Hi,

I got myself into helping out with another Code Camp.

This year we're having a Developer Code Camp again the day before TechEd in Auckland, from 9am till 6pm on 31 August 2008.

View the site, sign up and come along. It would be great to see you there!

I'll probably write up the titles, sessions and speakers later on when things firm up a bit more.

Kirk

Dear Apple,

When you create your annoying marketing emails, please remember to edit them after copying the great American deals and converting them to less-great NZ deals.

This one came today. In my inbox it says June 15. After loading images, Sept 7:

This...

...Became this

That wasn't too bad -- after all, who cares if Apple don't know when Fathers Day is? (Apart from fathers who want gifts :)

But this one from a few months ago was more annoying:

This...

...Became this

Now that's a bit more annoying. When I viewed the email in my inbox (with images turned off), I thought I was being offered a special deal of $49. But no, switching on images showed that actually it wasn't such a special deal at $75.

So, dear Apple. When you copy and paste the excellent US deals into an email, don't forget to change the ALT text of the images after you replace them -- it gets shown in peoples email clients if they have images turned off, or they hover over the image with their mouse.

Kirk

Well, next Thursday 31 July it's my turn to present at the user group again.

My talk is titled "Kapow! Become a Visual Studio 2008 super hero!" and will hopefully appeal to developers of all denominations¹ and experience levels.

Check out the details on the Wellington .NET user group site. Hopefully we'll see you on Thursday!

Kirk

¹ C#, F#, C++, VB.NET. You know, the major .NET religions

Just found out that I won an Xbox 360 - pretty cool.

I'd like to thank the academy...

Seriously though, it's pretty nice that Microsoft recognise the efforts of the .NET community. Around the country there are a lot of hours volunteered each month preparing sessions, speaking, catering and hosting events - all run at no charge by the community for the community.

Without the support of Microsoft and Darryl Burling in particular, it would be a lot harder for us to provide pizza every few weeks to hungry punters.

Last year I calculated I'd ordered 800 pizza since starting the Wellington .NET user group, and it must have been another 200 since then! I recently put together list of all the pizza we buy in a month nationwide, and it's about 200 pizza across all the user groups. That much fat don't come cheap!

So, thanks to Darryl and Microsoft, and thanks to all the great speakers and attendees that come along to meetings every few weeks and make the user group what it is!

Kirk

P.S. Two user group events in Wellington coming up -- one tomorrow and one next Wednesday -- check out http://www.dot.net.nz/wellington

My blog server didn't come up after the power was cut to our house yesterday. I didn't notice till the wee hours of the morning, and then found out that the graphics card was fried (they don't make 10 year old graphics cards like they used to!)

My mission is to provide an uninterrupted level of service, complying with my personal ISO 9002 committments.

Of course, running your blog on a 10 year old PC in your basement hooked up to a UPS with 5 minutes charge isn't exactly complying with ISO standards :)

This Wednesday in Wellington, Ivan will be presenting at the Wellington .NET Users Group.

Ivan is one of my all-time favourite contributors to the .NET mailing list, and I am always impressed at the amount of thought he puts into his mailing list posts, blog posts on his personal and the Mindscape blog, and into his presentations.

Ivan has recently been awarded a Microsoft MVP award for his contributions to the .NET community, well deserved too!

Anyway, enough of my geek idol lust...

His talk on Wednesday is titled "Build Your Own Designer: an introduction to Visual Studio DSL Tools". In the session he will be talking about when and how you would make a design surface within Visual Studio, and the designer he has recently been building.

Please RSVP and coming along this Wednesday 18 June.

Kirk

Joe White has done a great job posting session notes from TechEd US.

One post that I found interesting was his notes from Roy Osherove's talk "How not to write a unit test".

There was quite a few suggestions in here that resonated with me, such as removing 'new' calls from within your tests into helper methods that create or initialise objects, and some of his thoughts on stubs vs mocks.

An interesting read, easy to skim through. Thanks Joe, and thanks Roy!

(Wish I was there!)

Trade Me making value judgements, or just representing the facts? :)

I was surprised to see that the price of TelstraClear bundled plans are rising at the end of the month.

Looking at the old and new pricing pages, the main price rises seem to be in plans with broadband. Some of them increasing by $120/year:

Phone, TV and cable modem	Old	New
2Mbps & 1GB/mth	$98.02	$103.01
4Mbps & 5GB/mth	$108.02	$113.01
4Mbps & 10GB/mth	$118.02	$123.01
10Mbps & 20GB/mth	$138.02	$148.01
10Mbps & 40GB/mth	$168.02	$178.01
10Mbps & 80GB/mth	$208.02	$218.01
25Mbps & 120GB/mth	$298.02	$298.01*

_{* Curiously, this plan dropped by 1 cent!}

How can this be? Surely internet prices should be steadily dropping, not increasing? Especially as more households and businesses in New Zealand get broadband.

