Last time I wanted to play with using videos as a source for Silverlight media, I found that Silverlight's "WMV only, thank you" limitation put the kibosh on my plans. YouTube and Yahoo are Flash and at the time Soapbox was password protected. Soapbox's latest beta removed the permissions requirement on June 1 so I finally found some time today to go digging around to see if I could now use those videos as a source for dynamic embedding in silverlight. I was a little bummed to see that the the videos are also flash. Here's what you get when you request embed script for a particular video:

<embed src="http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf" quality="high" width="432" height="364" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" flashvars="c=v&v=30dd604f-e0f6-498e-a24c-e3b65c7d2452" ><embed><br /><a href="http://soapbox.msn.com/video.aspx?vid=30dd604f-e0f6-498e-a24c-e3b65c7d2452" target="_new" title="Microsoft® Silverlight">Video: Microsoft® Silverlight</a>

Flash flash flash

I tried pasting in the url anyway for the videos just in case, but of course, it doesn't work.

bah!

Soapbox is still a beta, and does have great features, so hopefully (presumably?) there will be more options in the future.

My first MVP award was on July 1, 2003. I received an email this morning that I have been awarded an MVP (Developer Visual Basic) again. This is my 5th. I am always a little surprised since I never really know year to year what the criteria is. I just do what I do and if that makes Microsoft happy, I find out on July 1st.

I was smart this year to spend every last dollar of the past year's Microsoft bucks before the end of June. When I was down to $5, I found these cute little "beanie baby" type MSN butterflies for $2.50 each. They will be a fun thing to give to someone's kid. Not bad for a non-shopper like myself. My nephews got some pc games and Office 2007 Home & Student edition. I was able to get copies of Office for my sister as she expands her business. It's nice that I can share this benefit with my family, whom I steal time to go to conferences, run my user group, etc. Before the airlines got more strict with their carry-on rules, my husband's benefit was that I brought home a 6-pack of local brew in my backpack when I did INETA speaker trips to user groups around the country.

Loren is a long time TabletPC guru and developer. He has also been very involved with teh UMPCs. So it was only natural that he wanted to check out an iPhone. He blogged while he stood in line and has written his first impressions, from testing out the touch screen in a bouncy car, how it looks in the sunlight, how the touchscreen works in general,  to wishing there was an open SDK that he could develop against.

Michele Leroux Bustamante will be doing a 15 (fifteen!!) part web cast series on Windows Communication Foundation starting this month.

Michele is a web services guru who has written Learning WCF and knows this stuff inside and out!

As a follow up to my recent post about spending time with the teens attending the Summer Institute in Information Technology in Burlington, I've written about my visit over on my DevLife blog.

[A New DevLife Post]

I saw this in my Microsoft downloads email yesterday:

Access 2007 Download: Access Developer Extensions

Access 2007 Developer Extensions make it easy to deploy and manage solutions built using Access.

Packing and sharing Access solutions has always been a pain in the rear. My recollection (it's been a while) was that there was no freely available runtime. So every end user had to have a full license to Access, even if they weren't doing any development.

So now the runtime will be free. It's not quite available yet but will be out soon.

Here's more from the Office Developer Center:

As Philip Elmer-Dewitt says on Business 2.0's website: "it may be the most impressive demonstration to date of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' legendary mastery of the art of media manipulation."

The hype has definitely works on me and this has a historical basis. I was stuck in an airport lounge late one night just when the Nano was released. I must have seen the same Nano ad 30 times that night and a few days later, I bought one (my very first iPod ever). But  for the iPhone I have a few things to protect me making the same mindless grab: 1) no iPhone's in Vermont (no AT&T) and 2) in the long run, I think I'm too cheap.

I have a simple phone and if/when I get another, it would be to get access to my email and also share my calendar from outlook. I don't download music or need to carry around my dogs pictures. My iPod (nano) mostly has podcasts (ala Wait Wait Don't Tell me, Fresh Air, DotNetRocks) on it and some old Bonnie Raitt, etc. albums. When I see the iPhone ad, I GOTTA HAVE IT, but then a minute later reality seeps back in and I remember I don't have much need for it.

There are plenty of people that will tell you the more technical reasons why you might not want in iPhone (yet) such as issues with the EDGE network if you are interested in it's web capabilities. Others worry about the fact that you can't replace the battery if you need to, can't expand memory, can't add SIMS, etc.

I bet that all of those people who lined up at the Apple stores around the country yesterday don't care. All that matters to many is that it's COOL and it's SHINY and it's made by Apple. 

