Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'web development'

Barnes Begins Project Nexus

Adam Kinney — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:32:00 GMT

Late last night, Scott Barnes introduced Project Nexus where the goal is to provide a vicarious experience for those who wonder whether the tagline "learn once, apply anywhere" really fits Microsoft's Rich platform story. Can you really take advantage of your .NET skills, code and tools across our multiple offerings? This where Scott steps in and says:

Well, I’m going to answer this and I’m not going to do it via lip service either. I’m going to write a complete end to end solution from scratch, in that I’m going to write code that I will be able to use throughout our entire Rich Platform. It will be a complete ACME style solution that is a living breathing application as well.

I think its great idea and I hope to help where I can. That's where this first post comes in. Scott's started the project by opening up with a Contract for the project, open for discussion. Currently his plan is to span the technologies of ASP.NET MVC + AJAX, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms, WCF and SQL Server. Is there something missing you'd like to see? Leave a comment on his post and let him know.

Sounds like a Continuum episode(s) in the works to me...

Desire is the name

Adam Kinney — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:31:00 GMT

I noticed A Website Named Desire was live today.

The content of the site includes an intriguing poster encompassing the world of the keepers of the web. Along the edge you'll find all the familiar web titles like Software Architect, Interaction Designer and Information Architect. From there you can play "Where's Waldo?" and hunt for them in the poster. There's a lot of humor embedded within the poster and its definitely worth the time to try and find a few of the "inside" jokes.

One of my favorite scenes includes a Nerf gun shoot-out which includes Capt. Kirk and an innocent Accessibility Test Engineer caught in the crossfire. Nearby a Front End Web Developer contemplates his h1 tags. (below)

To get your own 25X33" poster to hang on your wall, check out the event list on the site. The team will be floating around the conference offering their goods. Be the only one in the office with Donkey Kong, Godzilla and Guitar Hero in the same poster!

Catching up with Silverlight 2

Adam Kinney — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:24:00 GMT

Starting last week on March 5th after Silverlight 2 Beta 1 was announced, a lot has been said about Silverlight 2. Presentations have been given, demos have been shown, bits have been released, tutorials have been posted and many conversations have been had. As an attempt to catalog some of the more interesting and useful content, I'm posting my list of highlights since SL2B1 day.

Overview

In the unlikely event you haven't found where yet, you can grab the runtime and tools for Silverlight 2 Beta 1 on Silverlight.net.

Other links to help you get started include:

Building Rich Internet Applications using Silverlight 2 - MIX session presented by Joe Stegmen and Mike Harsh, Part 1, Part 2
A Whirlwind Tour - Jesse Liberty's introduction to Silverlight 2
Fundamentals Lab - This lab explores the fundamental tools and features that underpin any Silverlight application.
Breaking Changes in Silverlight 2 - This topic discusses the changes made to the Silverlight runtime and Silverlight tools between the Microsoft Silverlight 1.1 Alpha September Refresh and the MIX 2008 release.
Packaging and Application Startup - Pete Brown explores the new application model, read Part 1 and Part 2
Dynamic Animation Lab - This is a simple lawn mowing simulation that exposes different techniques of leveraging the managed Animation API in Silverlight 2.

Demos

Hard Rock Memorabilia - One of the most talked about demos at MIX08, welcome Deep Zoom!
Pulse at SXSW - mashes up twitter, del.icio.us, Technorati and flickr in a very visual and useful way
AOL email client - a full email client written in Silverlight 2
NBC Olympics - can be seen in the first keynote at MIX08 around 1:17:00, an interview with Perkins Miller is also available
TextGlow - read Word 2007 documents online with Silverlight 2
Silverlight.net Community Gallery - controls demo, RSS reader, SOAP Weather Widget and more
Tunnel Trouble - a new Silverlight-based game from Terralever
WeatherBug - designed for Silverlight Mobile, you can test the app running on the web.

Controls

Control Demo Page - see the controls in action
Source code and Unit Tests for controls - download the code
Creating Rich Dynamic User interfaces with Silverlight 2 - MIX session presented by Karen Corby
Controls Tutorial - Another Jesse Liberty tutorial
ListBox and ScrollViewer FAQs - all you ever wanted to know about them and more
File Upload Component - Wilco Bauwer builds a File upload and control and shares the source
User Controls Lab - Building Reusable Controls in Silverlight 2
Using the Silverlight 2 Canvas - a screencast by Jesse Liberty
Using Silverlight 2 Grids and Stack Panels - another great screencast by Jesse Liberty
Styling Controls - another tutorial by Jesse Liberty (he's been very busy)