Perhaps it's because TelstraClear got voted Best ISP, they can put their prices up?

Maybe it's to support infrastructure upgrades and top-end plans?

Maybe they are matching Telecoms prices?

Whatever the reason, I'm surprised at the increase -- broadband should be getting cheaper and faster (pretty darn quick?) rather than slower!

Kirk

One persons vision of the Google OS:

http://goosh.org/

Coming from a unix background, there's just something so natural about a shell that has commands directly hooked to google :)

It is a busy time in Wellington .NET User Group land.

Nine months ago I switched us over to fortnightly user group meetings. While it's sometimes a struggle to find speakers, thanks to the great support of the speakers and the Wellington community, we're able to entertain, teach and enlighten every 14 days.

I thought a round-up of our activity over the past 12 months would be interesting:

21/05/2008 - Subversion and Cruise Control - Sky Sigal

07/05/2008 - Visual Studio certification & SQL Server Reporting Services - James Hippolite

16/04/2008 - There's more to life than C# and VB.NET - Kirk Jackson

02/04/2008 - Mocking 101 - Owen Evans

19/03/2008 - Silverlight 2.0 - James Newton King

05/03/2008 - 2008 Lightning Strike! - Various Presenters

13/02/2008 - 2008 Summer Road Trip - Jeremy Boyd, Chris Auld, Kirk Jackson

30/01/2008 - ASP.NET MVC framework - John-Daniel Trask

05/12/2007 - Introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - Ivan Towlson

21/11/2007 - Dynamic Runtime & Languages - What's it all about? - Ivan Porto Carrero

07/11/2007 - SQL Server 2008 for Developers - Jeremy Boyd

03/10/2007 - A lap around Visual Studio 2008 - Darryl Burling

19/09/2007 - ASP.NET Futures: Dynamic Data Controls - Andrew Tokeley

06/09/2007 - Virtual Earth – Overview on Spatial Development - Matti Seikkula

01/08/2007 - Developing with Windows SharePoint Services v3.0 - Zac Smith

04/07/2007 - C# vs VB.NET - continuing the epic battle - Philip Cox and Kirk Jackson

06/06/2007 - Well MIXed! - Chris Auld

As well as organising 16 of those talks and 20 speakers to present, in the past 12 months I also have:

• Presented a PowerShell presentation at TechEd NZ in August 2007
• Presented on C# 3.0 features at a corporate user group
• Given a presentation for ELCM351 at Victoria University on "Future Directions in Web Development" (more on this later)
• Been the treasurer of the NZ .NET User Group Incorporated Society, and written about 100 cheques for beer and pizza, as well as attending committee meetings and procrastinating about budgets
• Organised the "Dev Code Camp 2007" on Sunday 12 August 2007 in Auckland, just before TechEd. It was a struggle finding speakers, organising catering and sponsorship, and MC'ing the day. Probably the hardest event I've done so far... Watch out for another one this year :)
• Presented on C# 3.0 at the Dev Code Camp as well.
  

It has been great to have the support of the speakers listed above from the Wellington community, and even greater that 8 of them spoke for the first time at the user group this year.

I'm always on the lookout for new speakers. If you're interested, drop me a line!

(I'm looking for a speaker for Wed 4 June by the way :)

Cheers,

Kirk

... a nice way to end the school holidays :)

Coming back to work is the hard part:

Good news that Scott Hanselman is coming to TechEd NZ which runs from Sept 1-3 in Auckland.

Hopefully this year I'll get to present again. The past two years I have had fun presenting PowerShell sessions, and there's lots of news of new PowerShell providers (and more coming), so there should be something good to report.

This year TechEd is tantalisingly close to PDC - which is Oct 27-30 in Los Angeles. I say 'tantalisingly', because a lot of teams within Microsoft will be holding off releasing new versions of their technology, or making big announcements at PDC (e.g. the mysterious Purdy team language / editor stuff will be divulged then).

Thank goodness for open projects like ASP.NET MVC - we're seeing right into the bowels of the project on a regular basis thanks to their open and frequent releases.

Simon Green posted a good comment on a previous post of mine (I like Guids), which is a generic class that wraps Guids, so that you get a nice compile time error if the wrong guid is used in the wrong place.

e.g.

/* Doesn't compile
Library.BorrowBook(bookId, personId);
*/

// Compiles fine
Library.BorrowBook(personId, bookId);

Whereas with a normal signature of (Guid, Guid) you'd get no compile-time error if the parameters were mixed up.

Try his solution out, and let me know what you think.

Cheers,

Kirk

On Krzysztof Cwalina's blog there's an example of what may be coming in the Managed Extensibility Framework, a framework for dependency injection, naming and activation, and duck typing. Looks like it could be interesting when released.

