It looks like a lot is happening on the web related to Silverlight. It's pretty difficult to keep track of all the websites, blogs, videos, del.icio.us links that get published every day or so. So, I created a Silverlight Pagecast (www.pageflakes.com/silverlight) to stay on top of everything's related to Silverlight. In one page, you get to see Silverlight.net website, MSDN's Silverlight Page, read most popular blogs on Silverlight, rss feeds from Silverlight websites, delicious bookmarks made by community on Silverlight, any blog mention on the web about Silverlight, videos on Silverlight and many more. As I discover more and more stuffs, I will keep adding them on this pagecast.

It's your one stop shop for all Silverlight action on the web.

You can also checkout my other pagecast where I have added lots of .NET related stuffs including many .NET related Podcasts.

www.pageflakes.com/omar

Feel free to recommend stuffs to put on these pagecasts.I would love to showcase your own work also.

 Imagine Cup is the world’s premier technology competition for students. Each year, students are provided with a theme – this year, the theme is extremely topical and relevant – “Imagine A World Where Technology Enables a Sustainable Environment”. Last year, we had over 100,000 students enter worldwide... think about that – that’s 100,000 bright young minds working to solve the world’s biggest problems.

This year, students can go in the draw to win internships, trips to France, cash prizes, xbox 360’s, HTC touch mobile phones and internships at Readify Consulting. This marks the biggest prize pool for Imagine Cup Australia to date, and provides a compelling reason for students to enter. There are 9 categories students can enter:

Software Design – Games Development – IT Challenge – Algorithm – Project Hoshimi Programming Challenge – Photography – Short Film – Interface Design – Embedded Development.

The Software Design category is particularly important, so if you know any young coders out there, please get them to visit http://www.microsoft.com/australia/imaginecup.

Cheers,

~Jen

Yesterday, Volta was made publicly available for the first time.  It is an experimental project in the early stages of development.  The team decided to release an early technology preview so that developers everywhere can help guide the project through experience and feedback.  We want your feedback.

The first release provides the basic feature set that will be improved upon with time.  It has some obvious shortcomings that we are aware of and are actively addressing.  But really, at this stage, the preview is more concerned with sparking your imagination about what is possible than ironing out all of the details.

Perhaps you disagree.  Maybe the most important feature to you is the completeness of a final product.  If that is the case, then say so and we will seriously consider making it a higher priority for the upcoming early experimental releases.

At some point, Volta may become, feed into, or inform a product, but that is a little way off yet.  So let's enjoy the unique opportunity of working together to make something great.

In the coming months, I will alternate between three types of posts:

1.  Volta focused posts: explaining the motivation, features, and technical details

2.  C#: this includes both 3.0 and eventually 4.0 features

3.  Random thoughts: like it says; two that will be discussed soon are programmer tests and continuations

I hope you enjoy the posts and I look forward to engaging with you in discussion.

For some reason 4 out of the 5 Windows Server x64 SKU's we have running in our office decided to reboot last night.  I checked the one that did not, and it had issues downloading the updates (thats a seperate issue).  Of the 4 that did reboot, I checked Automatic Updates and it appears that *somehow* they are all now set to download and install updates automatically.  Now, as most of us know you should set this to never install updates blindy on production machines.  Its always good to stage/test any new software installed into production, including service packs and Windows updates.  I double checked with my IT guy and he defintely remembers changing that setting during intial install (its part of our standard checklist).   

 This happened at 3am:

 Restart Required: To complete the installation of the following updates, the computer will be restarted within 5 minutes:
- Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB944653)
- Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB942763)
- Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB941569)
- Update for Outlook Junk Email Filter 2007 (KB943597)
- Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool x64 - December 2007 (KB890830)
- Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB942615)
- Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB941568)

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Restart required?  And it actually forced it?  Wow....   Anyone else notice this?

This just feels dirty to me...

I really like the ASP.NET AJAX script library. The Sys.UI.DomElement class in particular has some really useful pieces parts. As much as I'm enjoying using it, every once in awhile you find one little thing you wish it did.

For example, I have a little script does the expand/contract on user info in the new forum thread pages. It figures out how big to expand the div by looking at the CSS class that it uses. While this sounded like a good idea at the time, in order to avoid hard-coding heights into script or the page, it ignores the fact that you can have more than one style sheet, and for that matter, more than one style class on the element. I wrote this a long time ago, and I don't remember for sure, but I think my original issue was that I couldn't simply render the div hidden, read its height, then make it visible and start at height zero because the hidden-ness doesn't work the same in each browser.

While reading  R.C. Martin's book converted to C# by M. Martin "Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#" I could not ignore the fact that the Java notation for interface naming was used all over the place. Trying to be open-minded (or should I use "pragmatic" these days) I want to pop a question what is the benefit of dropping the I-prefix and how it does or does not influence the daily work.

For myself, having an "I" prefix in front of the name not only tells me that this is an interface, but also that this is a pure "contract" (Design by Contract is something I start to like).

   1:  public interface ICustomer

   2:  {

   3:    // ...

   4:  }

   1:  public interface Customer

   2:  {

   3:    // ...

   4:  }

So what do you have to say about it? To "I" or not to "I"?

The AJAX integrated support in ASP.NET 3.5 is nearly identical to ASP.NET AJAX Extensions with the significant exception of WCF services. I noted, though, also a slightly different behavior in the ScriptManager class as far as error handling for partial rendering operations is concerned.

When an exception is thrown during a partial rendering operation the HTTP request returns a regular HTTP 200 status code but instead of the updated markup, it includes a full description of the error.  In ASP.NET AJAX Extensions for ASP.NET 2.0, the default error handler pops up a client-side message box with the exception message or any text you assign to the AsyncPostBackErrorMessage property. In ASP.NET 3.5, instead, you get a JavaScript exception. 

Over the past few months I've been writing articles for the .NET Insight insight newsletter covering various ASP.NET AJAX concepts.  You can read those article here.  I've wrapped up that series and have started writing about Silverlight 1.0.  Each week a new article will be published and I'll update them here so check back.  The articles are designed to be focused and concise and get straight to the topic without a lot of fluff.  

• Getting Started with Silverlight
• Using Microsoft's Silverlight Control in a Web Site
• Understanding Silverlight's createObject and createObjectEx Methods
• Silverlight XAML Primer 1: Exploring Canvases
• Silverlight XAML Primer 2: Rectangles, Ellipses, Lines and Text
• Silverlight XAML Primer 3: Working with Image Brushes

Out of curiosity, does anyone have invite codes this year for the Mix conference? It's still a bit pricey for those of us who like to attend such things on our dime.