MarkItUp

I started writing my book in October last year.  Whenever I finished writing a chapter I would send it off to Betsey - the Technical Editor on the project.  Typically, over the period of about a week, Betsey would make changes to my grammar also check that the length of titles and captions were good.  Whenever I completed a third of the book it had to be bundled up with code samples too, and sent off to a team of reviewers who provided feedback.  These reviewers tended to be people from within the industry such as MVP's and so-forth.  Between Betsey and I, we pretty much had the book written by the end of March.

When I completed the book it then had to undergo another round of technical reviewing and a final, more rigorous examination from another person within the industry.

The good news is that all reviewing is now done.  All chapters have been sent off to the printers and so, with any luck, my book will be available by the end of the month - I can't wait!  Of course you can pre-order my book from Amazon and it will be delivered when it arrives:

http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/archive/2006/07/28/681288.aspx

None!

List<Feed> feeds = Readify.BlogsphereRunner.GetCandidates() ;
... // obfuscated selection process
DotNetDude dude = Hire( feeds[0] ) ;
Readify.Employees.Add( dude ) ;
GUIHelpers.Render( dude ) ;

GUIHelpers.Render( dude, new BorgTransformer() ) ;

Welcome aboard Geoff.

By almost any measure the 1962 Plymouth Fury was an awesome beast in it's day.  A car that looked great and which was more secure and comfortable than many other cars of its day.  Two extra rear lights, bucket seats and console.  Heck!  No wonder dealers and buyers alike loved it.

Regardless of how cool the belt moulding spear that ran from the front to the rear of the Plymouth made it look we aren't driving them today.  Today Plymouth's aren't advertised and we don't buy them.  Today we are much more likely to buy a more conventional modern car like the Ford Falcon:

The Ford Falcon boast such features such as Air-Conditioning, Alloy Wheels, CD Player, Front and Rear spoilers and also Traction control.  Who wouldn't want to own a 2006 Ford Falcon over a 1962 Plymouth Fury?  It's a no brainer right?

What's the compelling reason for upgrading to Vista?

It's amazing how many times I've been asked this question of late.  Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the people who have been asking the question have been primarily either Microsoft employees or other leading technical readiness people.  The conversation usually goes something like this:

Them: What's the compelling reason for upgrading to Vista?

Me: Well, there's a few.  UAC is probably the biggest one that immediately springs to mind.

Them: Yeah, sure.  But it's not really a good enough reason to move over though - don't you think?

Me: Hrm, sure, OK.  What about user experience.  Vista has dozens - if not hundreds - of new user experience features that make using the computer easier, more secure, and more enjoyable.  My favourite of these features is Search and Organize.

Them: But user experience isn't really a compelling business reason to migrate over.  I mean I've got MSN Desktop Search on XP and it does a great job - don't you think?

Me: Right, whatever.  Finally, I think that the new Windows API's in Vista are going to enable new types of features and experiences to added to the core OS experience.  These API's include things such as RestartManager, LivePreview, etc.  These are things that we can use today but will probably be expected by users in 3 or 4 years time.

Them: Yes but.... blah de blah, blah, waffle, wah.

Why is it that we are having such difficulty in understanding why Vista will sell?  It's not the market that are having trouble - Microsoft's own research tells us that they expect a few hundred million copies of Vista to be sold within the first 4 years alone!  The trouble that we are having is because of either a rash of conservatism or from pessimism that exists within our own industry.

I mean heck, you tell people about Search and Organize and they come back with... "Yeah but I can install MSN Desktop Search on XP"... Sheesh!  I wish that my artistic skills were good enough to superimpose the Ford Falcon front spoiler and other features on top of the Plymouth Fury so that they could see how ridiculous this really is :-)

People like comfort, they like safety, and they like features.  These are things that the Ford Falcon has over the Plymouth Fury and they are equally things that Vista has over XP/2000/ME/98/95.

Over on the BlogML site, Keyvan has been busily adding features to BlogML and the associated .NET API's.  Just recently he's added:

• Support for articles
• Extended properties in the schema
• Support for post excerpts
• Support for multi-author content
• Improved support for mime-types

I'll have to re-acquaint myself with these changes soon - I think that I'll implement the new version of BlogML here on my blog next week - and then we can look at a timeframe for packaging up a new public release for BlogML.

