Ian's Link Dump 12th February 2009

WPF/Silverlight

WPF vs Silverlight: A Subset or what?

Evangelizing Silverlight (actually good overview of strengths/weaknesses)

Silverlight to WCF Service Object Encryption
XAML PowerToys 4.0 Released (code name 'MVVM')

Silverlight DataGrid: A Simple Pager Control

Reading XML Through Linq with Silverlight

Wrangling Very large Deep Zoom Images

Expression Blend Tutorial (they don't come much cleaner than this!)

Community/ALT.NET

The Ferengi Programmer

Tools/Web Resources

StyleCop for Resharper

Free retro icon set

Ultimate collection of free Photoshop patterns

Ian's Link Dump 11th February 2009

This blog has been pretty dead since I discovered Twitter. I'm accumulating so many links that I'm going to try and dump them here daily (but not tomorrow as I'm going to London Twestival 2009).

Silverlight/WPF Links

Silverlight as a View in ASP.NET MVC

Mike Snow's Silverlight 'Tip of the Day' blog

WPF Checkboxes Design

WPF ComboBox Font Families

Three essential Expression Blend Add-ins

Web Design

Just because you can Animate doesn't mean you should

Move Web Site Designs and Current Practices

Cloud Computing

Azure Services Training Kit

Video

BBC White Paper: Assessment and Settings for Sony PMW-EX1 and EX3

Community

Find a User Group

Humour

Favourite Programmer Cartoons

Conferences are like buses...

... there's nothing for a few weeks, and then all of a sudden there's a ton of them at once.

Which is a bit of a sore point with me really because it was London buses - or the lack of them - that got my little mini-conference season (which happened two weeks ago now) off to the worst possible start. I won't bore you with the details as it all turned out fine in the end, but there was a lot of stress, urgent phone calls and help from friends (strangers initially, but people I now consider friends) in between times!

So why haven't I posted my usual post-conference review of i-Design 08 and Remix 08? Let's just say video editing, rendering and web publishing has the ability to suck every spare minute out of every free weekend and evening you have! Especially when you keep going round the loop of 'Can we change this?', 'Maybe it would look better if we did this...', 'Is there a better font we could use for that?' at the end of a long render, compress, upload, transcode process cycle that involves endlessly manipulating HD footage that typically can't be divided down into anything that runs for less than an hour at a time.

I should add that the afore-mentioned 'we' in this case is actually 'me' so I have nobody to blame but myself!

On the plus side, at least the whole 'shooting at a Microsoft event' thing at Remix08 followed the same pattern it did at the Las Vegas Remix event in February and the UK Product Launch event in March which meant (a) I didn't have to lug my gear down to Brighton (b) I could actually socialise a bit and (c) I didn't have to fret and worry about when all this stuff was going to be ready to publish and whether it would be up to the quality required. Wins all round!

So, rather than post my usual critique of the conferences I'll just summarise with a couple of lines: I enjoyed both i-Design 08 and Remix08. I'm glad I went. I'd go again. Not to say there's not a lot of room for improvement but I risk sounding like a broken record if I start 'whinging' again about what was wrong but could so easily have been got right. Bottom line is both provided a lot of food for thought and in the case of Remix UK, despite the silly-and-easy-to-correct weaknesses, it was good value-for-money and, I thought, an improvement on last year's event.

ALT.NET UK Conference

I spent Friday evening and Saturday at the ALT.NET conference in Holborn, a free conference for .NET developers which follows the "Open Space" format. This involves no planned, formal Powerpoint presentations, but more 'open' conversations around whatever it is people decide they want to discuss on the day. The whole philosophy seems to be one of 'Whatever happens is meant to happen, dependent entirely on those who attend and participate.'

I'm rather nervous about ALT.NET, as was probably obvious when I proposed a discussion on "ALT.NET = L33T.FAD" (Elite.Fad). This suspicion I have stems from random looks at daily digests from the American-based ALT.NET discussion group and, more recently, from reading extremely heated tweets about an 'invitation only' conference in the States. What comes across is that many of the key figures promoting the whole ALT.NET philosophy seem to think that 'spreading the best practices message' means resorting to endless personal attacks and company name-calling which can be a real turn-off. Egotism and arrogance appears to run rife and repetitive bickering is NOT active discussion (or 'encouraging synchronicity', as I was told in a tweet this morning!) It all comes across to the casual observer interested in finding out what all this ALT.NET stuff is about as like 'Slashdot for the .NET crowd' which is never going to be a good thing. Excellent work like Karl Seguin's Foundations of Programming e-book, written to explain the basics of the ALT.NET approach and encourage best practice amongst the .NET development community, is (in my view) seriously undermined by the amount of bile and vitriol being thrown around, much of it deeply personal (I guess the folks working for Microsoft Patterns and Practices or Thoughtworks must have very thick skins to cope with some of what's been thrown at them).

