Code zealot in a connected world
A colleague mentioned a site quitext.com which is a quit smoking support website. They send you daily SMS' to help encourage you to quit smoking. You can also buy it as a gift for someone you know.
I don't think I'll ever smoke myself, but I can understand wanting to quit smoking can be very difficult at times. It's good to have different ways to help out.
Everybody is blogging about it. I'm not there, but still the amount of betas rolling out from Microsoft is making me very happy.
Colleague forwarded a news article to me where Microsoft is partnering up with Nokia to deliver Silverlight on the Symbian platform. So that's going to make this platform very tidy.
Good times.
Giving up caring about the US Election. Being following the US Election, and sadly I stopped caring when Ohio and Taxes voted for Hillary Clinton. With the democrats continuing their in-fighting while the republicans relied behind one nominee, I just can't see the government switching to the democrats.
Great job, please continue to help the other party by destroying each other's credentials.
Went to a mandatory AGILE methodology meeting session currently being pushed by the client. Personally I consider myself already sold on Agile methodologies, so feels somewhat that it was going to be a gigantic waste of time. But it was mandatory, so to keep everyone happy, I went.
I went with a notebook, and just moments before the session, I had a brilliant idea of noting down any new words I'm about to learn that day:
spike-solution
We call it a deep-slice, but it's slightly different. A spike solution is a focused technical effort to explore whether a technical design is actually possible or feasible. In the particular Agile session it seems the spike solution is also a throw-away solution. But I can see it being documented on a dev-wiki until it's used in implementation.
A spike-solution is good because it reduces risk - if an approach can not work, it is better to know early rather than later (say, after all the UI, database, etc have been designed).
re-engineering
It's like re-factoring, but not re-factoring. It's re-engineering. You can't engineer a business process, because it's business and not engineering. But you can re-engineer a business process (I guess by applying engineering processes to a business procedure).
I consider this word a "rubbish word thrown-in to confuse people".
I've been playing with Silverlight for perhaps 2 weeks now. Evaluating it for a business application, here are some findings:
Silverlight 1.0
It's just fantastic that Microsoft actually got this out of the door. Programming with Javascript is simple. More a Flash app than a business app, but stable and rock solid.
Silverlight 1.1 (now renamed to 2.0) Alpha
Programming with managed code is awesome. Lack of standard controls really sticks out at you, everybody is writing their own versions of TextBox, DropDownList, etc etc. No Cross-Domain web service calls is annoying too. Writing XAML in Blend is a lot easier than in VS.NET even with the Silverlight tools installed.
Silverlight 2.0 Beta
Apparently this will be released in a few more weeks' time, before MIX 2008. It's got everything. More controls, better network stack. All for under 5mb download. Go-live licence.
I'm somewhat annoyed they won't allow sockets - I want to write a game :-(.
jliu
I look at how a small team can build amazing things with the latest tools we have in Office 365 & SharePoint. I'm a coder, developer, Office SharePoint MVP. I dream, then I rant.
Founder @ Flow Studio App
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