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September 29, 2006

Migrating from CF to ASP.NET

There is an interesting discussion on CF-Talk right now and during the convo I fell upon this article about Migrating from CF to ASP.NET. You can read about migrating from other languages as well.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:55 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Study: Linux and Windows Costs Equal

Read more here.

(very interesting info)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:15 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 27, 2006

Jason Gilmore Writes...

Jason Gilmore, Open Source Editor for Apress, was at the Web Dev Summit in Microsoft. He has since published a couple articles regarding particular sessions.

You can read the articles here:
* Open source vet looks inside Microsoft’s SourceForge knockoff
* Microsoft’s IIS 7 will aid PHP developers’ Linux deployments

Besides writing some good articles, Jason is an all around cool dude. ;-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 8:31 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 23, 2006

Wise Advice: Never Fight a Bus!

Dude (Dudettes included), how is a Honda Accord going to battle a bus? Dumb huh? Sounds like something you’d see Johnny Knoxville doing on Jack(butt). Well, this lady wasn’t Mr. Knoxville but “she fought the bus and the…bus won!” :-)

Keith Elder and I were in the front two seats on the way from the Microsoft Employee Store to the hotel. Traffic was 100% horrific! I couldn’t believe how bad the traffic was. It was going to be a stretch for me to make it to the airport but I think I would have been right on time. Well, that is until some lady attempted to force herself into our lane while merging into traffic from an on-ramp.

Continue reading "Wise Advice: Never Fight a Bus!" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 1:09 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

September 22, 2006

IE 7 Quick Reference Sheet

Dave Massey is presenting on IE 7 and Keith Elder asked if there was a quick key for the Quick Tab view. Dave didn’t know off the top of his head but he did quickly find the IE 7 Quick Reference Sheet on the IE Blog which is pretty in-depth and helpful.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:40 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

CardSpace & WCF

Don Box, Steve Maine, and Richard Turner are presenting on identity with Card Space and also speaking on WCF. I’ll brb as we move forward in the preso.

Ok…Don is crazy. :-) He is absolutely hilarious and a pretty solid presenter. To give an idea about his energy and approach (which is, in my opinion, is “I am me…except it or not.”), one guy (the creator of Qcodo, a PHP framework) answered one of Don’s questions (regarding what MSFT can do better) by saying “Give Windows away for free.” Don’s response was “F*** YOU!” LMBO. :-) It was truly hilarious. He explained why (basically, he has kids and he gets paid from Windows sales; lol) but it shows his preso style. He’s just open and speaks his mind. Great guy, it seems. :-) Update He just apologized (again, everyone laughed) and said it’d be great if it was free but, in my words, the money is needed.

Ok…let’s move to what the preso is about.

Continue reading "CardSpace & WCF" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 12:02 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft Dining Services?

They’ve provided some great food while we’ve been here. I was curious (not actively) who did the catering merely because Microsoft is a good client regardless of your industry. So this morning after eating breakfast I was checking my email and looked out of the window.

What did I see? A van riding by with Microsoft Dining Services on the side. I found this to be very interesting. It just goes to show what you feel being here: “Microsoft is HUGE!”

:-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:59 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Expression Web Designer just works...

I honestly thought this session (“Expression Web Designer” by Wayne Smith) wouldn’t be anything of great interest (because I was looking for WPF info vs designer stuff) but it has turned out to be pretty interesting. Microsoft is getting this application right. I probably wouldn’t use it because I’m not a designer and don’t too much care for messing with CSS, etc but for those doing it…seriously take a look at it. Hopefully the video of this session (and the others) will be provided soon. The cameras are over my shoulder and have been recording all of the sessions.

Let me give a few of the niceties that have been shown.

Continue reading "Expression Web Designer just works..." »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:39 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 21, 2006

IIS 7 will be great!

I’m in a session with Bill Staples titled “IIS on PHP” and he showed how to setup PHP to work with IIS 7. He has documented it on his blog here. I’ll just tell you real quick what to do.

Go to Handler Mappings, add a script map to the php isapi dll (name may be different pending version of php), and click OK. Done.

