If you have not seen the MIX 08 videos then stop whatever you are doing and watch them. There is great content on WPF, Silverlight, AJAX and ASP.NET. I have been focused on the Silverlight 2 sessions and have learned a considerable amount. Silverlight 2 is a big leap from 1.1. The latest and greatest (only in Beta right now) has an extensive list of controls. Yes the text box control has finally arrived.

While watching the sessions I noticed a nice snippet manager utility. Basically it is a small window that lists the snippets from a text file. Snippets can be dragged from the manager and dropped into Visual Studio. A great tool for developers that do presentations.

I googled for this tool and found it at Karen Corby's Blog. Both the app and code are available there.

Guess the movie

Know this. This creature is the bringer of death. He will never eat, he will never sleep, and he will never stop.

My loyal fans (all two of you) will have noticed that the frequency of my postings has decreased over the last few weeks. So what have I been up to, you may be asking? Well I'm a bit of a handy man and every now and then I like to get my hands dirty. For the past few weeks I have been helping out on the construction of a sunroom. We hired Four Seasons to do most of the work. Where I got down and dirty was installing the hardwood flooring, marble threshold, dry wall and electrical system. After three weeks of hard work and about five two-fours we completed a gorgeous sunroom. Below are a few photos of the sunroom.

Now that the sunroom is complete, does this mean I will back at my typical frantic blog posting past? Sadly, I am about to work on a cedar deck that will be adjacent to the sunroom. But this project will be confined to weekends so I'll be posting to my blog but not at my usual rate.

Guess the movie

listen to me. Do NOT go into the light. Stop where you are. Turn away from it. Don't even look at it.

While reading Scott Hanselman's blog I came across his posting on BabySmash, a WPF experiment. Basically, he wrote BabySmash! for his children so they could bang on the keyboard without causing any damage. When a key is stuck a shape is drawn on the monitor. Keys such as, Windows Key, Ctrl-Esc and Alt-Tab are disabled. While looking at the HTML source code for the supporting BabySmash! web site I noticed a comment block Design by Free CSS Templates http://www.freecsstemplates.org. This site contains some 300 free CSS templates. In the past I have used templates from Open Source Web Design In fact, my home page uses a template from Open Source Web Design but many of the templates use <table> tags rather than <div> tags. The advantage of Free CSS Templates is that the templates use <div> tags and CSS so they are easily customizable.

Guess the movie 

I don't like you either. You just watch yourself. We're wanted men. I have the death sentence on twelve systems.

June 4th, 2008 was the first meeting of the Toronto Silverlight User Group and yours truly was in attendance. The meeting was held at 222 Bay Street and was standing room only. This meeting was primarily focused on introducing Silverlight 2.0. A Silverlight application was created using Blend 2.5.

As an ASP.NET developer I need to be up to date on web technologies. Web 2.0 is fast becoming a norm and users are expecting Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Silverlight and Blend allow designers and developers to create compelling Web 2.0 application.

I enjoyed the first Toronto Silverlight User Group meeting and look forward to many more.

Great job!

Photos from the meeting:

Guess the movie

I see dead people.