The Rich Web Experience

Ready for 5.0.17?

Howard Lewis Ship — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:15:53 CST

Looks like 5.0.16 will not be the final release, there will be a very modest 5.0.l7 that addresses a couple of annoyances that didn't have good work-arounds.

Speaking at VSLive! Dallas 2008

Josh Holmes — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:53:00 CST

One of the things that I've missed during my tenure here at Microsoft is speaking at some of the independent national conferences such as VSLive. But if you look through the speaker's list at VSLive Dallas you'll find a fellow named Josh Holmes... Woot!

I've actually got 4 talks and I'm sitting in on the ALT.NET panel on Tuesday night.

Definitely come out and see us - Register online or call 800-280-6218 using Priority Code SPHOL and receive $300 off the package of your choice.

DW10 IronRuby and Silverlight, Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate
Josh Holmes
Wednesday, December 10 – 1:45 p.m.
As the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) and IronRuby become more polished, it's time to start applying those technologies in new and interesting ways. One of my favorites is in a Rich Internet Application with a Silverlight front end. A perfect joining of two great technologies – IronRuby brings the dynamic abilities to your code that XAML gives your UI. From animations to logic to simple HTML DOM manipulation - it's all possible and a lot of fun. In this session, we will cover the basics of the DLR, a touch of Ruby and play with it all in the context of Silverlight.

DW16 User Experience for Architects: No Longer Optional
Josh Holmes
Wednesday, December 10 – 3:15 p.m.
The user experience is a core part of new applications and those with the best user experience will prevail. When I say user experience, most people think of the graphics and the front end. This, however, is just the lipstick on the application and considered "small d" design. The "big D" Design starts well before the UI layer and can have profound implications on your application architecture. Is it a SaaS application? Or is that one of many front ends? How does that impact your services strategy? How does the information flow impact your database structure? These and hundred more questions are all ways that the user experience decisions can affect the architecture.
In this session, we will cover a primer on user experience for the architect and discuss the various ways that it will affect your application architecture.

DTH6 Mashups from the Ground Up
Josh Holmes
Thursday, December 11 – 9:45 a.m.
When building a Mashup, there are a lot of choices that come into play. Most people they with choosing the UI technologies that are going to be used, but they are wrong. They should be thinking about the information that is going to be used and how to get to that data. Mashups are about exposing new and interesting looks at data so the first thing that you have to do is figure out how to get to that data. Only after that do you start looking at the various front end technologies from AJAX to Silverlight to any number of other Rich Internet Platforms.
In this session, we will compare and contrast building out SOAP services verses REST services with ASMX, WCF and ADO.NET Data Services. We will demonstrate consuming those various services with AJAX, Live Maps, Silverlight and many more front end technologies.

DTH10 Best and Worst Practices for Building Silverlight Applications
Josh Holmes
Thursday, December 11 – 1:45 p.m.
Silverlight, as it's relatively new to much of the community, is putting people through some bumps and bruises as they create amazing experiences for their users. There are a lot of best and worst practices that are starting to emerge as the platform matures and more and more applications are being written. How and where to keep the state management? What networking stacks make the most sense? When does it make sense to use Silverlight or any Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform?
In this session, we will give a cursory overview of what it takes to build a RIA and dive deep into the best and worst practices with Silverlight.

VSLive! Dallas 2008

Links for 2008-11-17 [ma.gnolia]

Aaron Gustafson — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 CST

American Airlines Debuts Mobile Boarding Pass

Finally, some intelligence from an airline: passengers in select cities will be able to have their boarding passes sent to their cell phones or PDAs for scanning.

Saved By: Aaron Gustafson | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: airlines, boarding passes, mobile, technology
The State of Web Standards

Opera releases info on MAMA's findings regarding web standards usage worldwide (and more).

Saved By: Aaron Gustafson | View Details | Give Thanks

Tags: Opera, web standards, MAMA

Generative Ambient Music: Bloom

Neal Ford — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:52:00 CST

One of the techniques I describe in The Productive Programmer is focus, distancing yourself from the all too common distractions in modern office environments. I suggest that you can wear headphones (or earbuds) while coding as an indicator that others shouldn't bother you. Some developers can code to music (in fact, some developers have a hard time not coding to music), but others fine it distracting. If you are in either group, you should try ambient music. The goal of ambient music is to create non-offensive background music. I find Muzak-style background music incredibly annoying and distracting, partially because they always choose sappy music (or taking good music and sappifying it) and partially because of a personality quirk described here. Ambient music strives to create a sonic background that not only doesn't distract but qualifies as good music. You can search for ambient music as a category on Amazon. Ambient music frequently uses techniques borrowed from Minimalist music, where you create a melody (which is too stong a term for some minimalist music) that repeats with minor variations.