Deep Zoom

Applications = Designers + Developers - MIX session presented by Celso Gomes and Kirupa Chinnathambi , Deep Zoom heatured in the second part
Hard Rock: Behind the Music with Deep Zoom - MIX Session presented by Scott Stanfield
First Attempt with MultiScaleImage - Mike Taulty shows how to implement control over Deep Zoom, followed by an update
Deep Zoom Demo - Mike Ormond shares Deep Zoom code and then adds mouse wheel support in part 2
Deep Zoom Composer Preview
Deep Zoom Composer Preview - User Guide

Mobile

Mobile Devices and Microsoft Silverlight - MIX session presented by Amit Chopra and David Kline
Using Microsoft Silverlight for Creating Rich Mobile User Experiences - MIX session presented by Giorgio Sardo
Brad Becker interview - about the recent announcement about Silverlight Mobile.
WeatherBug demo
MIXr demo
Silverlight for Mobile primer session at MIX08 - my notes from the first mobile session at MIX

Dynamic Language Runtime

Microsoft Silverlight and Dynamic Languages - MIX session presented by John Lam and Jimmy Schementi
Hello World! demo - demo from MIX session
Managed JScript and flickr -demo from MIX session
Integrating Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC - demo from MIX session
Iron Python - Jimmy Schementi's MSDN article
Iron Python and the DLR - Bill Chiles's MSDN Article
John Lam on Ruby, Ruby, Ruby - Open Space session at MIX08

Moonlight

Exploring Moonlight : Novell's Implementation of Silverlight on Linux - MIX session presented by Miguel de Icaza
Pre-Mix 08: Moonlight Updates
Channel9 works with Moonlight!

Physics

Farseer Physics Engine - an open source physics engine for Silverlight 2
Polygon Demo - Andy Beaulieu's recent demo using Farseer
Heads Will Roll demo - Chris Cavanagh updates his sample, click "move platforms" to make the wheels/heads go flying

Networking and Data

Networking and Data Lab - In this hands-on lab, you will look at using a variety of remote data sources and communication techniques to retrieve data for a Silverlight application.
Working with Data and Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight 2 - MIX Session presented by Eugene Osovetsky
Sockets Sample
Data Binding Tutorial - A Jesse Liberty tutorial

Browser Integration

Browser Integration Lab - In this hands-on lab, you will look at the places where DHTML and Silverlight meet.
Calling JavaScript functions - Tim Heuer tutorial

Tools

Silverlight Blueprint for Sharepoint - This is the answer to "how do you use Silverlight in Sharepoint?", Micheal Lehman has an interview live on Ch9
PhotoZoom - Want a Deep Zoom Album of your own? try this site. Look for the "processing" notification when attempting to view your albums, the site is rather busy right now
BlogEngine.NET Silverlight Extension - I would expect to see more of these start cropping up
Programmer Utilities - Jesse Liberty's suggested "other" tools
Telerik Controls - There are lot of cool examples under the Online demos section. Very cool to see the Animations framework in there.
ImageGear for Silverlight

Fountains of Information

Scott Guthrie - great tutorials and source of breaking news
Tim Sneath - next best place for breaking news and clarity of information
Jesse Liberty - The Silverlight Developers best friend
John Lam - Dynamic Language Runtime
Jose Fajardo - User Experience and Design
Andy Beaulieu - games and physics
Sparkling Client - a podcast about Silverlight and other RIA technologies.
Code Trip - driving around the west coast, check to see if they're coming to your neighborhood

ReStyle contest now taking submissions

Adam Kinney — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 01:16:00 GMT

The ReStyle submission form is now ready to take contest entries. If you visit the page you will be asked for your EvNet credentials. What are those? They are what you use to comment with on Channel 10 or MIX Online. And if you don't have a SignIn there should be a nice registration button there for you to click and setup your account.

The image to the right was my very attractive test ReStyle while making sure the submission tool worked properly. I think its classy, with its big typography and hand illustrations.

Ian Muir has already submitted a text only ReStyle called Bare. Like the gray it shows off how you can completely wipe the page of any images, but maintain the same clickable regions.

So how did we do that?

Although this is not the most compliant way you would set up your HTML, this works well for the specific purpose of the contest. Let's dissect the MIX logo used in the upper left of the default theme.

Here's the HTML used:

<div id="logo"> <a href="http://visitmix.com/2008/default.aspx"><span class="reStyle">MIX 08</span> <img src="images/reStyleMe.gif" alt="MIX08" /> </a> </div>

And the CSS:

#logo{ float:left; margin-top:6px; margin-left:30px; background-image:url('images/mixLogo.png'); background-repeat:no-repeat; } #logo img { width:183px; height:100px; }

.reStyle { display:none }

The advantages of this code for this contest include:

div element provides the ultimate positioning and layout functionality
a element of course provides the link we need
span provides alternate text if we choose not to use images
img provides the actual clickable surface. reStyleMe.gif is a blank gif, so it provides no visual. That comes the image set to the back ground of the div, which you can easily change in CSS.