Last year, there was lots of buzz about a possible iTablet, for example, ZDNet's Matthew Miller is piecing together some various things he'd been reading. I never really paid much attention to it but now the iPhone has been making me wonder  if the technology that has gone into the iPhone is headed for other things (and if I was paying more attention , that's probably been said in a thousand blogs, too). Certainly if you google "tablet pc" and apple there's gobs of speculation - mostly from last year because a patent had been filed at some point. The patent most likely was for the technology in the iPhone. But heck, I have a touch screen tablet pc (Lenovo Thinkpad X60) and yet I'm still drooling over the iPhone (no AT&T in Vermont and I want Mobile 6 anyway and someone also pointed out on a listserv today... that phone's now cost more than computers!).

I don't know how Apple would ever come close to what Microsoft has done with the Tablet PC platform though, especially with the hand writing recognition. If I recall correctly, there were over a million samples used to get the recognition algorithms. On my touch screen, I can actually write with my finger (just for fun, and it was Stephen Toub who gave me that idea) and the reco works with that even!

Of course there's always Surface which is just as droolyas an iPhone  - just can't put it in your pocket.

I've been using Mike Volodarsky's patch for a while for sites that I am developing in IIS7 (no problems with file based development server) to get past debugger auto-attach problems. Now an official hotfix has been released.

Read more here

[A New DevLife Post]

I'm really excited about joining a group of about 50 high school students tomorrow who are participating in the Summer Institute in Information Technology at Champlain College this week. This is part of the Governor’s Institute of Vermont program.

According to Ann DeMarle (Director of the college's Emergent Media Center (among other impressive titles)) who is running the program, the kids range from very creative types doing digital video to hard-core programmers. About 1/3 of the students are girls.

I'm going to go talk to them a bit about having a career as a geek (and doing this in Vermont, of all places ) and then hang out with them while they work on their projects. Susan Wisowaty is going to join me as well. So between Ann, Susan and me, women with technical careers in I.T. will be well represented!

I will definitely follow up with a post on this after the fact.

It was cool on Saturday so Rich & I decided to go for a hike on the Long Trail. We drove to the top of the App Gap (which is near our home) and hiked south on the LT. This crosses over the top of the Mad River Glen trails, so we had lunch at the top of the double chair, looking out over the White Mountains in New Hampsire and then went on to to top of the Single Chair. There was some stuff that was pretty daunting to me in between those two spots, so rather than turn around and do them going back down, we hiked back down the ski trails and cut over to the road. Here are some pictures I took along the way.

There was a lot of Trillium  (will look through my wildflower books this weekend to try to see what the heck these are! They looked like a cross between a trillium family and wild orchid family to me..) along the way which was suprising to see in late June.

While at TechEd, David Sceppa wrote about the status of various database vendors as they create proviers for LINQ and Entity Framework. read more

[A new DevLife post]

Miguel de Icaza and team pulled it off in 21 days! Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]

Every summer, when strawberry season comes around, I have to look through my collection of old Food & Wine magazines for my favorite recipe. Its a Strawberry Tart and I know enough things about it that I should be able to find the recipe on www.foodandwine.com or just by googling. One of the interesting things is that the article was about Katrin Theodoli, then owner of the super luxury yachts Magnum Marine, and recipes she whips up in the little galley of the yacht when she's cruising the seas with kings and queens. Granted, you could solve a lot of problems in the world for the cost of some of these higher end boats; but still, I'm grateful for the recipe.

[Wendy, I hope you're reading this one!]

So since I decided I would ensure I could find the recipe more easily by just putting it here on my blog along with the reminder that it's in the June 1997 issue: "Outdoor Entertaining".

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• Pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 sticks of cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch dice
• 1 large egg
• 1 1/2 ounces bittersweet chocolate, melted
• 1/4 cup seedless strawberry jam, melted
• 1 1/2 pints strawberries, hulled and halved lengthwise

STEPS

1. In a food processor, pulse together the flour, sugar and salt. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add the egg and pulse until incorporated.
2. Preheat the oven to 375F. Butter a 10 inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured surface and pat into a disk. Roll the dough between 2 sheets of wax paper into a 12-inch round. Transfer the dough to a cookie sheet and refrigerate until firm, about 15 minutes. Peel off the top sheet of wax paper, invert the dough into the pan and peel off the other sheet of wax paper. Fit the dough into the pan and chill again for 10 minutes. Prick all over with a fork and bake in the middle of the oven for about 20 minutes or until evenly golden. Let cool on a rack.
3. Transfer the tart shell to a platter and brush the bottom with the melted chocolate. Refrigerate until set, about 10 minutes. Brush half of the jam over the chocolate. Arrange the strawberries in the shell, cut side down, overlapping them slightly. Brush the berries with the remaining jam.
   

