Frank La Vigne

Is That An Insult?

Frank — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:32:00 GMT

It looks as if someone took the opportunity to insult the systems and network of a company in a WikiPedia entry on Rube Goldberg.

As readers of the DailyWTF already know, Rube Goldberg has inspired many a system design.

Technorati Tags: Rube Goldberg,WikiPedia,Humor

Del.icio.us Links for 7/18/2008

Frank — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:11:00 GMT

Update to Community Megaphone Map

Frank — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 01:32:00 GMT

I just made the first update to my Silverlight-powered Community Megaphone Map: I added Washington DC.

DC's absence is a glaring omission in the otherwise wonderful map of the US in XAML I started with.

Fortunately, DC's shape isn't to complicated and I found a simplified map of our nation's capitol.

I drew up the shape in Expression Design by starting with a rectangle, rotating 45 degrees, messing around with adding points and moving them around until I got the right shape.

Hmm, that would make a cool screen cast.

Technorati Tags: Expression Design,Blend,Silverlight,Community Megaphone,DC

Del.icio.us Links for 7/16/2008

Frank — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:11:00 GMT

Can the video game hot streak last? - On the Level- msnbc.com
YouTube - Virgin Atlantic Safety Video
Who thought a safety video could be this cool
Tablet PC Managed Code Developers: Visual Studio 2008 Has a Glitch That May Affect You - The AlpineInker
Grrrr.

Del.icio.us Links for 7/14/2008

Frank — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:23:00 GMT

World's oldest blogger signs off at age 108 - Gadgets- msnbc.com
Six Thinking Hats
Interesting approach to problem solving.
Laser Flashlight Hack! - Video
Turn that old burner into a dangerous gadget?
Word.Net's Ambigram.Matic

A Bit of Perspective

Frank — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:13:00 GMT

I saw this Pearls Before Swine comic yesterday and you can easily swap the word blog for Twitter.

The next time Twitter's homepage sports the "fail whale," I'll keep in mind that human civilization existed before Twitter and will likely go on if Twitter's offline for a few hours.

Technorati Tags: Pearls Before Swine,Blogging,Twitter

Community Megaphone Silverlight Map

Frank — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 19:42:00 GMT

Local Developer Evangelist Andrew Duthie put together Community Megaphone last year.

Since then, it's grown by leaps and bounds from a Mid-Atlantic regional site to a site with national reach.

The site's UI is simple and clean with an orange and gray colors scheme.

Simple is good, but I decided kick it up a notch by adding a Silverlight touch with the Community Megaphone Map.

The map consumes RSS feeds from the site and displays the same information with a bit more RIA splash.

It also was a lot of fun to build and see it come together from idea to execution.

I'm still working on the map to give it a little more polish, but it's functionally complete and a great way to browse for community events for folks who are more visually-inclined.

Over the course of the next week, I'll dissect the map and how I built it.

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Community Megaphone,Devigner

Del.icio.us Links for 7/12/2008

Frank — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:14:00 GMT

When will a Mars sample return to Earth? - Mars- msnbc.com
Addicted to Digital Media - The iPocalypse continues
We Didn't Start The Fire
A cool fan-mutation style collage animation of all the people and events mentioned in the Billy Joel song.

Making Mobility Work for Your Business Webcast

Frank — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 12:53:00 GMT

I came across this mobility webcast from ITNews.

Making Mobility Work for Your Business

Date: 24 Jul 2008
Time: 11:00 AM
Duration: 60 mins
Explore the advantages and disadvantages of 3G and mobile technologies.
With an overview of the technology’s development and examples of strides being made in embedded 3G by Toshiba, this free net seminar will help you decide what 3G mobility can bring to your business.

Since IT News is based in Australia, I imagine that the 11:00 AM time given is a local time.

Fortunately, they seem to record their webcasts and make them available on-demand, no matter what time zone you live in.

Technorati Tags: Mobility,Tablet PC,Mobile Computing,3G,Toshiba

Silverlight Summer User Group Events

Frank — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:55:00 GMT

From Community Megaphone:

Philly .NET "An Evening with Billy Hollis: WPF + Silverlight" on July 16th.

[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]

The Charlottesville .NET User Group has Kevin Hazzard talking about "Accessing Web Services from Silverlight" on July 17th.

[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]

The Tech Valley .NET Users Group near Albany, NY has John Papa presenting "Data Services with Silverlight 2" on July 22nd.