While on his blog, I got to reading some of the older posts:

• The second edition of Framework Design Guidelines is in the works, and may be out by the end of the year.
• The Framework Design Guidelines Digest v2 is available for download in PDF format.
• How to Design Exception Hierarchies gives good advice on when to create new exception types, and when to reuse existing types.

There's good stuff buried in the archives of Krzysztof and Brad Abrams blogs.

Here's an idea that would work well in Courtenay Place:
http://stevewellsphoto.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/cruising/

A sign on the side of the road that says:

No Cruising Zone
Motorists passing the traffic control point 2 or more times in 4 hours are subject to citation

That'd teach those kids a lesson!

The photo is taken by photographer extraordinaire Steve Wells. Formerly of Wellington, now in Paris, and has a great new photo every day on his blog.

I'm presenting at the Wellington .NET Users Group this Wednesday night.

The aim is to have a bit of a run-through some of the interesting bits I pulled out of the Lang.NET Symposium videos, run through how the different CLR languages fit together and into the CLR, and talk about some of the things we have been hinted at for the future.

More details on the Wellington .NET Users Group site.

These guys crack me up:

And congratulations to Stephen and Melanie :)

Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern

Some final thoughts on threat modeling - a series on threat modeling

FXCop blog: What rules does Microsoft use?

Gilad Bracha - Computational Theology, Functional versus Imperative, Language History and Futures

Programming in the Age of Concurrency - Anders Hejlsberg and Joe Duffy: Concurrent Programming with PFX

LinFu.DynamicProxy, part 2

What is Ruby?

Guidelines for building RESTful web services:

Generate Your Own Security Code Review Checklist Document Using Outlook 2007

Inbox Zero

LINQ Framework Design Guidelines

LINQPad

Framework Design Studio

Anders Hejlsberg Film Festival: The C# and other VS Language Teams at the Movies

OAuth - Getting started

Instant domain search

Cool - Igor Moochnick has announced the release of pash, an open source implementation of PowerShell that runs on Mono or Microsoft's CLR.

I will be interested in seeing the uptake of Posh among Unix developers -- Powershell is more of an evolution of the standard Unix scripting environments such as bash, perl, and tcl, so should feel right at home.

This Star Trek parody to the tune of Ruby is quite nerdy and fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQoVqY2mWus

From 2006 - you may have seen it already, I hadn't.

I've been reading Charlie Calvert's blog, and his list of LINQ providers, and watching both the Lightspeed and LLBLGen Pro LINQ beta's with interest.

There's an available product that you can buy - the CHI69 "Computer Human Interface" - I have written a LINQ provider over the API provided within the supplied SDK.

Download the beta LINQ to Spouse provider here.

Connect to the CHI69 device, and read in the environment:

// Open environmental interface
Environment environment = CHIConnector.Connect<Environment>();

Build the representation of the user:

// Open self-representation
Husband me = CHIConnector.Self<Husband>();

The device allows querying the local environment for objects of different types using LINQ: 

// Search all available for a girlfriend
var prospects = CHIConnector.AllAvailable<Girlfriend>();

Girlfriend girlfriend =

(
from prospect in prospects
where
(prospect.Husband == null || prospect.MaritalStatus == MaritalStatus.Rocky)
&&
prospect.IsCompatibleWith(me)
select prospect
).First();

Peform some realistic actions with returned objects:

Thread.Sleep(69);

The library exposes a rich interface:

// Test marriage criteria

if (me.Mood == Mood.Romantic &&
    environment.Lighting <= Lighting.Flattering &&
    girlfriend.Emotions.Contains(Emotion.Desperate))
{

// Note the downcast. Some functionality will become unavailable
me.Wife = (Wife)girlfriend;

}

So go ahead and test the library and provider. I'm interested in any feedback you can give.

Some notes:

• Wife inherits from Husband (by definition, the functionality is a superset)
• Version 69 of the CHI device only allows for monogamous relationships. Due to demand, apparently this requirement will be removed in an upcoming release
• As an optimisation, some inherited properties are implemented or cached in the class library, rather than querying the real-world object (e.g. wife.IsRight does not require a remote call as the result is deterministic)
• The default device communication protocol is messy. Using SOAP would clean it up.
• Setting me.Salary = 0 will throw an OutOfLuck exception, terminating the program.
• High intensity emotions (e.g. wife.Emotion.Intensity >= Intensity.Danger) result in unpredictible behaviour.

PageofWords.LINQToSpouse.zip (14.36 KB)

It's good to see on John Lam's blog that videos from Lang.NET are now available.