Taking advantage of this flexibility is the gray sample ReStyle with the following CSS:

#logo{ float:left; margin:0; margin-left:30px; padding-top:20px; height:40px; } #logo .reStyle { font-weight:bold; font-size:xx-large; text-decoration:none; color:#666; } #logo .reStyle:hover { text-decoration:underline; color:#000; } #logo img { display:none; }

This effectively hides the clickable image and styles the text to look like any other link on the page.

Hopefully the HTML that we've set for the contest will allow for some great creativity for the contest. I'm looking forward to seeing what turns up next in the ReStyle Gallery.

ReStyle contest on the MIX08 site

Adam Kinney — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:18:00 GMT

Since MIX06, I have been involved with the development of the MIX site one way or another. This year is no different, I'm just a sucker for conferences about the web, design and Microsoft technologies like, hmm let's see, Silverlight (among others).

Today we've re-launched the ReStyle contest (formerly known as REMIX) by modifying the HTML to be more restyling friendly and providing a Starter Kit with the default and a sample theme. The sample theme is simply titled "gray", because that's what it does. It just grays everything out and removes images providing some technical suggestions on how you might redesign the site yourself. You can see the gray theme live on the MIX08 site.

Why would anyone want to spend the time redesigning a site using only CSS and the images they can create? Besides being educational and fun, there are also prizes.

The designers of the top three entries judged to be the best will receive:

(3) Each winner will receive a trip to attend the MIX08 Conference in Las Vegas, NV, March 5-7, 2008. Trip includes entrance into the MIX08 Conference, 3 night standard hotel accommodations, and a $1000 cash travel allowance .

- official contest rules

There it is, the big prize to work towards. A free trip to MIX08!

Now there is no time to waste. MIX08 is in 55 days and the contest is over on Feb 1st. You need to get cracking on a redesign, if you expect to win your way to MIX.

And if you want to hang out with other hopefuls, for the next 3 weeks, join the ReStyling the MIX site Facebook group. Right now, I'm the only member, and I'm "hopeful" others will show up to the party.

To get the latest news about MIX08 and the ReStyle contest, follow the News blog.

CoolWall - a Silverlight 1.0 application reflection

Adam Kinney — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 23:48:00 GMT

[UPDATE:My video interview is now live on Channel 10]

A large amount of my time last week was spent on a little project called Microsoft CoolWall. Tim Sneath already posted about the site going live this week and provided the story on how the app came to be:

The application was originally prototyped with the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha by Dot Net Solutions, a UK-based solutions integrator firm, and as a bit of fun, Adam agreed to try back-porting it to Silverlight 1.0 to see whether everything they'd implemented in C# could be as easily accomplished in JavaScript. I've noticed a certain preconception that Silverlight 2.0 is the "one to wait for" because it's the platform that allows you to use a "proper" language like C# or Visual Basic. Of course, having .NET languages, the base class libraries and technologies like LINQ will make RIA development a ton easier, but it's impressive what you can get out of JavaScript, particularly when coupled with the client-centric Microsoft AJAX Library.

The application resulted in a great way for me to "walk the walk" and not just "talk the talk". The "talk" I am referring to is the idea that "Yes, you can build more than a Media Player in Silverlight 1.0". (Although the folks behind the MNet.com project certainly didn't need to hear me say that. Yes, it plays videos, but it has built clip editing, banner ad system and web service integration).

JavaScript-heavy applications are not a new thing obviously in the AJAX age, but they are for some of those watching SIlverlight from a .NET standpoint. Sure you don't have the luxury of the CLR or even full controls at this point, but you can still do a lot with Silverlight in its current form. This isn't a full case study, but I thought I'd review some of the concepts behind developing the CoolWall application. And first off, I may not be a JavaScript guru look some of those masters at Ajaxian, but I try.

Application model
Silverlight project templates in Visual Studio start you off with a JavaScript function with a few functions defined within the prototype of that function. This is analogous to a class in C# with an empty constructor and a few methods defined. This class, specifically the handleLoad function, is then referenced by the provided createSilverlight method which is called to instantiate your application.

CoolWall.Container = function() { } CoolWall.Container.prototype = { handleLoad: function(control, userContext) { this.control = control; ... } }

I built out my application using this model and as the complexity increased I broke out certain functionality into other "modules". While simplifying the code it also allowed me to reuse some of the classes, in the case of the button, as well as control the application initialization. The control was necessary do to some of the events fire asynchronously and I needed to ensure all elements were created by the time they were needed.

Most every class also had a physical representation on the screen and linked directly to existing XAML that was created. In some cases the XAML from the main file is handled by separate modules and in other cases the XAML is loaded dynamically along with a new instance of the class.

