Lazy Developer : News

First GL.net Meeting

Jimmy — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:23:23 GMT

The GL.net very first first meeting will be on 25th February 2009. Two truly great speakers kindly agreed to join us. Guy will be talking about new features in C# 4 and Paul will show live coding session with Silverlight. The meeting will be held in Royal George Hotel, Birdlip, UK. If you are living or just visiting Gloucestershire then don't wait and go to the meeting page to register now.

I hope to see you there.

New User Group

Jimmy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:51:38 GMT

Happy New Year!

Finally, after ages of talking about I did it as my New Year resolution. Just few hours ago, GL.net user group has been officially open. Herein I would like to invite all .NET geeks from Gloucester, UK area. Of course, anyone else is warmly welcome.

Cheers

Just Surface - I Want That Table!

Jimmy — Wed, 30 May 2007 10:33:00 GMT

I will be surprised if you still don't know what the Microsoft Surface Computing is. But if you dont...

Take a look to Microsoft Surface project homepage. I will not try to describe here what is that about. I have no world to do that. It have to bee seen. You can start from presentation on Channel 10.

Did I mention I want that table?

Joined to AJAX Control Toolkit Team

Jimmy — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:56:00 GMT

Now I can officially say that, I joined to AJAX Control Toolkit team which I'm very proud of. A number of new challenges and things to learn are waiting for me now. I'm so excited.

First thing I'm going to take is ContextMenu Extender. Kirti put short requirements list on her blog, I will allow myself to copy that post here. Two copies may increase possibility of feedback.

One of our new contributors (that's me) has volunteered to author a new control which will behave like a context menu. It will prevent the default browser menu from showing up when you right click and show you a custom menu and provide you with richer, more relevant functionality. We would have to essentially override the contextmenu event and show a popup. The new context menu could easily use the existing FloatingBehavior support in the Toolkit to show a custom menu control.

Name of the control: ContextMenuExtender

TargetControl: Control

Properties: I am almost stealing this from the HoverMenu control in the Toolkit. The ContextMenu is the HoverMenu handling the contextmenu event instead of the mouseover/mouseout events. We could reuse most of the functionality in that control.

TargetControlID: ID of the element, right clicking on which will cause the context menu to show
PopupControlID: ID of the menu popup that will serve as the context menu
Position: Position of the menu popup with respect to the target control. Any position supported by PopupBehavior?
ContextMenuCssClass: Name of the css class that will be applied to the menu popup element.

Accessibility: When the target control is focusable the ContextMenu should be able to be activated using the keyboard alone so the extender needs to support keyboard eventson the target control as well. The popup panel should have the features expected of an accessible control like semantic html, alternate text, high contrast support, keyboard support and more. This would be a to-do for the website developer though and not the control author since the Extender consumes whatever Menu Control is passed to it.

International: Would there be any left-to-right/right-to-left concerns we should have if we are exposing the Position property? Users can make their page globally aware using that, correct?

Usability: This is something that end users who deploy this control should take into consideration. Right-clicking in a browser to expose non-browser menus is not something that users will discover intuitively. It should be considered that the control needs to communicate in some way that it has a contextmenu that is not the default browser one. It needs to be somehow advertised that there is more possible with the target control beyond just clicking and/or hovering over it. Talking about usability, what would be the Safari story? Would any Macintosh users like to chime in?

Any more feature requests, ideas?

Pex: a fish with big teeth

Jimmy — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:43:00 GMT

Actually, Pex it's not a fish, it's Program EXploration, tool for test generation and dynamic analysis designed by Microsoft Research. Examples of features can be found on the project page. In shortcut, Pex is able to analyse .NET application and use parameterised unit tests to automatically generate traditional unit tests with high code coverage. It also can fix the bugs for some failed tests (oh yes!).

Interesting? Go and check. I can't wait for this tool.

WPF, UniveRSS(e) and The Panel

Jimmy — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 23:47:00 GMT

Just a few weeks since the .NET 3.0 has been released and I feel a little dissapointed. I was expecting a lot of new amazing stuff popping up like a mushrooms after the rain, but no, it's a bit quiet like everyone is afraid of using the new .NET. Finally, I've found the very first cool thing today - UniveRSS. What is that? It's a 3D RSS reader. Yes, it's not a mistake. Moreover, it has been released by Microsoft. Sounds good so far, it isn't?

Ok, let's start from The Panel, the website designated to show new user experience using WPF and Windows Vista.

The Panel is the place to collect showcases of the new user experiences and provide insights on how they were implemented.

Fair enough, check the website if you want to know more while I will go to the UniveRSS project, which is much more cool that The Panel itself.

UniveRSS is, like I've wrote before, a 3D RSS Reader. It means that you have a 3D view for all your feeds. According to the project description:

It introduces a full-screen 3D universe where galaxies represent the folders of your RSS feed directory, and the stars are represented by the spinning cubes that hold the feed information. Size and position of the feed cubes indicate how many unread items they contain.

Sounds very cool, it isn't? There are some screens on the website and, of course, download. Moreover, you can download sources which is even best.

Well, I didn't install Vista yet, but now I see the reason coming. Meanwhile, it would be cool if someone will download it and make some comments.

So. We have first cool WPF stuff. I remember, during the DDD3, someone show us North Face website Microsoft is working on. That was the most amazing stuff I saw in a last few months. Do you have any cool stuff in your bookmarks, and maybe you made some cool stuff with WPF? Show yourself. Let's make a list. Maybe we can set up some contest (Brendan?).

Waiting for comments and links. Meantime I will be installing Vista.

Breaking News: ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Released

Jimmy — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 13:20:00 GMT

Not final release but quite close this time. The ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX, formerly known as the Atlas, has been released yesterday, with all the new look and feel. Changes are quite deep and important so all current Atlas pioneers should prepare themselves for a few hours to spend on migration.

The new solution has been spitted to two separated downloads. First, ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 Beta contains all the AJAX core functionality that is the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions and the Microsoft AJAX Library. That will allow creating AJAX-style applications using server- or client-side development. The Microsoft AJAX Library is also available in a standalone package for development on non-Windows systems. This package contains features such as asynchronous calls, page methods calls, ControlExtender class, Script Managers, bunch of Java Script classes, debug and trace, Timer and UpdatePanel. Note that UpdateProgress control has been moved temporary to ASP.NET AJAX CTP, which is quite significant change, but will return to the core in the final release.

The second package, ASP.NET 2.0 Community Technical Preview (CTP) extends core AJAC functionality with number of features. A full detail, where which feature is located is available on Feature Matrix on ASP.NET AJAX webpage. It's worth to check this out. ASP.NET 2.0 CTP is a preview of unsupported features that may be later included in final release of ASP.NET AJAX, included as part of ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit or even released as sample code.

Both packages together enable all development scenarios supported in the earlier versions but changes require some work to update existing applications. The migration guide describes all the process quite well. I will test it next week so expect some conclusions.

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit has been also released today, as a part of changes. The new release includes all changes made in ASP.NET AJAX core. Changes are significant as well, especially for extender developers. While typical, ready-to-use extenders didn't change too much, extender model has been redesigned. Properties have been moved to the main Extender class and client side behaviour template has been changed as well. My current cycle on showing validator extender will be upgraded to the new version, so in the next par I will try to describe the differences between the old and the new.

That's al at this time. In next couple of days I will try to write some more on this.