They are Silverlight hosted, but if you want to download them directly, here are the links to the WMV files (right-click to save them to your disk):

Videos/1-00 - Keynote - Jason Zander

Videos/1-01 - CSharp3 - Anders Hejlsberg

Videos/1-05 - Lively Kernel - Dan Ingalls - Sun

Videos/1-06 - JScript - Pratap Lakshman

Videos/1-07 - Irony and ERP Language Challenges - Roman Ivantsov

Videos/2-00 - Democratizing the Cloud with Volta - Erik Meijer

Videos/2-01 - Newspeak - Gilad Braha - Cadence

Videos/2-02 - Resolver One - Giles Thomas - Resolver

Videos/2-03 - Retargeting DLR - Seo Sanghyeon

Videos/2-04 - Visual Basic - Paul Vick

Videos/2-06 - PHP - Wez Furlong

Videos/2-07 - Phalanger - Tomas Petricek

Videos/2-08 - Pex - Peli de Halleux

Videos/2-09 - Numerical Computing with the CLR - Jeffrey Sax - Extreme Optimization

Videos/2-10 - remotion Mixins - Stefan Wenig and Fabian Schmied - rubicon

Videos/2-11 - CodeIt - Serge Baranovsky - submain

Videos/3-00 - IronRuby - John Lam

Videos/3-01 - Ruby.NET - Wayne Kelly

Videos/3-02 - FSharp - Luke Hoban

Videos/3-03 - Parsing Expression Grammars in FSharp - Harry Pierson

Videos/3-04 - NStatic - Wesner Moise - SoftPerson

Videos/3-05 - Moonlight and Mono - Miguel de Icaza

Videos/3-06 - Visual Studio Shell - Aaron Marten

Videos/3-07 - Modeling and Languages - Don Box

Videos/3-07 - Modeling and Languages - Don Box_1

Videos/3-08 - Cobra - Chuck Esterbrook

Videos/3-09 - Intentional - Magnus Christerson

The .NET user group is kick-starting the year with a country-wide road trip around New Zealand. Chris Auld and Jeremy Boyd are travelling to 11 towns and cities around NZ, and this Wednesday Feb 13, they come to Wellington:

http://wellingtonroadtrip08.events.live.com/default.aspx

Please come along and check it out. The event is shaping up to be the biggest .NET user group event that Wellington has seen yet, with over 350 people registered! I remember the first .NET user group meeting I organised, it had less than 10 people...

The session starts at 1:30 (doors open at 1pm), and will cover lots of cool new things, including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008, as well as covering some other cool related technology such as HyperV.

See you there!

Kirk

A few years ago I wrote a guid shrinker, so that I could send out urls with guids in them, but have shorter messages. This was for mobile work, and so I called them "Muid's" (for mobile unique identifier).

To do this, I wrote a converter that converted from a 16 byte guid to a 21 or 22 character string, increasing the character set to 64 characters instead of the 16 characters used by guid's default ToString() (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, - and $).

It was with a little embarrassment that I read Dave Transom and Mads Kristensen's posts, where they use the Base64 encoder to do the character encoding, while I didn't think of that, and wrote an encoder / decoder myself.

So check out Dave's ShortGuid if you want shorter urls with all the benefits of guids (very hard to guess, globally unique), but don't want to sacrifice the extra 10-14 characters in every url.

Ever wondered which website stole your address and sold it to nasty spammers?

If you use GMail you can use a handy feature known as "Plus Addressing", which lets you receive emails into one GMail account using a variety of email addresses.

When spam arrives in your inbox, you can use the extra information you put into your email address to figure out which website sold your email address or spammed you.

How to do it:

You don't need to make any changes to your GMail account. When signing up to each new website or mailing address, use a slightly different email address.

For example, if your email address is kirkjackson@gmail.com, when you sign up to www.last.fm, you can use the email address kirkjackson+www.last.fm@gmail.com and the mail will still come through to your GMail account.

e.g. Sign up to each site with a distinctive email address:

live.com - kirkjackson+live.com@gmail.com
facebook.com - kirkjackson+facebook.com@gmail.com
evilnasty.com - kirkjackson+evilnasty.com@gmail.com
etc

When you receive emails:

Each email you receive in GMail will have a different "to" address, with the site that sent it to you. Click "Show details" on the message to see the full address that the email was sent to.

If you're receiving spam to a particular email address (e.g. kirkjackson+evilnasty.com@gmail.com), then you know which site to complain to -- although that probably won't work. But better than that, you can write quite a simple filter in GMail delete messages as soon as they arrive.

Caveats:

This works best for sign up emails to sites that you don't trust, and that you don't expect to use again. It can be hard to remember your email address to log in if you need to return to Facebook.

If spammers get smart, they could just send email to your base email address (e.g. kirkjackson@gmail.com), even if you entered kirkjackson+evilnasty.com@gmail.com into their site.

Some websites won't allow you to enter +'s into an email address form -- because they haven't read RFC 2882.

Another year coming up. Back to work tomorrow after a relaxing few days off.

Today I was awarded a Microsoft MVP again, so that's a good start to the year.