UserControl Pattern
The buttons defined above and the image items that you drag into place were handled via a pattern to define user controls. The XAML comes from a separate file which is downloaded by a Downloader object, which stores the XAML in a string variable when the application loads. Then when the time comes to instantiate a new control, the createFromXAML method is used passing the stored XAML string as parameter which then returns a Silverlight object, in this case they were Canvases with children of their own. Then the object is added to the children collection of a canvas which lives within the main XAML.

To provide the interaction and integration a new JavaScript class, defined using the pattern above, is instantiated and a reference to the newly created Silverlight object is passed in the constructor. In this case, the newly created JavaScript object is then added to an Array in order to maintain a reference for the application state and cleanup.

draggableImage = this.control.content.createFromXaml(this.xamlString, true); ... this.items[i] = new CoolWall.DraggableImage(this, draggableImage, imageUrl, ...);

HTML Control Integration
One of the first things you notice when investigating Silverlight for development is that there are no controls. This may seem alarming, and yes, I am really looking forward to version 2.0 and its control set, but there is hope.

The integration between the Silverlight DOM and the JavaScript DOM is so well done there is no problem traversing the trees to get to HTML-based controls (you can even make it to other rich objects on the page). Now the only other thing to think about is that by default the Silverlight instance is windowed like a combo box or most any other browser plug-in. You can change this during the creation of your Silverlight application by setting the Windowless property to true. Now the Silverlight instance is rendered within the page and can be positioned with CSS like a div element. Once the HTML textboxes are in place, you can access them with JavaScript and integrate them into your JavaScript class.

handleLoad: function(control, userContext){ this.searchTextBox = $get("searchTextBox"); this.searchTextBox.value = "Welcome to the CoolWall"; }

ASP.NET AJAX
I have used the ASP.NET AJAX library before, but not to this extent. The more I used it the more fun it was. In this application ASP.NET AJAX, helped in two major ways.

The first way was the Web Service Proxy. Using the ScriptManager, you can add a reference to .asmx page containing your services, which will then be proxied as JavaScript functions. Very easy to use and I love the fact that serialization and de-serialization is handled for you. You can pass the string "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" as a parameter and it will happily convert to a Guid.Empty. A sample call in script looks like this:

CoolWallService.SearchMSNLive(searchTerm,Silverlight.createDelegate(this, this.onSearchCompleted));

The create delegate method is used there to handle the asynchronous completion of the web service call, but still maintaining the context of the class that calls the service.

The second way the AJAX library helped, was similar to other AJAX libraries where it extends the functionality of JavaScript. Code is easier to write once you have methods like Array.add() , String.format and the $get function used above.

Live Search and Live ID Integration
Most of the work done here came from the prototype, but it was very simple to implement using the Web Service proxies mentioned above. Both services seem very simple to write against, once you setup AppIDs with each service, you can leverage the code that comes with the respective SDK. I can envision myself using the LiveID Web Authentication model in the future as way of providing simple, even optional, personalization to an app.

Install Experience
Almost forgotten, but quickly added the optimized Silverlight install experience. And I say quickly added, because the InstallCreateSilverlight.js file that comes with Silverlight Installation Experience Guide almost does all of the work for you.

Conclusion
Even though, I wish I would have had an extra week to do this, I'm really happy to have gone through the work to benefit from the lessons learned. There are a few more features I'd like to see like a lightbox effect to view the images in a larger size, but I'm pretty happy with what got implemented. I still need to make my Christmas wish and this might just be the way to do it.

Oh and plus, I was interviewed about the application an the video should be showing up soon on Channel 10. The interviewer was kind of goofy, but it was fun.

Silverlight Installation Experience Guide

Adam Kinney — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:43:00 GMT

Recently I posted about the Remembering the "yet to install" audience, in regards to creating an experience that provides context for those who have not installed SIlverlight yet. The idea being that if your viewer visits your site and was greeted with the just the Silverlight install graphic, they may be turned off and leave.

The Silverlight Installation Experience Guide takes this topic and goes way beyond a reminder and a few images. The Guide includes best practices, usable code and template projects enabling you to walk through the steps as you read.

Hopefully we'll start seeing better "default" and "installation" experiences.

Silverlight 1.0 project template for VS 2008

Adam Kinney — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 23:48:00 GMT

If you're like me and enjoying Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, you may notice that the Silverlight templates included with the Silverlight Tools for VS2008 are focused on the 1.1 alpha. This is great, but what if you dig Silverlight 1.0 and still want to use the latest and greatest from Visual Studio land?

You're in luck! All you have to do is borrow the project template from the Silverlight 1.0 SDK. If you have already installed Visual Studio 2005 then you can install the SDK and find the project template via the file path below:

...\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#\Silverlight\SilverlightJSApplication.zip

If you're not running Visual Studio, I've posted the template on my server, so you can download the template directly.

