(note - If you do not see the drawing surface it's because this doesn't seem to work when the blog post is viewed individually. View my entire Silverlight category and it will be rendered properly. I guess I need to keep working on this one...)

This is the Silverlight setup that I used for my tests on this particular page.

I put the javascript and xaml files in the relative folders in my dasblog application:

thedatafarm.com/blog/xaml

thedatafarm.com/blog/js

Then I added the javascript references that are in the header tags of my html page into the header tags of the homeTemplate.blogtemplate file in my blog/themes/myfavetheme folder.

And it just works!

So far this is just letting you draw on the blog page. My persistence code in the later pages of the above mentioned tests use asp.net ajax and I'd have to do some major customization to my dasblog app to incorporate that right now. I pretty much use dasBlog out of the box, so I'm not ready to go down that road. I have lots of other stuff to learn, but this was a fun little exercise!

Inspired by the Scribbler app (part of the Silverlight 1.1 Gallery), written by Daniel Cook  & Pete Blois (with some inspiration from Laurence Moroney)  I decided to spiff up my own drawing application.

Why is it that a black background seems to be the way to make apps look cool?

I even finally opened up Microsoft Expression Blend to help me since I was getting sick of working in raw XAML and having to test each visual change by debugging the app. Last time I looked at this product, it frightened me and I closed it quickly. But now that I have done enough of the hand-coded XAML, it was not a huge leap to comprehend how to use Expression Blend and what I could do with it.

One thing that I discovered is that the Background property of the InkPresenter element, while necessary, is not recognized by the designer. So to do the design in Expression, I had to remove that property, then replace it when I wanted to test out the app.

Since my app is still using the v1.0 of Silverlight (and javascript, not .NET), I can't pull off the slick color picker that is in the Scribbler app. But when it's time to move to v1.1, I'll know where to find the code!

Although I'm pretty jaded about any achievement of Amanda Murphy (hey, I just expect great things of her!) I was happy to see her on the list of paneliests for this year's Women in Technology Lunchon at TechEd. It's a big honor.

Here's more on the luncheon (pasted from the TechEd site):

Women in Technology Luncheon

Every year, the Women in Technology luncheon provides a fantastic opportunity to network with other professional women in the computer industry. This year's luncheon takes place Wednesday, June 6, from noon – 1:30 P.M. and will feature Eileen Brown who will explore the challenges of being a woman and a technical professional in today's ever-changing world.

Eileen Brown, manager for the IT Pro Evangelist team in the Developer & Platform Group, will join us from Microsoft UK to share insights from a study done by Microsoft about women in technology. She will then introduce the panel of 4-5 phenomenal women, and moderate a discussion about attracting women into the technology field and retaining those who are already a part of the field.

Panelists include:

• Amanda Murphy, Senior Technology Specialist and Director of Operations for Infotech Canada and president-elect of INETA
• Lisa Coleman, Marketing Manger for Microsoft partner Intermedia.NET
• Mary Jo Foley, Currently the "unblinking eye on Microsoft" behind the "All About Microsoft" blog, and frequent radio, TV and newspaper commentator on Microsoft products, people and strategies.
• Ani Babaian, Senior Product Manager with Microsoft and author of a book to be released in October on women in technology.
• Mythreyee Ganapathy, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Education Strategies, and the mother of "a challenging 2.5 year old, who almost behaves like a Microsoft employee already."

The battery on my 3 month old Lenovo X60 is dead and I am getting the dreaded notice in the power manager "Irreparable damage to the battery has been detected. Replace the battery with the new one."

In addition to the message in the Power manager, I have the following symptoms:

• Battery Indicator light is blinking orange
• Power status says "Plugged in, not charging"
• Computer shuts down immediately when unplugged (since the battery is dead).

This is not atypical of old batteries that need replacement, but this battery is fairly new and has not been abused in any way.

I attempted a recommended BIOS update but this requires a fully charged battery.

I checked the March 27th battery recall, but my battery was not on the list.

Luckily, I found a comment thread in the LenovoBlogs under a post that is a few months old called "Power Manager." There is a new string of comments that began a few days ago with other people having this problem. An IBM technician from Vancouver has joined the thread, identifed the problem and is currently seeking a solution.

So if you have found my blog post via searching for a solution to this problem... keep an eye on the comments on the tail end of this post's comments: http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=52.

I like having found the www.LenovoBlogs.com site. It's a mini "blogs.msdn.com" and a good stab at corporate transparency and accessibility. The product manager's direct phone number is even published there!

