Inspired by the most recent post over at Advergirl (a friend of mine), I have decided to list out links to the 10 most popular posts from the entire 2+ year history of my blog. The reason for this is to introduce some of my older (but still useful) articles to some of my newer readers. So here goes:

10) Calling Javascript From Silverlight 2

This is another in my series of tutorial posts, which walks you through creating a Silverlight application that can both call, pass values to, and retrieve values from a Javascript method in the web page host. An invaluable read for any Silverlight developer.

9) Extraordinary Nut Snack

This is a commentary on the commercials from Frito-Lay on their new line of snacks. It includes a video of their first try at commercials. Beautifully done in CGI, the almonds fall like dominoes. And then they say the title of this post. Your mind will wander.

8) CAPTCHA the Flag

This is a complete walkthrough on implementing Asirra, a new CAPTCHA control (of sorts) from Microsoft Research. It's incredibly easy to add to your application, and might even result in an adoption!

7) 6 Tips For Making Website Registration User Friendly

There are a million different websites out there, and there's a million different ways to register for an account on them. This is a list of simple suggestions for the next time you head down the "registration" path. Best tip? Make it easier for your users, not for the developer building the pages.

6) Top 10 Things New Twitter Users Need To Know To Get Followers

You only get one real chance to impress upon someone why they should follow you on Twitter. Following these rules will help you immensely.

5) Simple Resizing In Silverlight

One of the beauties of Silverlight is that it is based on vector graphics. This means that no matter what size you display them, they don't get pixelated and blurry. Vector graphics can grow or shrink to any size, and this tutorial shows you the simple way to make it happen.

4) Creating A Simple Silverlight Animation

As the creator of the CodeMash logo, I was excited when I found out I could convert my Adobe Illustrator file to XAML. Once that was completed, the next logical step was to animate the gears. This tutorial shows you how to do that, as well as a quick tour around Expression Blend.

4) Left Outer Join In LINQ

As someone who has a hard time getting out of a traditional SQL mindset, when I started using LINQ, the question of how to emulate a left outer join immediately confronted me. This outlines the simple way to do just that.

3) I Hate Windows, I'm Moving To Windows Mojave

This was briefly written to announce the Windows Mojave website and advertising campaign. It has certainly has its praises and criticims, but this post got more traffic in one day than any other post has ever gotten.

2) TUTORIAL: Creating a WCF Service for Silverlight 2 and SQL

One of my first "tutorial" posts, this hit the ground running, and hasn't looked back. It's an excellent beginning example of how to get Silverlight talking to a web service that accesses a SQL database.

1) General Ionics: Fake or Fab?

This article was written while I was buying a water filtration system for my home. While not technical in nature, this has been, by far, my most popular post to date.

Labels: .net, jeff blankenburg, microsoft, Silverlight, tutorial

Today I am excited about speaking at the Indianapolis .NET User Group meeting. The reason I call it my Indianapolis 500 is because that's how many miles I'm going to be driving to get there and back today. According to Live Maps, it's 231 miles each way. Count in the fact that I am certain to make a wrong turn at some point, and that adds up to around 500 miles total. Now if only I could drive 200 miles/hour...

Anyways, I'm going to be presenting a completely revamped version of my "Amazing Things You Need To See" talk for them, and even plan to Photosynth the room/building we're having the meeting in during the talk. Should be a great night.

Here's a link to the slide deck for those of you that are interested...

Labels: .net, indianapolis, indynda, jeff blankenburg, microsoft

If you are a regular reader of my blog, I need your help.

Jim Holmes and I are putting on a .NET University-style event on November 8, 2008. It will be held at the Columbus Microsoft office (it's right next to Polaris Mall).

Here's where I need your help. I don't need you to register. I don't need you to attend. I need you to tell the junior developers at your company about this. I need you to tell your friends that have been curious about .NET development about it. You are welcome to attend as well, but if you're using these technologies regularly, it will probably be a refresher.

This event is going to be covering the basics. Web services, C# and VB.NET 3.5, Visual Studio 2008. AJAX 101, Silverlight 101, and WPF 101.

We want to give developers an opportunity to get up to speed on all of the new development technologies that have come out of Microsoft in the past year or so, and this seems to be a great way to do it.

As soon as registration opens for this event, I will posting that information here as well. If you're interested in speaking on one of the subjects listed above in a 100-level presentation, please contact me ASAP so we can get everything arranged.

Labels: .net, .net 101, .net university, jeff blankenburg, microsoft, university

(See Part 1 first...)

Today we are looking at a second way to lay out your interface in Silverlight. This will be far more familiar to the CSS fanatics out there. The primary concept is simple...we'll be using a StackPanel control to position our elements.