Once you have your hands on the template, copy the .zip file into the template directory for VS2008:

...\Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#

Now when you add a New Project you should see a "Silverlight Javascript Application" option below My Templates, which is pictured below.

SilverlightDevCamp SF Recap

Adam Kinney — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 07:51:00 GMT

I had a great time this weekend at the SilverlightDevCamp in San Francisco. I had never before been to a DevCamp, BarCamp or any other type of camp that happens indoors. The casual yet academic atmosphere was well set and provided for by our hosts Kurt Brockett, Kevin Marshall and Anand Iyer. Nicely done guys, as well as thanks to the sponsors.

The camp started Friday night with a greeting, logistics and a bit of beer and pizza. During the greeting we had come up with a few session ideas and some common questions. Once I was introduced I took the opportunity to jump into Silverlight and answer a few of the burning questions with easy answers. What I quickly learned is that I should have polled the crowd about on their knowledge of Silverlight. I spend most of my days deep in Silverlight and most of the attendees had just started their journey. In my excitement to share my knowledge, I had jumped to step 200 but should have started from the beginning. I was able to answer questions for those who could not come on Saturday, so I think that was a plus. Definitely something to remember for future DevCamps.

We continued to plan sessions and happily socialize the night away.

Saturday morning came and the full day of sessions began. It was interesting to see the session schedule organized and driven by the attendees. Some held forums to lead a discussion around a topic they themselves wanted to learn more about. Others had prepared their sessions ahead of time and it showed.

I was happy to participate and contribute in almost every session. Silverlight is such a new technology and we've launched many products around the technology and WPF, that it is still very fresh. We have some misinformation out there we need to correct as well as our continued improvement on the ability to explain Silverlight.

I also received some great feedback on how we can improve upon the initial step in learning Silverlight . Currently I recommend using the Get Started page on Silverlight.net and the QuickStarts, but it sounds like a scenario-based getting started doc would be useful (e.g. if you are an SVG developer...).

Here are my highlights from the sessions I attended (full sessions page):

Silverlight 101
Brian Ellis from Vertigo did a respectable job of starting the day with an introduction to Silverlight. Not too deep but a good amount to get started with the code and the tools.

Expression Blend 101
Unfortunately Cal Schrotenboer's talk was cut short by technical difficulties, but I did get the chance to talk with him and learn about the classes he is teaching. He has a list here, but I don't believe I've seen that many WPF classes at a college before. I would expect to see a Silverlight class soon.

iPhone and Top Banana
Beau Amber of Metalliq and Top Banana fame, walked us though the iPhone simulation he had created for MIX:UK 07. He did a great job replicating the iPhone in XAML using Blend as his main tool, actually I think it was the only tool he used. He also demoed Top Banana and as usual the crowd loved it. Its such a cool app and hearing the story about how it came together was inspiring. And good news, the source is almost available, apparently there is just a little more clean-up to do. I did record the whole session and am working on publishing the video.

Silverlight and Flash (and JavaFX)
After lunch (more pizza) it was finally time for the most anticipated session comparing Silverlight and Flash. Randy Fong had started gathering questions since the night before and the session had awakened Ryan Stewart and drawn in John Dowdell. (Ryan had actually attended almost the whole thing and John had asked some good questions during Beau's talk)

We had an interesting start with Abdel Remani adding JavaFX into the comparison as well. I say interesting because nobody had mentioned JavaFX before and it didn't seem as though it was completely comparable in all aspects. Either way I learned about JavaFX and Flex in this session and Ryan, John and Anand did an admirable job trying to keep the comparison clear and accurate, while not turning it into a grudge match.

Regarding comparing technologies, I found the whole DevCamp very useful in learning more about technologies in the RIA space. Special thanks to Rob Rusher who spent some time going through Flex with me.

Moonlight
The Moonlight session was interesting because none of us had actually gotten Moonlight to run yet, but we were all interested. Anand and Tyler Ballance had the most to share and we made a bit of pact to continue to work together to futrther our Moonlight knowledge. Next step, host a VPC or VMWare with it running.

Extending Silverlight 1.0
Jeff Atwood of Vertigo and Coding Horror walked us through the construction of the Chess Viewer Sample. This seemed to resonate well with the attendees and acted as real practical application of the code we had been talking about. Nice job Jeff and thanks for the lesson in chess notation.

IronPython
Tyler Ballance of Slide.com introduced us to IronPython and all of its Python goodness. He was actually a contributor to the Mac port so he had a fair bit of experience to draw upon. The session morphed into a "dynamic languages are fun? check yes or no" session. Which was fine because looking at Python code it looks fun and carefree. I should spend some time trying to build with it and see how I feel afterwards.