As my young co-workers at a former job would say: "chickety-check it out"! www.thedatafarm.com/blog

(I'm still trying to work out the issue of it not showing when you are looking at an individual post.)

The Mobile team is at it again. They have written a converter to take Journal notes and convert them into an interactive Silverlight page. You can read about it on the Mobile dev center and download the converter application. There are two live demos of it here on my own website where I have hosted their sample and one of my own. (Click on the images below to go to the samples.) Note that mine seems to have stretched a bit because I created it on a lower resolution computer.

I recently whipped together a small tool for a client and because it was so small (and for only one person to use), I used some simple drag n' drop wizardry for the form. I created a datasource pointing to a table in the SQL Server 2005 database on my develpment machine then dragged that datasource onto a form to create a navigation toolbar and a screenfull of text boxes and checkboxes.

When I finished it up and pointed it to the live SQL Server 2000 database I was having some strange issues with inserts and updates. Specifically, SQL Server was throwing this error: "Error converting data type varchar to bit."

A little digging showed me that the TSQL being sent to the databse was passing "True" and "False" to the bit fields rather than 0 and 1.

SQL Server 2005 didn't seem to mind this, but SS2000 sure did!

I looked at the dataset that was created by the wizard and the bit fields were properly identified as booleans.

But when I looked at the parameters collections of the Insert and Update statements that the wizard had built, I could see that the properties of my boolean values was set to DbType=AnsiString.

So even though I prefered to know why I was seeing a difference between SS2005 and SS2000, I modified the auto-generated Insert & Update statements to make the DbType "Boolean" which passed 0's and 1's up to the database and everyone was happy. Changint the DbType to Boolean automatically changed the ProviderType to "Bit". 

I have seen a few threads where people pointed out this problem but never saw any suggest my solution or provide a reason for SS2000 rejecting it. If this wizard is meant to be used by newbies, I don't know how they would deal with a problem like this.

Analyst/Programmer Positions Available

Would you like to work for an established local company with a down to earth, employee oriented work environment?

Are you a creative, analytical individual with solid programming and communications skills?

Union Mutual may have a place for you…

We are on the search for two enthusiastic developers with that rare mix of programming and people skills to join our .NET/web development team. As a part of the team, your responsibilities would include maintaining and supporting our existing environment, as well as working with end-users to develop solutions to business problems.

Our ideal candidates will thrive in an environment where they balance several tasks of varying priority while working with a number of different languages and systems. Professionalism, a positive work ethic and a keen attention to detail are paramount.

Desirable skills and experience include (but are not limited to):

·       Strong analysis and communication skills       

·       Thrives on projects both independently; and in a collaborative team-based environment

·       Profession or educational experience developing solutions using:

o       Object-oriented analysis and design methodologies

o       Microsoft .NET Framework (C# - ASP.NET/Web Services)

o       SQL/XPATH query

o       Source control (CSV or VSS)

·       A passion for learning new skills and languages

Additional exposure to the following would also be of benefit: 

·       Project management experience

·       Aptitude for web and graphical user interface design

·       Knowledge of application development security best practices

·       Best-practice testing methodologies (Test-Driven-Design; NUnit; JUnit; etc.)

·       Prior experience in the property/casualty insurance industry

We offer a competitive salary and excellent benefits including pension and 401K plans.

Qualified candidates are encouraged to submit, in strict confidence, a resume and cover letter to:

Union Mutual of Vermont Companies
Director of Human Resources
PO Box 158
Montpelier, Vermont 05601-0158

or submit to Resume2007@umfic.com

VTSQL is having their June meeting tomorrow, June 20th.

Our pal, Jean-Rene Roy is coming down from Montreal to do a presentation on SQL Server Service Broker. This is one of those topics I found myself having to learn so that I could understand how Query Notification works in ADO.NET 2.0. But there's a whole lot more to leverage from it besides what I'm getting from ADO.NET.

More meeting info here.

INETA sent Keith Pleas to speak to the grateful Vermont.NET User Group last night. Keith presented the Designing for Operations project that PAG is working on. It was eye opening to many of us who have not spent a lot of time thinking about having our applications provide useful information to those who have to keep users happy and a joy for some who have had to write this stuff themselves in the past. Read more here...

[A New DevLife Post]