The BlogML project has been very lucky to get Keyvan on board.  Keyvan has shown incredible enthusiasm for adding these features and, let to me we wouldn't have seen these things for a long time I'm sure.  I can now see the benefits of having open source projects especially when they attract people with energy and some time to actually implement things.

Paul Stovell has been monkeying around in the SUB source (which is now being hosted on the Readify internal TFS repository).  I know this because I of all the check-in notifications I've been receiving :-)  So far, in just a couple of days he has:

• Added a new SQL Server data provider - complete with sql setup scripts.
• Refactored the code base and made it easier to re-theme.
• Got the MetaWeblog API stuff working - as was evidenced by his first post from Word 2007.
• Added a new standard theme named VistaBlue - which is the one that Paul is currently running on his own blog.

In addition to getting his check-ins (with associated useful check-in comments), I've also been seeing the successful build notifications coming through every time that a check-in is made.  This is because of the new continuous integration tasks that Chris Burrows has now got working on our TFS install - which I'll blog about later.

Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface?

Mary Decker tripped at the olympics?

The planes hit the buildings?

Myer had their 2006 clearance sale?

And here comes your cake!
Cooked by Snookers and Snookers,
The official Katroo Happy Birthday Cake Cookers.
And Snookers and Snookers, I'm happy to say,
Are the only cake cookers who cook cakes today
Made of guaranteed, certified, strictly Grade-A
Peppermint cucumber sausage-paste butter!
And the world's finest cake slicers, Dutter and Dutter
And Dutter and Dutter with hatchets a-flutter,
High up on the poop-deck, stand ready to cut her

Today you are you!  That is truer than true!
There is no one alive who is you-er than you!
Shout loud "I am lucky to be what I am!
Thank goodness I'm not just a clam or a ham!
Or a dusty old jar of sour gooseberry jam!
I am what I am!  That's a great thing to be!
If I say so myself, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!"

I found the remainder of Dr. Seuss's "Happy Birthday to YOU" here.

Go on, place your mouse over a Readify consultant... you know you want to :-)

I see that Frank (busy guy that he is) has taken the time to collect the Meego images for his team that are working on Tech.Ed.  You can view his pyramid here. 

As I was looking at those Meego's I started wondering whether the Meego environments that have been chosen by each of those individuals provide a glimpse into their inner-self.  For example, from these images can I glean that:

• Tech.darryl, Tech.Andrew Coates and Tech.Jeffa obviously like presenting
• Tech.Nils enjoys the labs
• Tech.Alex and Tech.Scott see it as an adventure
• Tech.Deeps mans the stands

Maybe it's time to get a Readify inverted pyramid together to see what our guys are going to be up to when we hit Tech.Ed.

Anyone who has interacted with me on IM over the past day or so will have noted two things:

1. I have a new Meego picture icon
2. I've become much more expressive with my use of smileys in conversations

The reason for the overuse of smileys is that I love seeing my little Meego perform the actions in sync with the smileys that I use.  For example, if I use the tired smiley then my Meego dude yawns, if I do a smiling smiley then my Meego smiles, and so on.

Today I discovered that I can get more Meego-Smiley action without even having to have conversations with people because you can right click on your Meego dude and invoke the actions directly.  For example, I right click on my Meego dude and a context menu appears with a list of all the available actions:

When I select one, my Meego dude performs that action:

Cool eh?  And a great productivity enhancer too :-)

Get your own Meego dude here.

I had to create an XSLT extension object today that would format a DateTime value into a custom format.  I haven't used XSLT extension objects before but finding this article by Dare Obasanjo certainly steered me in the right direction.  In the end it wasn't very difficult at all, 20 minutes was about all it took to create my very own XSLT extension object!