Media Services
We had a short Media session where we covered codecs and playback but most of the time was covering features we are planning for the future including server-side playlists and DRM.

After the last session, I interviewed Tyler about his DevCamp experience and the sample he had built while there. I think the video came out pretty well and I should be publishing it shortly.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the DevCamp and look forward to attending future Camps. If you take a look at the SilverlightDevCamp page, you'll see that there are currently two more planned. One in Washington DC in November and the other at the end of this month in Chicago the weekend before Adobe MAX.

I few last notes: there are more photos available on Flickr, it was very nice to finally meet John Dowdell in person and I was told that my voice sounds like Seth Rogen.

YSlow - a performance analysis add-on for Firebug

Adam Kinney — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 16:12:00 GMT

It appears at the Ajax Experience conference going on this week, Yahoo! has released a add-on for Firebug which analyzes your page for possible performance issues. In other words its figuring out why your page may be slow, or in Yahoo terms YSlow. Its cute, it isn't it.

Judging by my initial report card for this site I have a fair bit of work to do.

And in a smart move to educate the developer as well as spread the meme, each of the bulleted items links directly to one of Yahoo's Thirteen Simple Rules for Speeding Up Your Web Site.

Although, I've only been using it for a little while, I can foresee YSlow as becoming a handy tool for web development.

Facebook Developer Garage, Seattle, Tuesday night

Adam Kinney — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:16:00 GMT

I am planning to go to the Facebook Developer Garage event on Tuesday night at the Capitol Hill Arts Center.

I've seen a few interesting Apps built on the Facebook platform and I can see the potential of the concept. Beyond testing and studying, I have been hung up on the Facebook = Blackhole, Whirlpool, Vortex described by Jeremiah Owyang.

I can deal with leaving my aggregator and visiting my Facebook homepage, just to get a picture of my life through navy (#3b5998, the "Facebook blue") rimmed glasses. My time in Facebook has been fun and rather interesting. I even find out about cool events like the Facebook Developer Garage (thanks go to Beth for attending first).

But then when I want to check on Groups I am a member of, I have to open another page to see updates. My mini-feed spoils me with everything else, but only shares group info when someone joins or leaves a group. From my point of view they appear to be adjectives people are labeling and de-labeling themselves with.

I think there's more you could do with groups. Notifications about discussion threads and photos might be nice, maybe a Group info panel for Group Admins, a list of shared links.

This sparked my initial interest in FB App Development. I was cut short, though, by the fact that the API exposes little Group info.

As a workaround it was suggested by someone in the Developer forums that you could still leverage the Group info to build a SuperGroups App which could then offer more custom functionality. But then you're stuck rewriting existing functionality, doing more work then you should have to be.

I also think it would be interesting to add Apps to Group Profile pages. I wouldn't mind having an App that uses Silverlight on the Silverlight Group page.

So this is one of the reasons I thought I'd attend the Facebook Developer Garage event. I'm guessing others may have ideas on Groups and Apps and RSS and blackholes.

The other reason is because of their snazzy logo.

No 301 love from Facebook

Adam Kinney — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 06:00:00 GMT

After recently changing my feed over to FeedBurner I was happy to see that my latest "Note" had been imported into my Facebook profile.

(In case you're not aware, Facebook has a cool feature which allows you to import posts from your blog into your profile which then become "Notes". They reprint the whole article but they do link back to the original permalink. This way your Facebook friends can read your blog without actually having to leave the realm of Facebook. And perhaps a more interesting feature, you can link who is in the Note. A way of tagging the post with a person's name but a strongly typed tag that links back to their profile. This activity alone can possibly warrant a one-liner in their news feed and even their friends news feed. Now your syndicated post, which is now a Note, could be read by people you don't know looking for information about one of their Facebook friends, thus expanding the reach of your words or possibly even providing some useful information worth sharing to people who are interested.)

The new note was there and it got me thinking about my redirect issue with FeedBurner. To support my RSS URL changing, I was now returning a HTTP status of 301 when my past URL was requested along with the location of my new URL. I thought it would be nifty of FaceBook if they had made the request for RSS, received the 301, recorded the new location and modified my setting in profile. They didn't. They still had my old URL listed.

If I knew what a 301 was and I had set it myself, which is the case here, then I would hope they would change the URL in my settings to be imported.

And if I didn't know what was going on and my blog vendor modified my URL, then I would likely be unaware of anything changing unless my Notes had stopped importing.

I poked around in Facebook's Terms of Use and I found this:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Maybe changing the URL based on the 301 would be considered translating or reformatting?