[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,WPF,XAML,User Groups,Developer Community

Del.icio.us Links for 7/11/2008

Frank — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:07:00 GMT

FCC chief says Comcast violated Internet rules - Internet- msnbc.com
Sadly, FiOS won't be available at the new house and Comcast is the cable co. FTL.
Slashdot | Dell Colludes With RIAA, Disables Stereo Mix
The Racketerring and Intimidation Association of America is at it again.
Spammers announce World War III - Security - iTnews Australia

Updates to the Community Megaphone Plug-in

Frank — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:44:00 GMT

Here's an update to my Community Megaphone Event Plug-In.

The new version (v 1.0.0.0) has a few new elements, namely the Browse button and an "Include Images" checkbox.

Based on the checkbox, the plug-in will either output links with or without images.

The new version also has an integrated web browser that takes you the to Community Megaphone homepage.

Just click on the event you want to link to and the plug-in is smart enough to figure out the Event ID.

When you've found the event you're looking for, click Choose This Event.

If you get stuck on a page you didn't want to be on, just click the CM Homepage button to get back to the homepage.

Installation

Installation remains the same as before.

First download the DLL file and copy it to the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins directory, assuming it's installed in the default directory.

Make adjustments if you've installed it in another location.

Let me know what you think!

Please send bug reports, feature suggestions, gratuitous praise, etc to me via my contact page.

Release Notes

Aside from the changes noted above, there's a fancy new About Box.

In case you're wondering about the Battleship Gray UI, the Live Writer Plug-In API only supports .NET 1.1 and 2.0 assemblies.

Meaning that WPF and LINQ are not available.

Hopefully, that will change that in the near future, but until then, no slick UI's or LINQ queries chopping through RSS.

Technorati Tags: Community Megaphone,WLW,Windows Live Writer,Plug-In

Community Megaphone Plug-In for Window Live Writer

Frank — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:44:00 GMT

Community Megaphone is a great site that Andrew Duthie put together.

Recently, the site has gone national and Andrew has been working hard at improving it.

His latest feature: geocoded RSS, which Glen Gordon put to good use by making an app that find developer events nearest you based on your location.

Here's my addition to the CM utility kit: a Plug-in for Windows Live Writer.

The plug-in adds an entry onto WLW's sidebar and Insert menu:

Once you click on "Insert CM Event," this dialog box comes up:

Browse to Community Megaphone to see the EventID the site assigned to the event you wish to blog about and enter that number in the text box.

Click OK and you'll see the following added to your blog post:

For instance, CMAP's August 2008 meeting has an EventID of 320, so if I plug in 320 to the dialog box, I get:

[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]

Future versions of the plug-in will eliminate the "browse to Community Megaphone site" step.

But for now, this is a fast and easy way to provide a link to a map and iCal file for events.

Installation

First ~~download the DLL file~~ download version 1.0.0.0 of the DLL and copy it to the C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Writer\Plugins directory, assuming it's installed in the default directory.

Make adjustments if you've installed it in another location.

Let me know what you think!

Send bug reports, feature suggestions, gratuitous praise, etc to me via my contact page.

Technorati Tags: Community Megaphone,WLW,Windows Live Writer,Plug-In

July Richmond.NET User Group Tonight!

Frank — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:20:00 GMT

At tonight's meeting of Richmond.NET, Kevin Hazzard will talk about accessing web services from Silverlight 2.

Abstract
Silverlight is a client-side technology. So it’s not really a part of your SOA strategy, right? You may want to think twice about that. SOAP and WSDL support are coming to the web desktop via Silverlight. And Silverlight has good client support for REST+ JSON/POX and RSS/ATOM-based web services, too. During this discussion, we’ll dive into data serialization, security and cross-domain access policy capabilities inside Silverlight 2 Beta 2. We also talk about the nuances and pitfalls of provisioning your web services for an Internet audience. This presentation will be heavy on coding, demonstration and interactive discussion.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it down to Richmond for his talk, but maybe I can convince him to come up here to NoVA and present.

[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,RichmondVA,Kevin Hazzard

Del.icio.us Links for 7/10/2008

Frank — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:19:00 GMT

Silverlight Control Builder Contest

Frank — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:59:00 GMT

Speaking of contests, Page Brooks and Dave Campbell have put together the Silverlight Control Builder Contest '08.

The prizes are amazing!

Check out what the 1st place winner gets:

1-Year MSDN Premium Subscription
Practically every piece of software that Microsoft makes, available for download for 1-year.
Your choice of one book from the entire O'Reilly catalog
Contributed by O'Reilly Media
Choose from a huge selection of books in the O'Reilly catalog!
Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX + WinForms + Telerik Reporting
Telerik's most comprehensive component package.