Essentially you just create a little class that does what you want - in my case, formatting dates:

public class XsltDateFormatter {

    public string formatdate(string d, string format) {
        try {
            DateTime date = DateTime.Parse ;
            return date.ToString(format);
        } catch (FormatException) {
            return "";
        }   
    }
}

Then you add your class to an XsltArgumentList object, giving it a namespace:

XsltArgumentList xslArg = new XsltArgumentList();
xslArg.AddExtensionObject("http://exslt.org/dates-and-times", new XsltDateFormatter());

Then you can pass the xslArg object to your Transform method when you transform your XML:

transform.Transform(doc, xslArg, writer);

To reference the formatdate method from within your XSLT sheet you register your namespace:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:date="http://exslt.org/dates-and-times"
    exclude-result-prefixes="date">

And then use the function like so":

<xsl:value-of
    select="date:formatdate(substring-before(scheduledstart, 'T'), 'D')"/>

The article actually comes with a download that contains hundreds of functions for things such as Math operations, Regex, and DateTimes, etc.  The actual download library is basically a .NET implementation of the EXSLT community initiative.

...to you, but one of the best parts of working with a group of super smart guys is that you get to see behind the scenes a little. 

Take Mitch for example.  Anybody outside of our organization would know him as a really bright .NET/CLR guy - but sitting behind our firewall gives you a more rounded picture of Mitch.  For example, just now I was sitting here and spotted the following comment attached to one of Mitch's check-ins:

This fixes the internal lines and cell padding issues. Man I am so bad at CSS! I actually had to hit Google to figure out how to do it!

ASP.NET MVP eh?  Meh!

Last week I started to get a lot of comment spam from my Project Distributor feedback forms so I've added Captcha comment validation to the site.  This seems to have steadied things for now.

Update: After reading this post from Rob Howard, I really wish that I had implemented the Hot Captcha service :-)

I've just returned from holidays in Port Douglas (which is in the far North East corner of Australia (which is underneath Asia (which is to the left of the US Wally :P ))) where my family and the Coates family spent a week of sun, surf, good food, great company and plenty of relaxation.  In fact, here's a picture of Coatsey checking out his new office:

For the past couple of years I've had two simple goals whenever I embark on a new development project:

1. Try something new
2. Produce a reuseable item

Trying something new simply means that, rather than doing things the same way each time that you vary your technique for a single thing on new projects.  Trying something new on each project is the best way to explore new architectural ways of doing things while keeping your risk low.

Producing an item of reuse (IOR) seems like a simple ask but sadly, most projects that I know of never achieve this.  The IOR might be a tool, or a pattern, or a set of common functions.  The coolest thing about producing IOR's is that it forces you to factor your code and it also means that you need to practice the process of productizing and encapsulating items.  In the case of a tool, this may mean that you get the practice of creating an installer for the tool.  I post most of my own IOR's to my ProjectDistributor workspace which can be found here.

Both trying something new and producing IOR's are all about investing in your future.  Whether it's building an installer, creating documentation, or building a test harness for your IOR what you are doing is attributing a small, unnoticable cost to a project to gain something incrementally that would otherwise take a high price to get.  The thing that you gain might be knowledge or tools, it doesn't matter; the important thing is that they are things that will save your bacon one day when you step onto a project with:

1. A bigger team than you are used to managing
2. A very short deadline
3. A need for lots fringe technologies

Grant has been doing a great job of producing tools from the time that he's had recently with TFS.  To see what I mean go and check out the following tools that he's produced in the past month or so:

• TFSBlame
• TFS Bug Snapper
• TFS ListProjectAreas and Area URI's 

Tools such as these will prove to be invaluable in the long run and if you read through some of Grant's posts you will see that in creating those tools and talking about them he has often received feedback for features that have made his tools better.  This feedback is the reward for taking the time to do a job properly and taking the time to turn a piece of code or a repetitive task into a tool. 

You'd be amazed at the number of times people within a company have said to me somethign like: "Our company should take the time to invest in a set of tools to help people with things that are commonly hard to do in (SQL Server|Visual Studio|Biz Talk|Whatever).  Whenever they tell me that I can't help but think to myself... "If it's such a problem then why don't you already have those tools and we can just polish them up and productize them".  Contrast that with what Grant is doing and you'll undertand exactly what I'm talking about here.   

Jeff Attwood is great at telling a story and his blog post from today is no exception.  In it he recalls some wonderful stories to show the power of exponentials and the price of conducting brute force attacks on modern crypto systems.