For those of you less familiar with CSS, this is more of a flow-based layout. As the size of the Silverlight container grows and shrinks, you will find that the elements will move to accomodate that space. I, personally, would not recommend approaching your entire interface with this technique, but it certainly makes sense for small portions, like navigations and lists of data.

Most of our positions will be determined by manipulating the margins of the individual elements on the page. In doing so, we can place our elements specific distances apart without having to specify their exact position on that page.

In the example below, I have 6 buttons that I want to arrange in a 3x2 block. I start with an outer stack panel that, by default, will stack my elements vertically. However, I want to have two rows of 3 buttons each, so I am going to nest two more stack panels. Each of these will have the Orientation attribute of the StackPanel set to Horizontal, to create the rows.



For demonstration purposes, I also modified the margins of a few of the buttons, just to show that we are merely stacking these elements. This is not a grid, or table, and certainly not absolute positioning. These elements are merely stacked, either horizontally or vertically, with margins as the leverage to move things around a bit.

NOTE: I have a major complaint about how margins were implemented in Silverlight.

Again, for those of you familiar with CSS, the de-facto standard for specifying margin sizes was one of two formats:

margin-left:10px;
margin-right:10px;
etc.

OR

margin:0 10px 0 10px;

Each of those examples would have given you a 10 pixel margin on both the left and right of the element you were styling. In the second example, we are using a bit of shorthand to specify ALL of the margins in one line. They start with the top, and go clockwise. margin:Top Right Bottom Left;

In the margin implementation for Silverlight, it would appear that they also offer a shorthand version for margins (actually, the only version is shorthand), and they did not follow the standard convention mentioned above. Instead, they chose to use Margin="Left, Top, Right, Bottom". I've not yet talked with the team to see why this convention was chosen over something more familiar to developers, but if I can find an answer, I will post it here.

(continue to Part 3...)

Labels: .net, jeff blankenburg, microsoft, Silverlight, stack panel, XAML

There are three opportunities for you to get your "learn on," for FREE, in the next month.

April 19 - Central Ohio Day of .NET - Wilmington, OH
Registration has already maxed out for this one at 250 people! A great number for the third year of this event! They will have 27 different sessions to choose from, and on top of being a great day of learning, I am putting together a little event afterwards for anyone that is sticking around at the Roberts Centre that night. More on that at the end of this post.


May 10 - West Michigan Day of .NET - Grand Rapids, MI
The second year for this event, in Grand Rapids, MI. The day will focus on the future of .NET an cover all the world-class technology Microsoft has or will release this year. In addition, the day will consist of breakout sessions with breakfast and lunch included!



May 17 - Cleveland Day of .NET - Cleveland, OH
Cleveland Day of .NET is a free one day conference targeted at developers using the Microsoft .NET platform. It is a collaborative effort among the various local user groups and is open to all developers, local or otherwise. This event is occurring on Saturday, May 17, 2008 from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM.

There will be numerous sessions to choose from covering a variety of topics. The exact session list will be coming in a few weeks but you can look forward to topics such as:

ASP.NET
Silverlight
DLR / IronRuby / IronPython
SharePoint / MOSS
SQL Server 2008
... many more





Poker .NET (Newbies Encouraged to Try)
I am hosting a Texas Hold'Em Poker Tournament for the first 20 responding attendees of the Central Ohio Day of .NET. It will be held at the Robert Centre, the evening of the CODODN. I've reserved a "parlor suite" that will accomodate us with a full (unstocked) wetbar, refrigerator, and furniture for hanging out. You are welcome to bring anything you'd like to eat and drink while you're there.

We will get started with the tournament at 8:00 PM...plenty of time to hang out with folks after the CODODN and still have some fun in the evening playing cards with your geek friends. The hotel room also has accomodations for sleeping, so if you were looking for a place to crash after the event, I can provide that for a few travelers as well.

The buy-in will be $20, and all of the rules, etc. will be provided when you arrive. Expect your standard Hold'em rules to apply. Please contact me directly at jeffrey.blankenburg@microsoft.com to "register."

Labels: .net, cincinnati, cleveland, cododn, columbus, day of .net, grand rapids, poker

So some of you may have heard rumblings about some piece of software being released recently, and some of you even chided me for not having a super mega blog announcement about it.

Visual Studio 2008 has RTMed!


Now, in other news, we have put together a few events to give away copies of Visual Studio 2008 Pro to y'all. (I'm currently in Texas...my apologies.)