Huh? What? Where? :-) That’s crazy huh?

Checkout Bill’s blog for the screenshots, etc. I’m sure you can do the same with CF. Once I get CF 8 installed (or grudgingly install 7 since 8 won’t install on Vista right now), I’ll try it out and see if it works. If you are on Vista and have CF installed, try it out and let me know how things work. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:14 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I got pimped!

You can view Keith Elder’s post about today here. He just passed me a note saying:

“Go here
http://www.keithelder.net
I made u famous”

:-) Thx for the mention on the post Keith! :-) You dotnetpimp you! lol.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:23 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ScottGu, LINQ, ASP.NET, IIS 7, and Atlas rock

Ok…this is turning out to be a pretty nice summit. We’re a little more than half through the first of two days and these guys are definitely supplementing my geek needs. lol. I’ll be brief because I’m in a session right now and it is interesting.

Continue reading "ScottGu, LINQ, ASP.NET, IIS 7, and Atlas rock" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:01 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 20, 2006

Microsoft folks are cool

I’m here at the Microsoft Web Dev Technology Summit (a small event of 30 or so invited folks up here to Washington) and have met several Microsoft folks. All of them were cool. I honestly thought they’d be ultra techie or something but, well…some are techie but none ultra, most of them are very open to other worlds, etc. So far, it is a pretty coo experience. I can’t wait to go to “Campus” (Microsoft’s officesssssss [apparently it is huge; I’ll know tomorrow]).

I did find out today that we are going to get an employee discount from the Employee Store. Now that is sweet! Microsoft has been very generous, to me in particular this year. I’m not going to stop them either. Keep it coming Microsoft! :-) LOL.

I’ll post more as these days move forward. You can definitely tell, from talking to people, Microsoft is changing.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:14 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

September 18, 2006

Experience Acrobat 8

This is a very nicely done site. It moves like Flex but it could be Flash. Either way, nicely done Adobe.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 8:35 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Adobe Connect announced...

You can read the press release here.

The biggest thing to notice is Breeze is now Adobe Connect. Here is the blurb explaining a bit more: “Additional solutions for rapid training and online events are available under the Adobe Connect brand, formerly known as Macromedia® Breeze® software.”

This is the best part:

“Pricing and Availability

The Acrobat Connect hosted service is expected to be available in November 2006 as a free trial version through the end of the calendar year. The commercial release of Acrobat Connect, initially available in English, is expected to be available in early 2007 for a subscription price of US$39/month, or US$395/year per user. Acrobat Connect Professional is expected to be available in December 2006. It is expected to be available in English, German, French, Japanese, and Korean and will be licensed on a named user, as well as concurrent port basis. Existing licensed customers of the Macromedia Breeze solution with up-to-date maintenance plans may be eligible for updates to Acrobat Connect Professional and new versions of the Adobe Connect servers. For more information, visit www.adobe.com/acrobat/ .”

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:53 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 16, 2006

How do you measure success?

This is always a tough one to slice. The first thing most people look at is financial success. While that is important I don’t think that is the bottom line. Although, this post is being written based on Katapult’s financial reports I viewed yesterday.

Fiscal YTD Katapult has done GREAT for a first year company with absolutely no funding. Yes, I’ve been doing this for years (through JDEV Inc. and freelance) but KM started out almost dead August 19, 2005. We had a little work coming in from freelance clients of mine/JDEV Inc. that we switched over to KM but the work was almost at a standstill. 1 year later we have 35+ clients with a steady 10+ projects running at a time. Does this mean KM is successful?

That is the question that has been on my mind for the last 24 hours. So, I’m kind of thinking out loud here but I’m sure some will be interested in the read. :-) (or at least I hope) Let’s read on.

Continue reading "How do you measure success?" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 8:16 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

September 11, 2006

Flex 2: TextArea and line breaks

Well, this was a pain. The clients site is 100% complete and has code replacing \r with <br< and what happens? Flex rears an issue that I wasn’t expecting. Oh…the CMS is built in Flex (and looks pretty nice too).

Flex 2’s TextArea “uses UNIX-style line endings.” (read more here, towards the bottom) What does this mean for you the user? Well, several things. For starters, any text with Windows-style line endings will show extra line breaks.