Telerik RadControls License for Silverlight (after release)
A new generation of UI controls for building Rich Interactive Applications.

Xceed Upload for Silverlight with 1-year Subscription
Quickly and easily add upload capabilities to any Silverlight 2 Beta 2 application!

$150 Amazon.com Gift Certificate

Second and third place prizes aren't too shabby either. ;)

Best of all, the submitted entries will be made available as open source and licensed to re-use.

Everybody wins!

Be sure to check out the rules.

[found via fellow AISer Pete Brown]

UPDATE: Developer Express has added the following prizes to the prize pool:

First - Dxperience Universal and $500 gift cert to something

Second - Dxperience Enterprise $250 gift cert to something

Third - CR/R $100 gift cert to something

Maybe I should enter the contest :)

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Contest,Devigner

The Night the Lights Went Out in Rockville

Frank — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:41:00 GMT

Last night's meeting of RockNUG was canceled after the power went out just as we were about to start.

The DIY User Group Session is set to take place at next month's meeting on August 13th.

I did, however, win a book in the swag drawings that were held while we waited out the power outage.

My prize? Teach Yourself ASP.NET in 24 Hours.

Since, I already know ASP.NET, I've decided to give away the book (a $29.99 value) to someone who needs to learn ASP.NET.

If you're interested, write me a paragraph on why you want to learn ASP.NET.

Here's some legal mumbo jumbo:

This giveaway is only open to US residents who are 18 years of age or older.
All contestants must be able to provide a valid U.S postal address. Prize cannot be mailed outside of the United States. Unclaimed or undeliverable prizes will be forfeited.
Contestants agree that event organizers reserve the right to disqualify any contestant for any reason.
Each person may submit one entry. Additional entries will be ignored.

If no one claims the book, I'll donate it to the swag collection at the next user group meeting or the local library.

Technorati Tags: RockNUG,ASP.NET

Presenting at RockNUG Tonight

Frank — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:56:00 GMT

I'll be doing a presentation on "Graphic Design for Developers" tonight at RockNUG's Mid-Summer DIY User Group.

Details from the site:

DIY (Do It Yourself) User Group
presented by:

Scott Lawrence: ReSharper 4.0
Angel Filev: C# 3 Features: Extensions and Lambda Expressions
Sai Daliparti: Dive into MOSS 2007
Matthew Podwysocki: Functional C#
Frank LaVigne: Graphic Design for Developers
Paul Bhorjee: MyGeneration with EntitySpaces O/RM
Vladimir Bychkov: Podcasts and Programming
Jason Fabritz: The Swaginator
Dean Fiala: WCF? WTF? FTW?
YOUR NAME HERE: Your Cool Topic

Have something you want to show everyone -- an idea, a tip, a trick, a time saver or just something cool? Tonight is the night to show it to the world (for some values of world). In five to fifteen minutes, you can become a RockNUG legend and/or have a chance to experience your own projector malfunction. As an added bonus everyone who presents gets two swag numbers!

[ Event Details | Map | Add to Calendar ]

Technorati Tags: RockNUG,RockvileMD,Devigner,Graphic Design

Del.icio.us Links for 7/8/2008

Frank — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:12:00 GMT

Del.icio.us Links for 7/6/2008

Frank — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:28:00 GMT

Swift3D and Silverlight

Frank — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:27:00 GMT

I've done a lot of work with Swift 3D in the past. [Sample 1 | Sample 2 | Sample 3 ]

Swift 3D is a 3D rendering environment for Flash that's been around for about eight years.

Now that version 5 includes Silverlight and WPF support, I decided it was time to take another look at the tool.

Check out this sample animation.

The tool works by rendering out each frame of a 3D animation into a vector graphic.

Here's an example of such a frame.

   1: <Canvas x:Name="Canvas0" Width="400" Height="300" Opacity="0">   2:     <Path Data="F1 M 84.25,85.25 L 176,70.75 L 318.5,106.75 L 207.25,132.75 L 84.25,85.25">   3:         <Path.Fill>   4:             <SolidColorBrush Color="#E9E3C5" Opacity="1"/>   5:         Path.Fill>   6:     Path>   7:     <Path Data="F1 M 84.25,85.25 L 207.25,132.75 L 211.75,269 L 94.5,185.25 L 87,117 L 84,88.5 L 84.25,85.25">   8:         <Path.Fill>   9:             <SolidColorBrush Color="#827B6B" Opacity="1"/>  10:         Path.Fill>  11:     Path>  12:     <Path Data="F1 M 318.5,106.75 L 314.75,228.75 L 224,264.75 L 211.75,269 L 207.25,132.75 L 318.5,106.75">  13:         <Path.Fill>  14:             <SolidColorBrush Color="#6D6759" Opacity="1"/>  15:         Path.Fill>  16:     Path>  17: Canvas>

All the frames are stitched together by a StoryBoard that changes the opacity to 1 from 0 in a timely manner.