Brian Eno is one of the pioneers of ambient music. He and Robert Fripp recorded the track The Heavenly Music Corporation on the album No Pussyfooting in 1972 by combining some experimental tape loop techniques from Eno, combined with Fripps guitar loops (called Frippertronics). No Pussyfooting is still available, and quite enjoyable. But the interesting part about it for this post concerns how it was created. Once Eno and Fripp had all the equipment set up, they started the tape loops and recorders for the background track and retired to Eno's front room and drank tea while the album recorded itself. No Pussyfooting has some early examples of generated ambient music (they were certainly not the first to experiment with generated music, but the first in a main-stream context). Eno and Fripp created several albums together. Eno has created a large catalog of ambient music (including the classic Music for Airports, recorded by several ensembles including the incredible Bang on a Can All-stars), and Fripp expanded the ideas behind Frippertronics using electronics for a stunning collections of recordings called Soundscapes.

Which brings me finally to Bloom. Bloom is an iPhone application created by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers. When you launch Bloom, it starts a gentle drone sound as a background, and gives you the option to create ambient music by tapping the screen. When you tap, a note plays based on the location of your tap. You can tap single notes or chords. After about 5 seconds, the note repeats and continues while it gently decays. Using Bloom, you can create your own ambient music. I can play with Bloom for hours. It is one of the best iPhone applications I've found: a trully innovative application that takes great advantage of the iPhone interface.

The other option when you start Bloom is for it to generate music for you randomly. That brings us back around to focus. Using Bloom, you can generate unique, non-distracting music for an entire day. Rather than buy a collection of ambient recordings, you can generate your own ambient music. Bloom lets you set several "moods", changing the tonal range and drone sounds to add just enough variety in the music to keep it just interesting enough to not distract. What used to take tons of studio equipment now runs on the iPhone. This makes a great way to help enhance your focus in noisy environments. Allow Bloom to create music for you that doesn't distract yet effectively drowns out all the other distracting sounds in your cube-ridden environment. Bloom is a great example that the iPhone isn't just another mobile device: it's a new platform for software development.

Adobe MAX Has Begun!

Shashank Tiwari — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:33:00 CST

Max Starts at Moscone West San Francisco

Its Monday November 17th and Adobe MAX starts at Moscone West in San Francisco.

Actually, like most conferences these days it started a day before the official day. Yes, Adobe MAX did have a pre-conference on Sunday and many attendees took advantage of the training opportunities.

However, the big start (a.k.a. the keynote) is only this morning and is actually going on as I write this post. Details on the keynote will come a little later today but you can see what the hall looked like just before it started.

Adobe MAX 2008 Keynote

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Tapestry 5.0.16 (Release Candidate) it OUT!

Howard Lewis Ship — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:09:32 CST

The latest release of Tapestry, Tapestry 5.0.16 (Release Candidate), is now available.

Tapestry 5.0.16 is the release candidate; we encourage users to download this version. In about a month, the Tapestry PMC will run a vote to grant it release status, barring any blocker bugs (critical bugs with no workaround).

In the two months since the previous release, we've addressed over 80 issues, including many bugs and a few last minute improvements. New features include a LinkSubmit component (dearly missed from Tapestry 4), new support for reporting Ajax errors on the client side, smarter client-side validation, support for several new locales, and much new documentation.

Tapestry 5.0.16 is available for download, or via the central Maven repository.

Framework Design Guidelines: Scenario Driven Framework Design

Brad Abrams — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 08:35:00 CST

Ccontinuing in our weekly blog post series that highlights a few of the new additions to the Framework Design Guidelines 2^nd edition.. This annotation is found in Chapter 2: Framework Design Fundamentals. Joe and Chris nail the core things.

JOE DUFFY

As software developers, we enjoy creating fun and powerful new capabilities, and sharing them with other developers. That’s one of the reasons API design is so enjoyable. But it’s also incredibly difficult to step back and objectively assess whether some new capability that you’re particularly passionate about has utility in the real world. Using scenarios is the best way I know of to identify the need for and ideal usage of new capabilities. Developing scenarios is in fact incredibly hard, for good reason: It requires a unique combination of technical skill and customer understanding. When you’re finished, you could make a series of decisions based only on gut feel and intuition, and perhaps deliver some useful APIs, but the risk that you will make a decision you will later regret is far greater. When in doubt, it’s best to leave a feature out and decide to add it later when a compelling need is better understood.

CHRIS ANDERSON

Each developer has his or her own methodology, and although there isn’t anything fundamentally wrong with using other modeling approaches, the problem generally is the output. Starting by writing the code you want a developer to write is almost always the best approach—think of it as a form of test-driven development. You write the perfect code and then work backwards to figure out the object model that you would want.

Camps and Community (MAX BOF)

Shashank Tiwari — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:20:00 CST

Come join me at the “Camps and Community” Birds-of-a-feather session at Adobe MAX 2008 in San Francisco. Its at Room# 2000 at Moscone West and starts at 9.30 PM on Monday November 17, 2008.

