Dave Bost

I loaded up the kin folk into the family truckster, pointed the compass due west to the mountain "Vistas" of Colorado, and during our rest and relaxation time before the young’ins start school, so many noteworthy items transpired in my absence. This is my cheap attempt at catching up…

Silverlight Shows it Stuff for the Olympics

Old news, but certainly noteworthy. Silverlight had a coming out party of sorts during the 2008 Olympics. NBC Sports made the decision some time ago to utilize Silverlight for its interactive experience on NBCOlympics.com. NBC certainly set the bar high for future sporting event coverage. I was amazed at the depth and breadth of live and on-demand coverage for the 2008 Olympics. For the first time, I could choose which events I wanted to watch (Trampoline anyone? How about Handball?), when I wanted to watch it and not be set to what the NBC producers decided to show and which of their on-air channels. This worked surprisingly well for us on our vacation. For one, we were without our DVR to record what we wanted to see. Secondly, we weren’t going to be hanging around our condo during our entire vacation to watch the Olympics. For us, we were able to pull up whatever highlight of the day we wanted to see or just set it on the Equestrian events for my oldest who is just getting into horseback riding and can’t get enough of horses. All in all, this years Olympics were outstanding and for me and my family that was mainly due to the NBCOlympics.com website.

Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Ships

Yes… while I was doing my best Julie Andrews impression and running through the mountain tops of Colorado singing "The Hills are Alive", the DevDiv team goes out and ships Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. I know quite a few of you have been waiting for this one. This is no simple service pack. There is actually some new features to be found in here. Brad Abrams threw together a comprehensive list back when the service pack hit beta. More detailed posts coming soon around these enhancements.

Codeapalooza Registration Opens Up

Since the early days of .NET, the Chicago .NET User Group has held a (mostly) yearly event called Day of .NET. Its been a while since the last one, but that’s because they were working on plans for something bigger, better and more agnostic. Codeapalooza comes to IIT Wheaton Campus on Saturday, September 6th and registration is now open. There are 6 tracks with a minimum of 5 sessions each throughout the day. The session themes range from Data Layers, Sharepoint, Process to Potpourri 1 & 2. We’re also trying to secure room to hold an Open Space session throughout the day. I will be presenting a couple of sessions at Codeapalooza (Building WPF Applications and a Tour of CodePlex) but I’m sure I can ramp up a few Open Space discussions as well. What topics would you be interested in seeing at the Open Space? With the breadth of this event and the great speakers on tap, this event is surely to sell out. Be sure to register soon.

Kentucky Day of .NET

Our friends down south, Chad Campbell and Jeremy Sublett, are throwing a hoe down themselves on the same day as Codeapalooza (so, unfortunately I won’t be able to make it). Kentucky Day of .NET will be taking place at Sullivan University in Louisville on September 6th. Check out all of the details at http://kydayof.net. Just think of all the geek goodness we could share between both events if we could somehow link them together. Anyone know of a good way to do this?

Live Search releases Webmaster Tools

The Live Search Webmaster tools team proves that you don’t have to live in beta on the web with the 1.0 release of the Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools provides reports on website crawling issues that Live Search encounters along with deep information about your backlinks. Essentially, these set of tools is a facility of Live Search to work with webmasters to make sure their content is available in a way that will take their sites to the top of the search result list, and at the same time provide Live Search with the necessary means to improve their core result relevance. If you’re a webmaster, check out the tools at http://webmaster.live.com.

Windows Mobile and Windows CE Monthly Chats

Rob Cameron shot me an email while I was away to inform me that the Windows Mobile and Windows CE app dev teams will be holding a series of monthly chats. If you have any questions on building applications on top of the Windows Mobile or Windows CE platform, this would be the group to ask. The list of upcoming chats has been posted here.

Phew! That was quite a list to catch up during my time away. It just goes to show you that the world still moves when you’re trying to slow it down.

In Wordpress, when you access your admin screen, you will receive a very subtle message to notify you that a new version is available. I have been running Wordpress 2.3.3 for the longest time, putting off upgrading to 2.5. I finally succumbed to the subtle message that finally became annoying and upgraded to 2.5.

I wasn’t up and running on 2.5 for more than a few days when I received another subtle message to upgrade to version 2.6. Screw it, I said. I’m not wasting my time upgrading again, it will have to wait. Not that upgrading is all that painful, but I use Filezilla to FTP the updates to my blog server. If you’ve ever used Filezilla, it’s what I like to call "crap shoot software". It will either work, or you’ll crap out trying. When uploading multiple files to my blog server, Filezilla will sometimes decide to stop working and just close the app all together. This happens on the Mac version as well as Windows. It makes FTP’ing multiple files an exercise in futility. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a better FTP client that someone is willing to give me for free. I don’t mind paying for good software. I just don’t FTP enough to justify the spend.

Back to Wordpress…

Anyhow, I wanted to head over to FeedBurner to check on my RSS stats and noticed that for the past week or so, I have 0 (!) subscribers. Grant it, I don’t have a ton of subscribers but I have more than ZERO (note: if you’re not subscribed to this blog, what are you waiting for? Click here to add the feed to your favorite RSS reader). I couldn’t understand what was going on. FeedBurner would report an HTTP 500 error and my feed. The BIG DADDY of web application errors. If I browsed to the file that FeedBurner ends up re-directing to on my blog, I would get nothing. Notta. Zilch. Not even an empty XML tag.

Then I realized - Hey!, I just upgraded the Wordpress engine; and - Hey! Wordpress is letting me know that ANOTHER new version is available. Could this be the cause of my problems? So… I build up the gumption to fire up Filezilla and upload the new Wordress 2.6 engine to my server. Thankfully, Filezilla didn’t puke on me this time. I did have to do a directory-by-directory copy, but it worked. And now, I’m happy to say, my blog feed has returned from the dead.

I have to tell you. I’ve been having more and more problems with Wordpress of late. It might be time to switch AGAIN. Another exercise I’m not willing take on just yet.

Update: an RSVP link has been created, http://www.geekdinners.com/DinnerInstance.aspx?id=11

Shawn Wildermuth is swooping into town next week for one of his Silverlight Tour training events and we thought what better to do than to resurrect the old Geek Dinner. Come join us at The Real Time Sports Bar in Elk Grove Village, IL on Monday, July 14th at 6:30PM for some cocktails, food and geek fun.

What: Geek Dinner
Where: The Real Time Sports Bar, Elk Grove Village, IL (map)
When: Monday, July 14th, 2008 @ 6:30pm
Why: Why not?!? Because you’re a geek and you need to eat!

*note: We’re going dutch. Everyone is responsible for their own eats.

SharePoint development is a hot topic these days. With the announcement of a new SharePoint developer webcast series, comes more content and guidance to become a better SharePoint developer. At TechEd, the new http://MSSharePointDeveloper.com site was announced. This site contains (or will soon contain) a plethora of training content around SharePoint development. It includes screen casts, samples, quickstart code, virtual labs and downloadable hands-on lab content.

MSDN is launching a webcast series this month on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). The great thing about this webcast series is you get to hear from industry experts such as Juval Lowy, Jon Flanders, Jesus Rodriguez and Matt Milner on their experiences and guidance to using the WCF and WF technologies found in .NET 3.5.