There are a few silverlight demos that use the InkPresenter, though two of them don't refer to Ink at all...:

The page turning demo has it. You can annotate the pages and that gets remembered during your session. As you flip the pages back and forth, the annotations are incorporated into the effects.

The scribbler demo has it. This is straight drawing. What I love here is the cool pallette.

The Ink Tattoo Studio demo has it. This a fun demo.  On a tabletpc, the pressure of the stylus can be registered by the digitizer.I saw a version of this app that said "Ouch!" if the pressure got too high. Otherwise, the tattoo tool buzzes.

Dan Wahlin and Matt Gibbs have a book just coming out about ASP.NET AJAX (Prof. Asp.NET 2.0 AJAX) from WROX. So Dan has now spent a LOT of time with AJAX and is very knowledgable. Then Silverlight comes out and boom - he's got a Silverlight ASP.NET AJAX app that is VERY cool. I'm supposed to be writing an article on Entity Framework right now, but boy do I want to continue playing with Silverlight.

Since I won't be at TechEd, I want to make sure Eric Sink is well-entertained! Of course, he's a pretty entertaining guy, so do yourself a favor and go visit him, get a cool t-shirt, get a chance to win a Wii and see some awesome developer tools like my favorite source control program.

[The fine print: I was not asked, paid, cajoled, bribed or otherwise to make this post, but I admit that I was definitely flattered!]

It's always entertaining to laugh at the unrealistic things people do with computers in television shows - most often shows like CSI. I remember seeing one of the early demo apps for WPF that Carter Maslan created in early 2004 and thinking that it looked like the fantasy computing scenarios from t.v. coming to life.

Now another of the Microsoft Research projects that looks like life emulating art is coming unveiled... Microsoft Surface. Considering that I recently publically declared my love of using a touch screen computer, this looks like the best of that combined with the best of WPF and then blown up to a huge surface. It's very cool and promising and apparently coming at the end of this year. There will be a unit in a NYC Sheraton starting next week and then another will be at a tech show in San Diego later this summer. Check the FIND IT page for more details. I highly recommend watching some of the demonstration videos on the site and exploring the history as well. COOOOOOOOOL....

After my first series of exploring the InkPresenter in Silverlight, I have done some playing with having video interact with ink in Silverlight. You can read more about that here...

[A New DevLife Post]

The ADO.NET team is conducting a focus group about Linq to Entities during TEchEd. Unfortunately, they posted this today and the deadline to sign up is today.

Here's the info to sign up.

I won't be at TEchEd this year and neither will Roger Jennings, but Roger has already created a great list of points he would bring up if he was there. I basically second all of his suggestions. Many of them point to clarity on Microsoft's messaging around Entity Framework (though I personally feel comfortable with this at this point) and then technical details such as being able to deal with perfectly normal relationships between data...you can read what I mean by this if you check out this forum thread.

A recent column in the New Yorker magazine has some interesting insights into feature creep and users who want more features but are then overwhelmed by them. Read more ...

[A New DevLife Post]

I found a simple way to highlight information on a master/details form. More here...

[A New DevLife Post]

While I have been revelling in the thought of not travelling all summer, today I learned two things that translate to my not having any travel plans until November.

I had hoped to speak at the SDN conference in the Netherlands in September but none of my session topics were selected. After that I had planned to attend PDC in October, but that's not looking so good anymore.

Well, I'm definitely going to be in Las Vegas for DevConnections in the fall. We have a whole track just for Data Access talks in November, starting with 4 talks on Microsoft Day and then 9 more on the next two days. I am following up with a postcon 1/2 day also (more Entity Framework).

Then DevTeach is having a conference in Vancouver at the end of November. Of course, I can't assume I'll get to go there as a speaker, but I am crossing my fingers!

As for INETA user group engagements, I am currently waiting for the folks who do the scheduling to get caught up on their backlog of requests, but at the moment I have absolutely no INETA talks scheduled, which is weird after having done 15 in the current fiscal year. That is probably why I have nothing scheduled! Most speakers do 2 or 3 talks in a year. I just got a little carried away, but boy was it fun!

So my hope is that I am going to have a life this summer; ride my bike etc. Maybe when I reappear in the fall I'll have shed a few of those nasty .NET pounds I have put on since 2002. Or maybe not, but a girl can dream

XML is a pain to work with but because of it's importance, Microsoft is adding tooling into Orcas to make it easier. So, I was poking around in Orcas looking at what's new in tools for XML and XSLT. I even learned some stuff that was in VS2005 that I never paid attention to. Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

At MIX, I was somehow fortunate enough to be included in an intimate luncheon with Scott Guthrie, Ray Ozzie and a handful of bloggers from inside and outside of the .NET community. I've finally written about the luncheon and what I took away from it (no, I didn't steal the silverware!) over here...