To make it easier on everyone else, here is what the above link states:

*   The TextArea control uses UNIX-style line endings, which means that text data containing Windows-style carriage-return line-feed (that is, \r\n) formatting for new lines contain extra line breaks. You can use String.replace() with a regular expression to convert the text to UNIX-style line endings, as the following example shows:

    private static const windowsCRLF:RegExp = /\r\n/gm; 

    ... 

    myTextString = myTextString.replace(windowsCRLF, "\n");

This irritated me for a few but now I’m off to the desktop once more to fix this issue and move on with the development of this app. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 11:16 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Flex Goodness: enterDebugger()

This is a gem. Put enterDebugger(); in your script and it’ll pull up the debugger for you.

Seriously…it is a very nice gem.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:31 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 9, 2006

Subversion Trials on Windows (without Apache)

Ok…it is easy but it isn’t. There isn’t 1 central location for Subversion (SVN) help on Windows. Well, let me rephrase that. There isn’t 1 central location for SVN help on Windows. :-) After thinking about it, that statement is accurate. lol.

Fine, fine, fine, fine! Comment with all of your links, etc but Google doesn’t seem to find that 1 location with all of the help I need. I was able to piece together different information about the setup, etc and get it going and, come to find out, it is quite easy. So, I figured I would post what I did and hopefully help someone else out in the process. I’m not going to get into using SVN or which database type you should use. That’s up to you. We’re dealing with connection only here.

Continue reading "Subversion Trials on Windows (without Apache)" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:23 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 7, 2006

Microsoft Makes Vista Prices Official

— Windows Vista Home Basic: $99.95 (upgrade), $199 (full version)

— Windows Vista Home Premium: $159/$239

— Windows Vista Business: $199/$299

— Windows Vista Ultimate: $259/$399

I thought I’d extract that from this article for quick access.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 12:57 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Interakt acquired by Adobe

Man, this was a shocker to me. I didn’t expect it but I think it was the right move. Interakt builds some truly great extensions for Dreamweaver/Adobe products so naturally Adobe bought them and can now bundle them with their product(s). This is a great move for the community and Adobe.

I think the best part is the team stays together so it is the same company but driven by a major corp, including financially. :-) I can’t wait to see what these guys do with Adobe backing them.

Read more about the acquisition here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 12:15 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

September 2, 2006

Heading to Microsoft

I’ve been invited to Microsoft for the “WEB DEVELOPER SUMMIT” they are putting together. It is def’ exciting! I mean, how many folks get to really go into the belly of the beast? :-) This will be a very fun trip and I will be taking lots of pictures.

The summit will cover:
* Roadmap for ASP.NET
* Several ASP.NET topics (web parts, Ajax, etc)
* LINQ (which I’m highly interested in)
* IIS 7
* Expression family
* WCF & WWF
* etc…

We also get to visit the Microsoft store. :-) From this short amount of time that I’ve been diggin’ MSFT I have received more free software than I am used to (other than being an Adobe User Group manager; lol). So, I’m curious as to what they might give away this trip. For Max it was Vista Feb CTP and Visual Studio, along with about 5 other disks. It won’t matter to me one way or another but I’m still curious.

Well, bottom line…thanks MSFT and those who helped put all of this together (Tim and Sanjoy; along with anyone else behind the scenes)! See you guys in Washington!

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:41 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Personal Blog

There are times and places for certain posts and I’ve been refraining from posting here regarding different things like family, etc, etc. I do some but I tend to keep it business, for the most part. Well, it is time for me to start blogging on a personal level and Tia is ready to blog as well. Who is Tia? My wife and President of Katapult. She hasn’t blogged before but she always has great things to say about life, love, etc so a blog is perfect for her.

For those that don’t know, we have a personal site (here) which is horribly outdated but is still our site. :-) We have attached a blog to this site here. You can find us talking about school, life, love, and you can find (soon) some of Tia’s excellent quotes. She seriously has some great quotes that she’ll start posting soon.

Well, check the personal blog out to keep tabs on us personally. Enjoy!

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