This was not such a big issue to me as a user, but more as a site developer. We added the blog post import feature on Channel 10 where I don't believe we are recording changes sent via 301s. Feed URLs are actually discovered and recorded via auto-discovery links once a blog URL is given, so there is even more freedom for the system to respect the 301 since the user never manually entered the original URL.

Funny, you wouldn't think being on vacation would turn out a post on HTTP status codes...

My old job is now listed on the career site

Adam Kinney — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 17:12:00 GMT

Official Job Listing on the career site

Well its not exactly my old job, Duncan has taken over the dev lead role (Congrats to Duncan), but it does include a lot of the client and UI work I was handling. I like the skill set description they used:

We are looking for someone who lives and breathes HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX and ASP.NET. The ideal candidate will have skills in all those technologies combined with a passion for design and user experience.

But here's the meat of what makes the job great:

Do you like to ship, takes chances and effect change? Do you want to build cool sites that use Silverlight and Atlas to deliver a great user experience? Then come join our group where you'll find a small dynamic team of folks and you'll swear you are part of startup.

Its part of your job to learn the latest technologies, create and innovate.

Now, to forward this link on to a few people that may be interested...

A new story and a new theme

Adam Kinney — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:14:00 GMT

Earlier this year, I made a conscious effort to give my blog an overall theme to base my posts on. The concept of the "Devigner" is what I was going to go after, but due to the lack posts about this concept, its obvious that didn't work out. I still believe the idea is interesting, how one who designs interfaces and develops code fits into software development, but I wasn't spending much time into exploring how other "devigners" worked. It would have been an extra-curricular activity compared to my main work and my main work currently consumes a large part of my focus and outside time now.

Which leads into what my new story will be, I plan to cover my experiences and work at Microsoft.

"Oh that's original", you may be thinking. Although, it may not be completely original, the main theme of what I plan to discuss is the development of Channel 9, Channel 10 and any other sites or project my team works on. A lot of the Niners on Channel 9 are always asking about our current progress and what we're doing next, so this should give them some information to chew on. The size of our team and our responsibilities has grown quickly which has resulted in some lessons about software development worth sharing. And we are lucky enough to be tasked with creating new innovations using new technologies, so there should be interesting stories to tell there as well.

Overall I'm looking forward to providing a better insight into what we are working on as a team and hopefully generating stories worth reading. Now I just need to make a new banner for my site...

REMIX contest is live, win a free MIX07 ticket

Adam Kinney — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 01:03:00 GMT

The REMIX Contest is live. This is your chance to show off your CSS and design skills and win yourself free admission to MIX07. Admission is awarded to the top three winners, and we are handing out Zunes with Accessory Packs to the top 10 honorable mentions.

Mmm, Zune, I just got one today actually, I'm really digging the big screen. And, no, this is not one of the prize Zunes. So don't worry about winning a used Zune. Before I get myself into any trouble, here's the official rules for the contest.

So enjoy the submissions (none at this time of posting) and submit your remix. I am one of the judges and will be looking forward to seeing your submissions.

"And Along Came 10..." article in MSDN

Adam Kinney — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 08:09:00 GMT

Duncan wrote an article entitled And Along Came 10...* that talks about at a high-level how we started the codebase behind on10.net and the next version of Channel 9 some of the architectural decisions behind the scenes. This project, which has encompassed this whole year, has been a very interesting and fun ride. Two years from now, I can imagine writing a book on the wild ride of what has become of Channel 9 and 10 and how it got there.

* The title plays off the Channel9 and on10.net (which we're now just calling Channel 10) relationship of which he is a big fan :)

Running ASP.NET projects on Vista with IIS 7

Adam Kinney — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 04:30:00 GMT

I messed around for a little bit, but to save yourself the time read the How to Enable ASP.NET 1.1 IIS7 article on IIS.Net. I'm still learning IIS7, but the more I dig into it the more impressed with it. I'm digging the Modular Architecture.

Ch9 Forum Screenshots are up

Adam Kinney — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 20:40:00 GMT

This is more a note to myself as most of those who care have already seen, but last Thursday we posted preview screenshots for the new look of Channel 9. A major portion of the work was devoted to a debate we had going on between Flat vs. Threaded view of forums. And now to finish the transition from Image to HTML/JS/C#...

Our deployment video just went live on Channel9

Adam Kinney — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:02:00 GMT

Sampy just posted the video he took of our team while we were posting the last update to 10. We were a bit giddy at getting this update at the door and I think that comes through in the video :)

10 gets an update

Adam Kinney — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 04:32:00 GMT

Last week we updated the Microsoft 10 site. Jeff talks about it here, mainly covering the fact that the code update was written to prepare for the conversion of Channel 9 and reach the goal of one code base running on multiple sites. We've simplified the architecture down to four major constructs - entries, links, tags and users. Tags, which run the show, acting as modifiers for every entry (Is this a blog entry or a forum entry? What is about? What language is it in? etc...) I also took some time to beef up the design a bit and add some oomph, which was noted by Long Zheng here.