    Brute Force Key Attacks Are for Dummies

Soccer, schmoccer I say.  The World Cup has come and gone and once again we've seen a game which resembles more like a diving tournament than a real sporting contest.  How can real men - men who spend nearly all of their life working out and training - fall over as often and as easily as those soccer guys do?  I think that the biggest irony of the World Cup was the fact that Italy won (seeing as how their entire game seems to be based on diving or falling over).

I actually feel sorry for poor Zizou.  His reputation will now forever be tarnished by a moment of craziness, but the fact is that he is one of the real men of soccer.  A genius. 

I think that most people will only have focussed on Zizou when he unleashed his headbutt, but for me the interesting thing was to focus on Materazzi.  As with all of those Italian "strawmen" he immediately crumbled to the ground upon being struck and then continued to writhe in pain for well over a minute - before finally getting up and running around as though nothing had happened.

What a shame!

...that's pretty much my take on our irresponsible media but before I explain, let me digress for a moment. 

Back on June 15th The Melbourne Age posted an article by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd titled "Bloggers, they're just trying to put the 'me' in media".  In her article she poo-poo'd the stereotypical Blackberry carrying blogger saying that they did not have the credentials to report sensibly on the matters of today.  You see, Maureen had just attended a blogger convention in Vegas and was obviously feeling a little low on self-esteem that day having been faced with the fact that there are other people out there prepared to talk about current events and news.  I imagine that Maureen must have felt a lot less special as she sat writing her poisonous article against the blogging community. 

So why do I have such a lack of empathy for Maureen and her fellow journo's?  It's because I have a very low opinion of our mainstream news reporters and the garbage that they feed us through newspapers and the television.  These people have repeatedly made poor and opportunistic reporting choices, and they are now faced with the prospect of living their days in a crumbling empire competing with 16 year old, cigarette smoking teenagers who blog their own views of today's events from within their own living rooms and apartments.  Maureen, I wish that I could advise you not to waste your efforts in talking down the blogging community but instead take the time to talk to your colleagues about cleaning up your own patch.  It's respected people in the industry such as yourself who have the power to get big media back on track and help make sure that we can rely on them for the truth and not just whatever mush they can produce to fill time and sell ads.  Maureen, take a risk... raise the bar, don't waste your time trying to push people below a bar that is already way too low.

OK, that was a big rant against mainstream media and it follows on from yesterday's blog post where I talked about the media's treatment of the Israeli-Palestinian stuff.  After posting that article I was chatting to Roy Osherove (who is the only Israeli guy that I know) and he pointed me at an amazing video which gives a very different slant on the images that we get shown every day.  Here is the link to a blog entry in which Roy links to a video showing another view of life in the "war-torn" region:

    http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2006/06/18/Pallywood.aspx 

Watch that video and then you tell me... what do you think of our media?

Ever since I was a kid growing up in Australia I can remember seeing "Middle East stuff" on tele.  Every night I see it on the news.  There'll be some guy throwing rocks at armed men or some homes have been bombed, or whatever.  It's on the radio too.  Every morning I wake up to the news that "There has been escalated tensions in the Gaza strip...", and it's like "Duh... no shit!".

Gaza, Palestinian, Hamas, Israeli... these are all words that, based on the what the television and radio tell me, I should know well and perhaps even have feelings about.  But the fact is that I have no idea what these things mean, and nor do I understand why they are on my television every day.  What do they want me to do by showing me this stuff?  What do they expect me to feel?  Should I feel sympathy?  Anger?  Apathy?  Empathy?  Hatred?  Sorrow?  What?  Tell me.

I'm sure that it all actually just comes down to irresponsible journalism.  While chatting to my brother about this tonight, he had the following interesting things to say about the whole Arab-Israeli thing:

"these images have been chosen deliberately from thousands of images for the main purpose ove providing a smoke screen to the truth"

"lets face can u show me the common person who has a objective grasp of the arab israeili conflict... and even when we do care, most of our perceptions are based on what the media has chosen to show us"

Maybe that's the case.  Maybe this really is just our ignorant, irresponsible media at play.  Sigh.