature on my site now. Furthermore, I've deleted all of the existing trackback data so the links to unscrupulous websites have been removed. I don't think there are ways to make evil links to my site now, outside of going through the steps to leave a comment. I suppose time will tell if I'm right.

Frankly, I'm surprized the search engines even ranked my site with all of these crap links on it. I ought to have paid more attention to who was reading/linking to my blog when it started getting popular.

I'd disable comments, but (a) I like getting them and (2) Scott Vandehey would say it isn't really a blog then.

 I'm gearing up for my week-long excursion to New London, Connecticut in late May for some Windows Communication Foundation training at Carl Franklin's house. This is going to be awesome. Brian Noyse is teaching it. Here's a nifty fact from Brian's profile:

Brian got started with programming to stimulate his brain while flying F-14 Tomcats in the Navy, graduating from Top Gun and U.S. Naval Test Pilot School.

In preparation for the class, I selected WCF Step by Step by John Sharp from MS Press. This is a solid book that nicely augments the podcast with MLB that I've easily listened to over twenty times. Its so cool to pick up new things every time I listen to it on my Treo.

I've been listening to Carl and Richard's podcasts for a while now - literally years I suppose. I heard that Carl is moving his public ILT training over to Mark Dunn's place in Atlanta to make space for more podcast studios. So this sounded like one of the last opportunities to catch a flight to the east coast, albeit the nearby Radisson, for good reason.

Now that its early May and MLB's book is out, I suspect I'll head over to Powell's someday soon pick up a copy of Learning WCF: A Hands On Guide. I have a layover in Chicago and only so much battery life. Have you ever tried to find an outlet at O'Hare to recharge? WTF!?!?!?!

Yep. I had a feeling. My buddy, Kelly, just called fro MIX07 where they just announced the 1.0 beta and the 1.1 alpha of Silverlight today.

The 1.1 alpha has the sweet C# code inside it. I can't wait to get started. It also has ominous "for developers only" text next to the download link. Who else would come to this page?

I used SharpReader for a long time, then briefly used the RSS Reader in Outlook 2007, after an even briefer stint with IE7's RSS reader client (ack!). I don't categorize myself as superstitious, but was else do you call it when you suspect all those posts and media downloads in Outlook 2007 are slowing down your system and you have no real data to back it up?

I liked the Outlook 2007 reader because I was horrible at opening SharpReader on my laptop. I always had Outlook open. It took a while to launch SharpReader, but it was a great application. Then, I'd open SharpReader on a weekend and be horrified by (a) the number of posts that I was behind, and (2) the amount of information that I could have used during the previous week. I'm always looking to get my compile time down, so right or wrong, I'd close applications left and right to give my Dell Latitude D610 as much horsepower as it can wield during the week.

My buddy, Scott, turned me on to Google Reader. As a big time RSS fan boy and an even bigger nerd than I, his opinion is to be respected.

So this weekend, I imported my OPML file into Google's RSS Reader and away I go. So far, I'm pretty impressed. There's a few things I'd like to do, such as return certain posts to "unread" status as I want to come back to them later and rename some folders, but all in all, I likey.

Now, I can open my RSS reader without the cycles of a big application. ( type my new magic word, "gr", in SlickRun and launch my reader anytime I like. Booya!

For no particular reason, I decided to make this weekend a Silverlight Cram Session. Two of my fellow developers are on a plane (and perhaps have already started the party) at MIX07.

From everything that's been said in the prior two weeks, I expect some pretty sweet announcments at MIX. My friend, Erik, is also getting ramped up on Silverlight. He presented at Innotech and is giving v2 at the PDX Code Camp.

So, I downloaded the Feb 2007 Silverlight SDK and the Feb 2007 CTP Sample Pack. For some odd reason, I feel that they are already obsolete. However, they served their purpose quite well. The WPF/E Quickstart that comes with the SDK rocks - you should just block out some time and go through it. The author of this content did an spectacular job of explaining new technology in a way that just worked. I can't recall anything that was more well written. Its just brilliant.

I bit it off in 30 minute chunks and devoured the entire Quickstart samples on Saturday afternoon. I started writing each example manually, and then by the middle, I succumbed to the clip-board inheritence methodology.

It's weird to think back to Friday when I had just a conceptual idea of what WPF and Silverlight does from various podcasts on Channel9, Hanselminutes, DotNetRocks and DNRTV. Now, after doing it for several hours, I get it.

Sweet.

This is one of the biggest reasons to love my job; and boy, do I. Good stuff like this gives you the will to come back for more, day after day, week after week.

I'm still in a mode where NotePad2 or VS.Net 2005 is my best friend for XAML. Perhaps I'll shed that kinship and move on to Expressions later. For now, I'll just bask in the glory of learning something new and wondering how I can implement various types of media experiences with lines, rectangles, elipsi (pural?), polygons, polylines, and paths.