Now the cool thing is that during our actual deployment, Sampy has the camera running, in true Ch9/10 style, and interviewed us while we were deploying. You can tell we're pretty giddy after completing the update, but we try and add some value while looking like crazy people. I'm hoping we'll have the video up live tomorrow on Channel 9.

Duncan is now running Oxite

Adam Kinney — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 05:34:00 GMT

Duncan Mackenzie is now running his blog off of the Oxite codebase we put together. Its interesting when you are preparing code to be themeable and reusable. "Oh, did I hardcode my name in there..."

We've got a few UI enhancement ideas to work through (Duncan's month archive list goes all the way back to Feb 2003, paging, expansion, something?). Other than the basics, I'm looking for onnovative way to do tag clouds. Right now I don't even have a cloud but just a list (which is just wrong).

What's the best display of Tags you've seen?

Blog fortified, WordPress theme implemented

Adam Kinney — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 20:11:00 GMT

The last time I updated my blog's code base, I started from scratch (again) and my mindset was "keep it simple". And a very simple one-person blog appeared. Well it was a little too simple, no trackbacks, referrals and no automatic pinging of blog services like ping-o-matic. Now with Duncan's help (who was looking for a new blog engine as well) that has all been added and more.

I am authoring this post in Windows Live Writer (yay, MetaWeblog support!). So far I am pretty impressed. I like the simple and attractive UI, but the most interesting part is the extensibility model. Its very simple to write plug-ins and there are couple of cool ones available so far like the Live Local map and Flickr photo plug-ins. [Watch the video of Live Writer on 10]

If you are viewing this post on my website you'll notice that my blog is themed with a possibly familiar theme. The theme is entitled Subtle v0.32 and it was designed by Glued Ideas. Duncan first noticed a variation of the theme on Shooting the Kids, and it brought up the issue once again, how great Word Press themes are and how nice it would be to take advantage of them. So when updating the UI that's exactly what we did. Its a bit hardcoded now, but it sounds like an interesting issue to address. Multi-blog engine themes portability.

Anyways, now that the new engine is up, vacations are over and summer has passed, I'm going to challenege myself to blog everyday. I believe I have plenty of content, I was just ignoring or working on the tools. I'm also pledging to get better at email, regarding faster response times. So now would be the time to resend any emails that never received a response. :)

A new update for 10

Adam Kinney — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 07:32:00 GMT

Check it out! Jeff has some more info and links here. Very excited to get this out there :)

Compiling Web Projects faster

Adam Kinney — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 05:00:00 GMT

We've been feverishly working on the new update to 10. No, its just an update its version 1.0. Its exciting, man, I go to the current site now and it just hurts my eyes, I can't wait to share the new site. BUT, its not ready yet, very close though (after I finish up the other half of the UI tonight!, it will be extremely close :p)

Up until recently though the process has been troublesome. Its been like this: code, code, code, code, compile ................., look at modifed results, test scripts. Ok, back to source, code, code, code, code, coffee sip, code, ignore phone, code, code, compile ............. close eyes .........

Compilation was taking forever! It was one of those ignoring problems that you want to take the time to fix, but instead you use the compile time to go to the bathroom (the one 5 feet away at home).

But praise the calendar! This week was Sampy's first week on the team. So we talked a bit, tried to find some tasks for him to do to get familiar with the 10 code base. We figured out a 1st level task (talking WoW or any RPG terms now, its like a quest you get in Anvilmar to go out and kill 4 bunnies with broken legs). His first mighty task was to get the solution to compile faster. Now remember Sampy comes from a team that developed parts of Visual Studio, so thus, it should be simple. And it was.

To compile solutions using project references with web projects (the new ASP.net 2.0 crazy kind), don't Build the Web Project when you build the solution. There's no need to anyways. My compile time went from around 90 to 240 seconds to around 20 seconds. That's very noticiable when you compile and view as much as I do when rendering HTML.

Thanks Sampy!

Scoble webdesign

Adam Kinney — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 02:43:00 GMT

Yes, Scoble's leaving, everyone knows that. But the other day we were talking about the website improvements PodTech could use to really enhance their site (full list here), and it was interesting to hear him bring up the different issues. He's like a power user, who really knows what he's looking for and is happy boisterously provide the feedback. Its cool because a guy who spends the majority of his time working on and designing community sites, he's a valuable resource that will still be around even after he loses his blue badge.

"working on and designing community sites". Its funny but after typing that I was thinking, what else is there? If a site does not have community or personal touch, its not much of a website in today's day and age (not very Web 2.0ish if you wish). Its a crazy web today, much more interesting than last year's, but I'm happy to be working on it.