We will share experience from past Camps we have organized and participated in, for example:

We will also talk about community sites, events and more.

Bring in your questions and share your experience and ideas to make the community interaction and support better and more effective. Come and let us know how we can work together to organize more camps and more community interaction opportunities.

Remember that I am not an Adobe employee and very much a part of the community like you. I am happy the Adobe folks chose somebody from the community to run this session. Now, lets get the most out of this opportunity and share and learn from each other.

Here is the schedule for all the sessions that are part of the BOF and “Meet the Team” lineup.

Birds-of-a-feather and Meet the team at Adobe MAX 2008

The one listed on the first row that starts at 9.30 pm is the one on “Camps and Community”. You can also access the details from the Adobe MAX North America site by clicking on the “Highlights” link. Here is the url – http://max.adobe.com/na/experience/#?s=1&p=2.

See you there!

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What Does that .NET Namespace Mean: System.* and Microsoft.*

Brad Abrams — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 09:04:00 CST

I need your feedback... I am chatting with some co-workers about the perception of in the .NET Community of what the System.* and Microsoft.* namespaces mean. So I had the crazy idea of just asking you!

For this exercise, I'd like you to think about a new "feature area" of the .NET Framework... Would you instinctively draw any conclusions about that area based on if the namespace where System.* or Microsoft.*? If that feature area were in the Silverlight subset of .NET, would that change your mind at all?

There are basically three schools of thought among my co-workers -- which one is closer to your perception?

1) They are the same or it really doesn't matter. The root namespace between System.* and Microsoft.* have no meaning... Microsoft appears to be arbitrary about when functionality goes in one or the other.

2) Part of the Framework vs. Addons.

System.* indicates stuff that is logically part of the framework. It is 100% supported, solid-long term design that will not need to churn, safe to bet on, stable, likely will get great tooling support. Designed to be very interoperable and could work anywhere .NET is. This may ship as part of the redist or maybe an out of band (such as ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET AJAX, etc).

Microsoft.* is the bleeding edge stuff or value-add. It is typically very cool stuff that adds on to the framework and enhances it, but maybe a work in progress... over time you might expect some of those concepts to go into the framework. As an example, the great work patterns and practices does often falls into this bucket.

3.) Part of the core redist vs. addons

System.* means it ships in the core redist. You are not able to ship it with your application. System.* stuff only ships when the redist revs. You would not expect Microsoft to do any out-of-band releases in the System.* namespace for example.

Microsoft.* means it is not part of the core redist. A note: as we move stuff into the core redist you'd expect us to change the namespace from Microsoft.* to System.* meaning you'd have to tweak any calling code *if* you wanted to take advantage of the new version.

So, what do you think? Which one best fits your thoughts this? I'd love any other comments...

Win a Copy of Advanced Flex 3 at MAX

Shashank Tiwari — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 09:01:00 CST

Thanks to our publishers friends of Ed (APress), we are giving away 4 copies of Advanced Flex 3 at MAX 2008 next week. Stop by at the 360 | MAX booth, where you will surely find Tom and John (and me, many times in the day), and register to enter the daily raffle. You enter the raffle once and remain a hopeful for all three days. We will pick one winner (and two on the last day) randomly from the list of registered folks everyday and announce the winners right then. The winner goes out of the list and the rest are all carried forward to the next day. So the earlier you enter the better chance you have of winning. Good luck!

Advanced Flex 3

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Tapestry 5 Ajax Screencast

Howard Lewis Ship — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:57:00 CST

This is a follow on to my previous JSF comparison; Jim Discoll produced a Simple Ajax JSF example, and this screencast is the Tapestry 5 equivalent. I promise I'll stop now!

The Importance of Retrospectives

Nathaniel Schutta — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:48:00 CST

Today we learned something important, the NTSB announced the results of their investigation of the the 35W bridge collapse. Turns out it was a design flaw - some gusset plates weren’t quite up to snuff. As a result of this tragedy, bridges of similar design will undergo much needed scrutiny and we won’t see these types of designs in the future. Heck, by now engineering textbooks have probably already been updated.

Contrast this with the average failing software project. Maybe this is a bit of stretch (much like the bridge construction metaphor) especially considering that few software failures result in the loss of human life. But when was the last time anyone published a report about what went wrong with a multimillion dollar software collapse? No, we bury our mistakes (near Jimmy Hoffa) and pretend that the next time, when we do it JUST like we did it this time, it will work. It’d be too difficult to admit we did something wrong, even in the “safe” confines of our own organizations protected with lengthy NDAs.

