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Archive for March, 2009

ASP.Net MVC, IE 8 (Yawn) Released

March 19th, 2009

The first tech news coming out of Mix this morning was the release of IE 8. While its nice that they are still trying to do nice things with IE, I currently have 3 browsers installed that I prefer over IE: Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Firefox is my everyday browser. Its much faster than IE, and its plug-in ecosystem is great. All IE 8 does is make testing of our current release more difficult. Now we have to support 3 versions of IE. Such is progress.

There is something cool coming out of Mix today and that something is ASP.Net MVC. I played around with ASP.Net MVC a couple of months ago and really, really liked it. For creating a modern web site I don’t think it gets much better. Think Rails done right on top of a managed, strongly typed, compiled language married to great tools. Download page here. Microsoft has been making a lot of great moves in the web development space recently with their adoption of jQuery, release of Silverlight 2 last year and upcoming release of Silverlight 3, and now ASP.Net MVC.

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Posted in .Net, Programming, Silverlight, Tech

Google Streetview of UK Now Live

March 19th, 2009

Google has announced that Streetview of the UK is now live. Since we are going to be over there in a few weeks I figured I would find Tower Bridge and see if the StreetView is available. It is (below). Notice the blurred-out license plates.

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Posted in Life, Tech

Porkins Tribute Video

March 18th, 2009

This. Is. Funny.

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Posted in Video

Lunarpages Down, Again

March 18th, 2009

My email and web site were unreachable for a while today. Lunarpages, the company with which I host JasonJackson.com, has been having some reliability issues lately. Its got me seriously thinking about switching to another hosting company. Even their help desk system was down today, so I assume that they screwed over a lot more people than just me.

They have been down 4 times in the last 6 months, and those are just the times I have noticed it. I wonder how many more times they were down and didn’t tell anyone? I would at least expect an email, “Sorry we were were down, here is what happened yada yada yada.” Nope, not once.

There is a technical term for this type of thing, and it is “douchebagery”.

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Posted in Tech

Some More New Features in Silverlight 3 Announced at #Mix09

March 18th, 2009

Scott Gu and Co. have announced a few more items that are, well, kick ass.

A new data tier technology that will allow developers to write data services, decorate those services with a client attribute, and your Silverlight project will automatically generate proxies for those data services. This eliminates a lot of custom code I have written to do my WCF plumbing.
Silverlight on the desktop on Mac and Windows! Its pretty obvious they are going after Adobe Air here. This gives Windows developers and easy-in to Mac desktop development.
A Silverlight developer plugin for Eclipse on Windows and Mac.
Blend 3 can import from Photoshop. It provides granular control over importing layers from the Photoshop document. Very nice!
Blend 3, in general, looks like a huge improvement over Blend 2.

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Posted in .Net, Programming, Silverlight

New Features in Silverlight 3

March 18th, 2009

Scott Guthrie is on stage right now in Las Vegas and here are a few things he has mentioned about Silverlight 3:

Utilization of the GPU on the client machine for graphics acceleration.
Merged Dictionaries (I had to write one of these myself).
Style inheritance.
On-demand type download – I wrote this from the ground up for the current app I am building. Its nice to see it bundled in with SL3.
Gestures in Windows 7 – I don’t know if this will be available in Silverlight on all platforms…
Playboy is putting all of its archives into a Deep Zoom powered site. Oh, and Rolling Stone is too.

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Posted in .Net, Programming, Silverlight

Silverlight 3 Download Links Live

March 18th, 2009

The download links for Silverlight 3 are live on Microsoft.com

Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 SDK Beta 1

Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Neither the Mix site nor the Silverlight site have any SL3 details as of 9:10 CST 3/18/09. It looks like Microsoft may have put the links live before SL3 is officially announced.

I look forward to seeing the feature list for Silverlight 3.

EDIT: WordPress went nuts and put a bunch of weird formatting in which was occasionally showing up in Firefox. I went into the HTML and ripped out all of the junk.

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Posted in .Net, Silverlight

Cool Silverlight physics demos built by someone with way too much free time

March 17th, 2009

The title of the post really says it all. Here is the link.

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Posted in .Net, Science, Silverlight

Kings

March 17th, 2009

Last night my wife wanted to watch a couple of her girly shows from the DVR so I surfed on over to Hulu (I blogged about Hulu before here) and put on my headphones to catch up on the Daily Show or something similar. On the front page of Hulu was a link to Kings, the new tent-pole show from NBC. I had seen the various ads for Kings and read a couple of articles about it, but was not excited enough to actually watch it when it aired. So I clicked on the link. I thought I would get 10 minutes in and realize it was stupid, and that would be that.

Two hours later I was a Kings fan. I was enthralled with their first episode. It was beautifully shot, the acting was spot-on, there were several plot twists, and the universe the writers have built is fantastic. I loved Ian McShane on Deadwood and enjoyed him as the King, but newcomer Christophe Egan really stole the show. Check it out for yourself:

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Posted in Life

Great Baseball Quote

March 16th, 2009

I saw this quote online today and thought it was pretty good: “One of the things I love about baseball is that it is not a short, tall, big, small, strong or fast man’s game.”