MarkItUp

My interview with SearchVB.com about web parts is now online:

Link to Working with Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0

There are times when only a Mother's love
Can understand our tears,
Can soothe our disappointments
And calm all of our fears.

There are times when only a Mother's love
Can share the joy we feel
When something we have dreamed about
Quite suddenly is real.

There are times when only a Mother's faith
Can help us on life's way
And inspire in us the confidence
We need from day to day.

For a Mother's heart and a Mother's faith
And a Mother's steadfast love
Were fashioned by the Angels
And sent from God above.

- Michael Olakunle Adesanya

My book has been reviewed by Richard Dudley and he's posted the review on ASP Alliance here: 

Link to Review: ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts in Action: ASP Alliance

Thankfully it was a favourable review

David Seruyange has built this great little macro/code generator to produce property definitions from a terse little grammar.  Basically you can type a string like this:

int Age;Dictionary<int,string> AdditionalData;

And Proper will generate property stubs that look like this:

private int _age;
public int Age{
    get{ return _age; }
    set{ _age=value; }
}

private Dictionary<int,string> _additionalData;
public Dictionary<int,string> AdditionalData{
    get{ return _additionalData; }
    set{ _additionalData=value; }
}

What a great idea... especially when you have a large number of properties to generate!

Proper is a tool that generates properties in a few different languages with a lot less typing than is usually done in an editor. The syntax is simple:

Source: t3rse::proper

I can't remember if this was the 80's or 90's but I know that many of my drunken nights ended up dancing on the top of a table to either this song or a Proclaimers tune

I love Google Reader! The UI is great, they offer nice keyboard browsing support, and they do an excellent job of supporting my mobile device.

Link to Google Reader

Now they have added statistics about my subscriptions; from these I can tell you:

From your 76 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 735 items, starred 8 items, and shared 0 items.

And here are some graphs...

The other day I wrote about dynamically generating gadgets for personalization purposes:

    http://markitup.com/Posts/Post.aspx?postId=98a4d0e8-cf3c-43d2-b431-e1e1e29958f6

There's been some talk around the place since then about being able to dynamically generate countdown gadgets so I thought that I'd use my little gadget API to "hack" such a feature.  The steps for creating your own countdown gadget are simple:

1. Go to this URL: http://markitup.com/CountdownGadget.aspx
2. Fill in the form:
   
   
   
3. Download the gadget from the generated link:
   
   
4. Open the gadget into your own Sidebar:
   
   
   

Enjoy!

"...An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced..."

A lengthy excerpt of Francisco's money speech:

"Francisco's Money Speech" by Ayn Rand -- Capitalism Magazine

Woohoo, there's going to be an Atlas Shrugged movie... 

Link to Atlas Shrugged (2008)

Learn about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged

Much more great stuff here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged

And how many times I've thought this over the past year:

"Isn't it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it is his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn't everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? I have carried out every moral precept of our age, I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned." - Francisco d'Anconia (138)

What Hank said to Dagny after they sleep together for the first time:

What I feel for you is contempt. But it's nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don't love you. I've never loved anyone. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I wanted you as one wants a whore - for the same reason and purpose. I spent two years damning myself, because I thought you were above a desire of this kind.  You're not.  You're as vile an animal as I am.  I should loathe my discovering it.  I don't.  Yesterday, I would have killed anyone who'd tell me that you were capable of doing what I've had you do.  Today, I would give myu life not to let it be otherwise.  Not to have you be anything but the bitch you are.  All the greatness that I saw in you - I would not take it in exchange for the obscenity of your talent at an animal's sensation of pleasure.  We were two great beings, you and I, proud of our strength, weren't we?  Well this is all that's left of us - and I want no self-deception about it.

p236.

You've just joined a new company as a senior developer.  During the interview process your role was discussed in depth...

1. Lead a development team
2. Deliver a new application
3. Using state of the art tooling
4. Highly ambitious

You start, and in your first few days you are shown more details of the task at hand.  The project plan and delivery timeline were created by the head developer - a person for whom you have a great deal of respect.  Internally you are no really about how you will deliver this in such a short space of time. 

What do you do next?

A detailed write-up of Keith Elder's experience of upgrading and migrating his blog engine: 

Link to Upgrading and merging of blogs to Subtext

Whilst BlogML didn't play a role in the initial migration and merging, it did get praise for how it allowed Keith to move his blog from his development environment across to his production environment. 

Keith also wrote that he hopes that BlogML gains traction - I think that it will.  I remember this time last year thinking that if BlogML could just last through 2006 and pick up the major .NET engines that it would be a good thing.  Both of those have happened.  This year my goal for BlogML is to see it picked up by a couple of large non-.NET blogging engines.

Thanks to Keyvan I've been tagged  so I have to reveal 5 things about myself that you may not already know; here goes:

1. I was born at Glenelg private hospital in Adelaide, South Australia on July 22nd 1968.
2. I have played both cricket and hockey at state level.  I played state junior hockey and played senior turf cricket for both SA and also QLD.
3. I used to work as a trading floor operator for a stockbroking firm and was on the trading floor on the morning of the 1987 stockmarket crash - Black Monday.
4. I try to have a different breakfast each day of the week; some of my favourites are: Sliced Tomatoe's on Toast, Honey and Banana on Toast, Cheese and Vegemite on Toast, Muesli and Yoghurt.
5. My MVP got renewed for 2007 today

I'll keep the tag alive by tagging Mitch Denny, Greg Low, Paul Stovell, Andrew Coates, and Grant Holliday.

Today I started writing an API which allows me to easily access Gadget "packages" programmatically.  Here's a little snippet of my sample code that uses my API:

// Open a Gadget package and returns it as a strongly-typed object model.
Gadget gadget = Gadget.Open(existingGadgetPath);

// displays the name in the manifest file
Console.WriteLine(gadget.Manifest.Name);  

foreach (GadgetFile file in gadget.Files) {
    if (file.FileName == "main.js") {
        string js = file.Text;
        file.Text = UpdatePersonalizationKey(file);
    }
}

Gadget.Create(gadget, newGadgetPath);

This code opens an existing Gadget, updates some of the JavaScript in the main .js file, and then saves the files back as a new package. 

Code such as this would be really useful for personalizable gadgets, picture the following scenario:

You have created a gadget that will be downloaded from your website.  Users fill in a form and then get access to the gadget - maybe it's a valuable gadget such as a custom financial investment research gadget. 

Now you want to be able to track usage of the gadget and potentially push some targetted advertising down into the gadget as well.  Using the above gadget packaging API code you could easily embed a personalization key into the gadget which would then get passed along with each web service call made by the gadget.  This would allow you to easily track gadget usage and to provide personalized services and ad views to the gadget user.

Now that I'm creating my gadget API I'm also thinking about building a small IDE which will allow people to easily create new gadgets and browse existing ones.  I'm thinking that you could easily create something which gives people a simple File|New or File|Edit experience over gadgets.