MarkItUp

Yesterday I mentioned that I had been using the new Speech stuff in Vista.  It's pretty cool and the more I use it the more accurate and faster I get.  I was again showing Harrison how it works tonight and he loves it.  More than that, he doesn't even question that you can do it. 

I jumped on, started up Speech Recognition, and started talking:

"Start Listening; Switch to Outlook"; "Move up four times"; "Press Enter"; ... {reads email message}; "Close Window"; "Press Delete"; "Stop Listening"; {coughs}; "Start Listening"; ...

I asked Harry what he thought of that and he said that it was pretty cool, so I asked him to give me an example of how he'd do it.  Without having read any help notes and without any training my 6 year old son said:

"Open Games"; "Start World Explorer"; ...

The more I use it the more I can see that this is really going to be the future of how we interact with computers moving forward.  Imagine it...

"House: Turn on lights"; "House: turn on airconditioning"; "House: turn on television"; "Computer: Open Internet Explorer"; "Computer: Browse to Google.com"; "House: load Madegascar DVD"; ...

Or, even better...

"Begin Conversation With House"; "turn on airconditioning"; "turn on television"; "tell me the time"; "End Conversation"; "Begin Conversation With Computer"; "Open Outlook"; "Read Me All New Emails"; ...

In our house we have a dinner time ritual called "Highlight of the day".  In it, we take turns to ask another member of the family what was their highlight of the day.  Today I had two and I was easily the winner.

My first highlight was that I went to the Parliamet for Question Time.  It was awesome to see this process in action and I highly recommend it to all.

My other highlight was that I used the Speech To Text stuff in Windows Vista to control my computer for nearly the entire morning.  Regardless of what the naysayer's have to say about Vista, both Harry and Charlie thought that it was cool that I could tell my computer what to do and that it would just do it.  Welcome to the future

Have you ever stopped and asked yourself what is the correct protocol for using BCC's when sending emails?  I have.  I mean, what would the person that you were sending the email to think if they knew that you were silently forwarding your message to other parties? 

I don't use BCC much, but I have used it a bit in the past - I think that I mostly do it when I want to pass a message on that I've received from one party to another party and I'm too lazy to send a second email to the original party to let them know that I've passed the message on.

I've learned to be careful with doing that though.  On at least a couple of occassions the person whom I've BCC'd has inadvertantly replied to all members in the original thread to add a comment.  I've since learned that using BCC for such subversive means is not a good idea.  Nowadays, I either do the longhanded approach of sending two emails or simply copy the original member onto the CC line of the email - if that's appropriate to do so.

So what is the correct protocol for using BCC?

Link to OZ IA 2006 Podcast - Thomas Vander Wal - Folksonomy to Improve IA

Thomas Vander Wal is the person who is attributed with the creation of the term Folksonomy.

Rocky was a pretty paranoid guy and I'm not quite sure what he'd think about cool new technologies like Ajax.  Me: I see them as a great new way to build engaging UI's by providing more responsive web applications.  Rocky: he'd be likely to just see them as a new attack surface or something.  Poor Rocky.

Anyway, some of working with Rock must have rubbed off on me because now I find that I'm acting more responsibly by doing things like locking my keyboard when I leave my desk and checking my inputs when I code.  To that end I watched this great webcast (not sure what happened in the first 5 minutes... just forward past that part) about the next generation of attacks centered on Ajax:

The Next Generation of AJAX Attacks – A New Generation of Attack Theories event

The webcast highlights some key areas to think about that are made more prevalent through the use of Ajax - such as attackers using the Bridges that are used in Mash-ups to deliver attacks from behind the safety of another web application - and what the implications of this are.  There's also a lot of the usual common sense stuff like checking input parameters.  The good thing is that these guys talk about those topics in a very relevant way.  For example, for data being passed around it's not just rendering of that data to the UI that can expose you to nasties - like cross-site scripting attacks - but there are many times in JavaScript where strings and objects are dynamically executed - examples include setTimeout, setInterval, eval, and dynamic html writing which all allow for malicious use of strings.

Well that's it from me... just gunna head off an check my buffers for overflows!

I got this link via Adam Cogan: 

Link to Integrating ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint - Mike Ammerlaan's Blog

It discusses how to go about enabling your Sharepoint 2007 portal for use with Microsoft Ajax.

Readify colleague Grant lifted the lid on his new role the other day and I'm pleased to announce that soon I'll also have a new title: Development Center Manager.  At some time in the next month I'll hand the over the reigns to the HR part of my role to focus purely on internal IP and product development opportunities.

The first applications are already on the assembly line so hopefully, within the next couple of months our new Marketing Manager will be able to lift the lid on some shiny new Ajax and WPF front-ended, Windows Workflow driven, WCF communicating, Sidebar accessible products

Oh yeah, while I still wear the hat, I should put in a solid HR plug... we're still on the lookout for new Readifiarians - especially in Sydney and Canberra.  If you're interested in a role at Readify then please contact me via the Feedback form on this blog. 

Cheers!

As announced by Frank, Phil and the guys set the new AFL.com.au site loose today:

http://afl.com.au

It's been amazing watching the guys go to work on this and to get some insights about how it's been put together behind the scenes.  In addition to using DNN as the portal front-end, I can also reveal that a lot of the data orchestrations that occur behind the scenes make use of SSIS.

Other Readify guys who have contributed to the success of this project have been Sydney-based Dan Bartholomew and Adelaide-based Andrew Ball.

Phil has done a great job getting DNN over the line for both the NRL and AFL sites in the past year!

A left angle bracket followed by a "b". Then add a right angle bracket followed by the following characters:

"s", "c", "o", "p", "e", " ", "c", "r", "e", "e", "p", " ", "i", "s", " ", "b", "a", "d"

followed by a left angle bracket and the "/" character. Finally add a "b" and a right angle bracket.

Nice article about how the PageFlakes guys got their Ajax implementation up and running:

Link to ASP.NET AJAX under the hood secrets - The Code Project - AJAX / Atlas

Scrap that buggy Soapbox link...

Link to Soapbox on MSN Video

Here's a couple of links to the "Wow" on YouTube:

This first one is an extended, launch video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL3rfuKwMDI

This next one is pretty grainy but its the same one as the Soapbox ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c33gk1QvHnY

Having watched these I'm not sure why this marketing campaign has received such bad press.  I actually like these videos.

SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) is the successor to DTS and is a powerful, enterprise tool for managing ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) operations.  Using SSIS you can easily design ETL packages and then import them into Integration Services within SQL Server.  From there you would typically run them via Scheduled Jobs.

Here's a link to a nice series of tutorials that walk you through how to develop SSIS packages - although be prepared to do a lot of reading as it's all text:

Link to SQL 2005 SSIS How-To Article Series | developer.* Blogs

Here is another resource which, among other things, contains heaps of articles about how to use specific tasks within an SSIS package:

http://www.sqlis.com/

Late last year I was interviewed by Craig Shoemaker about Web Parts in ASP.NET 2.0.  During the interview we talk about the book and about the writing process in general.  I also talk about why the portal framework is cool because of the extensibility points and the modularity that is built into the framework.

Click here to download and listen to the Podcast. 

The first week of the WCF Master Class is running in Melbourne next week and everybody here at Readify is getting excited as the final touches get put on things.  There's been some good press about this course too lately, here's an interview with Juval that was published on Computerworld today:

Link to Computerworld - Microsoft Software Legend on .NET 3.0, WCF and the future of software development

You can read more about the content in the course here.  You can also book from that page but I'm pretty sure that we are now only taking bookings for the Sydney classes that take place the week after next.