Retrospectives are a vital part of creating better software but to be effective it requires a level of maturity that few organizations posses. Taking an honest look back at what happened, what went well and what went wrong leads to better results but only if you can discuss the project/increment/whatever openly and more importantly change how you do things. Life is full of constant adjustments, why should software projects be any different?

Clojure Baby Steps

Howard Lewis Ship — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:36:10 CST

Getting some baby steps going with Clojure. What threw me for a while is how difficult it was to get to do some basic output.

I wanted to see the JVM system properties. It's easy to get them, Java inter-operation is strong in Clojure, but in a readable format?

user=> (System/getProperties)
#=(java.util.Properties. {"java.runtime.name" "Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition", "sun.boot.library.path" "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Libraries", "java.vm.version" "1.5.0_16-133", "awt.nativeDoubleBuffering" "true", "gopherProxySet" "false", "java.vm.vendor" "Apple Inc.", "java.vendor.url" "http://www.apple.com/", "path.separator" ":", "java.vm.name" "Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM", "file.encoding.pkg" "sun.io", "sun.java.launcher" "SUN_STANDARD", "user.country" "US", "sun.os.patch.level" "unknown", "java.vm.specification.name" "Java Virtual Machine Specification", "user.dir" "/Users/Howard", "java.runtime.version" "1.5.0_16-b06-284", "java.awt.graphicsenv" "apple.awt.CGraphicsEnvironment", "java.endorsed.dirs" "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/lib/endorsed", "os.arch" "i386", "java.io.tmpdir" "/tmp", "line.separator" "\n", "java.vm.specification.vendor" "Sun Microsystems Inc.", "os.name" "Mac OS X", "sun.jnu.encoding" "MacRoman", "java.library.path" ".:/Users/Howard/Library/Java/Extensions:/Library/Java/Extensions:/System/Library/Java/Extensions:/usr/lib/java", "java.specification.name" "Java Platform API Specification", "java.class.version" "49.0", "sun.management.compiler" "HotSpot Client Compiler", "os.version" "10.5.5", "user.home" "/Users/Howard", "user.timezone" "", "java.awt.printerjob" "apple.awt.CPrinterJob", "file.encoding" "MacRoman", "java.specification.version" "1.5", "java.class.path" "/usr/local/clojure/clojure-contrib.jar:/usr/local/clojure/clojure-lang-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar", "user.name" "Howard", "java.vm.specification.version" "1.0", "java.home" "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home", "sun.arch.data.model" "32", "user.language" "en", "java.specification.vendor" "Sun Microsystems Inc.", "awt.toolkit" "apple.awt.CToolkit", "java.vm.info" "mixed mode", "java.version" "1.5.0_16", "java.ext.dirs" "/Users/Howard/Library/Java/Extensions:/Library/Java/Extensions:/System/Library/Java/Extensions:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/lib/ext", "sun.boot.class.path" "/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/classes.jar:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/ui.jar:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/laf.jar:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/sunrsasign.jar:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/jsse.jar:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/jce.jar:/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Classes/charsets.jar", "java.vendor" "Apple Inc.", "file.separator" "/", "java.vendor.url.bug" "http://bugreport.apple.com/", "sun.io.unicode.encoding" "UnicodeLittle", "sun.cpu.endian" "little", "mrj.version" "1050.1.5.0_16-284", "sun.cpu.isalist" ""})
user=>

So I thought I'd print out the results, one item per line.

user=> (range 5)
(0 1 2 3 4)
user=> (for [x (range 5)] (println x))
(0
nil 1
nil 2
nil 3
nil 4
nil)
user=>

Hm. This took a while to figure out. The trick is that for is a lazy operator, used for list comprehensions. That is, the sequence produced by for is lazy, you have to start navigating the sequence for it to fully execute. Thus, what we see above is two different streams of output, mixed together: A list: (nil nil nil nil nil) interspersed with the println calls. Here's the order of operations:

The Repl starts to print the sequence, starting with a "(" before the first atom
The first atom is evaluated, printing "0" and returning nil
The Repl prints the "nil"
The second atom is evaluated (lazily), printing "1" and returning nil
The Repl prints the second "nil"
And so on ...

That's a lesson ... in a lazily-evaluated world, even the most basics ideas have to be thrown out the window. You would never see this in Haskell, because it creates impenetrable barriers between functional, side-effect free code and any code that communicates with the outside world, even something as simple as println.

The solution? Collapse the list to a string and print that at the end:

user=> (use 'clojure.contrib.str-utils)
nil
user=> (println (str-join "\n" (range 5)))
0
1
2
3
4
nil
user=>

Baby steps. Sometimes the simplest things are tricky, but I suspect the more advanced things are easier.

Tapestry 5 Ajax Screencast

Howard Lewis Ship — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:30:58 CST

This is a follow on to my previous JSF comparison; Jim Discoll produced a Simple Ajax JSF example, and this screencast is the Tapestry 5 equivalent. I promise I'll stop now!