[A New DevLife Post]

News stories about flying on planes always catch my eye because I travel a lot. Here's one from www.cnn.com today:

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Customs officers at Cairo's airport have detained a man bound for Saudi Arabia who was trying to smuggle 700 live snakes on a plane, airport authorities said.

The officers were stunned when a passenger, identified as Yahia Rahim Tulba, told them his carryon bag contained live snakes after he was asked to open it.

Tulba opened his bag to show the snakes to the police and asked the officers, who held a safe distance, not to come close. Among the various snakes, hidden in small cloth sacks, were two poisonous cobras, authorities said.

The Egyptian said he had hoped to sell the snakes in Saudi Arabia. Police confiscated the snakes and turned Tulba over to the prosecutor's office, accusing him of violating export laws and endangering the lives of other passengers.

According to the customs officials, Tulba claimed the snakes are wanted by Saudis who display them in glass jars in shops, keep them as pets or sell them to research centers.

The value of the snakes was not immediately known.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

One of the things I am looking forward to during my summer at home in Vermont is participating in the Dragon Boat Festival/Race/Fundraiser. The even raises money for DragonHeart Vermont (for breast cancer survivors) as well as for the VNAs Hopsice and the Vermont Respite House which provides care for terminally ill patients.

In addition to being able to help these organzations, it is a fun day. I have been paddling something or another all my life, from war canoes, kayaks and canoes at the age of 7 at summer camp, to rafts on Class 5 waters in West Virginia's Gauley River to kayaking all over Lake Champlain with my hubby.

The dragon boats are beautiful and have teams of 20. Check out the site and the pics! Come out and cheer us on this August.

While I had taken some baby steps with using the mediaElement in Silverlight (eg playing one of the wmv videos included in the sample videos in Vista) I had not investigated much further even though I was having fantasies of a sample Ink in Silverlight demo that would involve annotating your favorite YouTube videos.

I have started playing with drawing in Silverlight in this sample app. The cool thing is that while it works best on a TabletPC, it is not a requirement. You can even use it on a Mac.

However, I quickly learned that YouTube videos are formatted using a flash format (FLV). I had no idea that this existed. I really know so little about media encoding. I'm a database developer, not a designer.

Silverlight only displays WMV formats.

So my next idea was to point to Microsoft's YouTube wannabe site , SOAPBOX, but was surprised to see that while they are tweaking the features, the site requires a login to access videos. So much for writing an app to help promote SOAPBOX.

Then I looked at Yahoo... more flash videos.

Then it was time for dinner. So I might have to do my first experiments with some canned videos. But I REALLY like my idea and want to find a way to make it happen.

My Entity Framework presentation at DevTeach was in the last slot of the conference. It was scheduled in the theater which looks like something out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Some of the speakers were referring to it as the muppet theater.

About 5 minutes into my presentation, we were informed that there was a snafu with the hotel and they had scheduled a dress-up cocktail party in the theater. So we had to pick up and move to the ballroom on the other end of the conference center. No worries. Except that when we arrived, there was no projector or screen.

So, while the IT guys from DMIB (thank you thank you!!) set up a projector and screen for me, I just stood up and started talking about the Entity Framework for about 10 minutes until I had the use of my slides and demos again.

I wasn't too phased by this since I could easily sit in a bar with geeks and talk about this stuff for hours with out the aid of a computer. Also I had a VERY great audience of attendees who were totally understanding! Thanks to you, also.

I have posted the demos and a revised Powerpoint for the ADO.NET Entity Framework presentation to the DevTeach site for attendees and to my own website at www.thedatafarm.com/talks.aspx for others. I have run these demos in the March CTP of Orcas.

I have found myself with no travel plans for the entire summer and I am thrilled. Last summer I was hardly in Vermont with a hectic travel schedule that began, well, in March with DevConnections, then two trips in April, a user group and DevTeach in May, TechEd and then my Moncton/Nova Scotia/Newfoundland trip in June, 3 user groups in July, 1 in August, 3 in September, Bulgaria and more user groups in October, DevConnections in November and then Redmond to visit Microsoft  in December. That's not just the summer, it was the whole year, wasn't it? So now that I have finished up my crazy spring 2007 travelling (DevConnex in late March, then Seattle area in mid April and Las Vegas (MIX) in late April and Montreal for DevTeach last week) I am done.

No TechEd.

No user group trips.

No conferences.

It will all start up again in the fall, but for now I am looking forward to a long and beautiful summer in the place I love with the man I love and the doggies I love.

We'll see how long this plan stays in tact....