   1: <Storyboard RepeatBehavior="Forever" FillBehavior="HoldEnd" BeginTime="0:0:0">   2:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas0" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>   3:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas1" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.0833333" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>   4:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas2" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.166667" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>   5:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas3" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.25" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>   6:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas4" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.333333" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>   7:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas5" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.416667" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>   8:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas6" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.5" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>   9:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas7" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.583333" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  10:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas8" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.666667" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  11:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas9" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.75" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  12:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas10" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.833333" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  13:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas11" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:0.916667" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  14:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas12" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:1" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  15:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas13" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:1.08333" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  16:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas14" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:1.16667" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  17:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas15" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:1.25" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  18:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas16" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:1.33333" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  19:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas17" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:1.41667" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  20:     <DoubleAnimation Storyboard.TargetName="Canvas18" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" From="1" To="1" BeginTime="0:0:1.5" Duration="0:0:0.0833333" FillBehavior="Stop"/>  21: Storyboard>

I've got a lot of ideas now that Swift3D is in my Silverlight Dev toolkit. :)

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,WPF,XAML,Swift 3D

Happy Fourth of July

Frank — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 16:34:00 GMT

Today is Indepence Day here in the United States.

While you're having a good time and watching the fireworks, remember those who fought an d stood up for our freedoms from 1776 until the present day.

Technorati tags: Independence Day, Fourth of July

Del.icio.us Links for 7/2/2008

Frank — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:24:00 GMT

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - DIY d12 Handbag (of Holding)
People can come up with the most interesting things.
Robot invasion! - Innovation- msnbc.com
WPF: Reducing CPU consumption for animations « C# Disciples
Oil is making millionaires in North Dakota - Yahoo! News
Citibank ATM breach reveals PIN security problems - Yahoo! News

Indexing Flash Files: The Brute Force Approach

Frank — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:58:00 GMT

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have been around for a while, but they've always had one major flaw: search engine optimization.

TechCrunch has a story about fixing this Achilles heel. [emphasis added]

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

Basically, the problem is that search engines can't "see" inside of a Flash file, called an SWF. The cool kids pronounce it as "swiff."

Macromedia/Adobe has been working on this problem for a while now.

In my heyday of working in Flash (1998-2004), one of the kludges was to include all the text in meta tags and comments on the HTML page the Flash creator automatically generated.

So, it surprises me to hear that, after all this time, the best Adobe could do was to create a player application that "acts like a virtual user going through each application."

You would think that a better approach would be to generate an index file when the SWF file gets generated and give it a standard naming convention so search engines could easily find it.

In other words, Foo.swf would reside in the same directory as Foo.index.xml.

And yes, XML would be the ideal format for the index file.

Work to Do

Michele Turner, Adobe VP, says "Google is already rolling out the SWF-indexing technology, while Yahoo still 'has some work to do.'"

Presumably, the Flash player in question doesn't render graphic content and uses the code to simulate user activity.

But is simulating user activity really the best approach?

It seems a bit brute force to me.

You have to wonder what the extra load on the search engines' servers will be.

Why not distribute the processor load across all the content creator's machines rather than at the server level?

Clever, But Not in the Way You'd Expect

Obviously, I'm a fan of Silverlight.

That having been said, this seems to me to more of a business strategy move for Adobe, rather than what's good for the users and creators of RIA sites.

Adobe can now claim that "Flash files are indexable"

Limiting that ability to Flash rather than opening it up to all RIA platforms gives Adobe a competitive edge.

Deja Vu All Over Again

There's nothing stopping Microsoft from releasing their own search engine player, but then it's up to each individual search engine company to add it.

Seems like a lot of effort for the search engine companies and increased load on their systems.

With effort comes cost and each RIA vendor will have to "convince" the search providers to add their player.

It sounds a lot like the plug-in mess of Web 1.0.

Except this time, the battle is in the server room.

[found via ForgetFoo]

Technorati Tags: Flash,RIA,Search Engine Optimization,Silverlight

Download the Internet

Frank — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:44:00 GMT

Although no one ever asked me to download the internet to a bunch of floppy disks, I'm sure the question was asked by many a n00b (newbie).

But here's a little illustration of what that process would look like.

[found via Nitin Reddy]

Technorati Tags: Humor,Internet