We will be holding a Holiday Bowl-O-Rama & InstallFest event in Nashville, TN on December 3rd, and another one in Detroit, MI on December 7th. These events MUST be registered for in order to get the free bits, so here's the links to these events:

Nashville, TN - December 3
Detroit, MI - December 7

We will be handing out Visual Studio 2008 Pro (90-day trial) disks to everyone that attends. However, we are only able to give away a full version (available in early 2008) to those individuals that register using the links above, AND attend. Registration alone is not going to be enough.

As some of you loyal readers know, I went bowling a few weeks ago, and declared myself the best bowler that reads this blog. This is your opportunity to prove me wrong. These events will be held at bowling alleys, and we'll be picking up the costs of bowling and shoes, and food will be provided as well. All you need to do is show up, and hurl that ball down the alley.

If you can beat my 2-game average, I will have a special gift for you. (This is above and beyond the Visual Studio software you're going to receive). I'm not going to be promoting this contest at the events, so you'll have to come find me with your proof of score. It's one of the many benefits of being a regular reader of this blog.

So, go register for your event. Tell your colleages to register. It's gonna be a blast. We'll also have XBoxes with Guitar Hero III and Halo 3 available for playing.

Labels: .net, jeff blankenburg, microsoft, visual studio

This post is part of a large announcement today. Microsoft is releasing the source code for the .NET framework libraries under the Microsoft Reference License. This license allows viewing of source code, but not modification or redistribution. The source code will be downloadable and viewable by anyone who accepts the license agreement.

This is a very exciting announcement. You'll be able to download a package with all of the source, and then be able to install and browse it locally.

I can continue gushing about this, or I can send you to the official announcement locations:

Scott Guthrie's blog has the primary announcement, with screenshots of the Visual Studio experience.

Also, there is a 30-minute podcast interview with Shawn Burke on Hanselminutes.

Labels: .net, .net framework, microsoft

So it's been hyped for the past few weeks that we were going to see many new things announced by Microsoft this morning. The hype didn't keep up with reality.

It was WAY better than sold.

THe biggest highlight of this conference is the combination of Silverlight with the .NET framework.

We can actually write C# code to function like you would normally expect Javascript to do.

We can create vector based animations to run in a cross-browser, cross platform environment, with all of the instructions stored in XAML.

Designers can completely control the look and actions of these elements in a graphical interface, but that design is then translated down to XAML, which can be edited, updated, etc as a file on the server. This allows the designer to control the looks, and the developer to control the functionality.

Two demos during the keynote were flooring, however.

First, the CEO from a company named Metaliq demoed a new AJAX/Silverlight/.NET application they call Top Banana. It is basically a content editing application, all within a browser. The URL is http://silverlight.metaliq.com/topbanana
It appears they have taken their demo down, but as soon as I can get access to it again. I will post it. It was truly unbelieveable.

The other struck close to home. I'm a huge baseball fan. Mondo big. And having grown up in Cleveland, I've been forced to suffer with the Indians my entire life. THe C-something-something from MLB.oom was here demoing their new MLB.TV application. It acted as I expected. Showed every possible statistic available in an interface that also shows the live games streamed over the internet. All great, all what I would expect. It include a feature that allowed you to add your favorite players (think fantasy baseball) and it would alert you every time your player did something in any of the games. It would also serve up the specific video clip of that notable performance. (On a sidenote, thsi guy said that they generate 10 DVDs worth of data with every pitch of every game. That seems like a little bit. :))

Anyways, even the fantasy player list wasn't the coolest part of this demo. Oh no. He then pulled out his cell phone, and showed us a Silverlight application running there. It showed stats, game scores, even live score updates, and runners on base. Think about the graphics that show up during a TV broadcast. Minus the actual game video. Well, with Silverlight, it appears they are going to be successful in streaming actually live video to your phone, and remember that fantasy player list, statistics, and video feeds? That was all demonstrated as well.

Man, this has been amazing thus far. Thanks again to Quick Solutions for sending me here.

Labels: .net, AJAX, microsoft, Mix07, Silverlight

In a pinch, I have been asked to present my Google APIs talk for the Central Ohio .NET User's Group. It'll be this Thursday!

If you were teetering on attending, this talk will be overhauled. I am abandoning AJAX search (except maybe as a casual reference at the end) because I lack a practical application for it.

I will be covering:

Google Maps
Google Checkout
Google Calendar
Google Spreadsheets (I hope)

See you there!

UPDATE: Here's the presentation! Office 97 - 03

Labels: .net, Google

After returning from Vegas on May 3rd, I'll be heading up to Ann Arbor for the Day of .NET. I was selected as a speaker for the event, and I will be presenting my talk on Google's APIs.

Hopefully, I'll see you there!

Labels: .net, Google, microsoft