Fortunately none of this acidity or endless belittling of the 'average' or '9 to 5' developer really surfaced at the conference, and while I wouldn't want the "Open Space" format for every user group event or conference I go to, it's a really neat addition to the formats that are out there. It encourages good conversation, and greater participation, in a more inclusive way than the 'let's go down the pub' approach, and it avoids the problems inherent in the traditional 'one person dictating to a passive audience' PowerPoint presentation approach.

I had a lot of stimulating conversation throughout the day, and the conference served as great 'group therapy' for those of us struggling with the day-to-day realities of the software business we're in.

That being said, it quickly became clear that there is no 'silver bullet' to the problems software development has faced for years (years? I mean decades!). Who knew?! ;-) One attendee I was talking with commented, "I've heard about a lot of common problems. But I haven't really heard any solutions". My experience was the same, although others had a different experience. In the closing session, where each participant was asked to announce what positives they'd take away from the day (with any negatives to be held back until we went 'down the pub' - an approach that felt like insecurity and a refusal to acknowledge any failures to me, but then I do tend to be a 'glass half empty' or 'gloomy optimist' person ;-)!) many people said they had heard about solutions they were keen to try, so maybe I just attended the wrong sessions in trying to find solutions to many of the problems of modern software development.

But I DID get some great tips for books and video's I'd not seen posted on any blogs, and some pointers to software that I should try and find time to look at, which I think I only got because of the format of the conference and the mature experience of the average attendee.

I did feel that 'a BIT more organisation' would have helped, whether in trying to get the schedule available in all the rooms spread across a rather large area, having a conference site that allowed links to attendee's web sites rather than just people's names, or in having an organiser or at least the session proposer in each of the rooms those sessions were supposed to take place in, but that may just be an age thing about liking structure and efficiency. I'm sure it's open to debate, and pretty small beer when looking at the benefits of the whole day. I also think that glib generic statements like "IoC is really easy and enables lots of lines of code to be replaced by just a few" smack far too much of the 'I've got a hammer and everything looks like a nail' approach to software development and was disappointed such statements weren't challenged by what I perceived to be 'the silent majority' in attendance! More worryingly, ad-hoc hallway conversation comments like 'The company promoting SCRUM the most, and selling it the most, aren't actually using it on most of their projects' did little to discourage me from the belief that there's a lot of 'flavour of the month' and 'hype from the vocal minority overly impacting the direction the industry is blindly following, despite rising evidence that it's not working in solving the real problems the industry has' about so much of what ALT.NET seems to be about promoting.

I made a few big boo-boo's myself of course. I didn't really answer the 'What is ALT.NET?' question when on the Park Bench (and felt it was better to get up and give someone else a chance to speak than try and correct my deficiencies - I've been called 'MotorMouth' once too often in my long and industrious career ;-)) And yes, I should have challenged that IoC statement I mentioned earlier at the time it was made (my excuse is that it was a larger session and it's hard to interrupt someone mid-flow, particularly when the main topic has quickly moved on to something else).

I also made a serious error in not getting to the conference in time for the first opening introductions. One problem we all seem to have is knowing people by face, but not by name, and I should have been at the event early enough to video everyone introducing themselves. I should also have picked up my camera to film each attendee's closing positive feedback about the event - it would have made a fantastic ad for the next conference! Fatigue had set in by this point, which is no excuse for being lazy.

One other criticism I heard was that two or three individuals tended to monopolise a lot of the bigger discussions. I don't think it's a criticism that's easy to solve. And when the two or three individuals doing it are that much brighter than you (I mean me!) and have some really solid experience is control of the conversation such a bad thing? It's certainly more stimulating than having one person dictating a PowerPoint slide at you. By their own admission, most attendee's had adopted a 'passive' approach in the sessions they attended, and it's hard to fix that passivity if people don't want to fix it themselves.

So a great day, but my original prejudices remain intact. Last year's flavour of the month in JavaScript frameworks seemed to be 'Prototype/Scriptaculous'. This year it's JQuery. What will it be next year? And how do I tell my clients that 'best practices' last year meant writing a lot of code that is now based on a product that is probably going to die soon, or at best have relatively little support in the marketplace. The same examples of this 'show me the new toy' mentality is there whether we're talking ORM tools, IoC frameworks, or build and testing tools. In the old days the barrier to moving forward used to be 'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'. These days it's more like 'Well at least I've got Microsoft Premiere Support so what I'm writing isn't going to be throwaway and obsolete in a year's time' (although the way Microsoft's going I guess even that's questionable). It's hard to get past that, and I don't think a lot of the publicly visible face of ALT.NET helps promote the philosophy in the risk-averse Enterprise space (although others suggested that corporations were actually the most enthusiastic users of the agile approach).

None of which alters the fact that I'm really glad I went, and would highly recommend the event to anyone. I may have left the event with prejudices intact, but I picked up some really useful tips and tricks, pointers to good new resources, and met some really interesting people. And, I'm pleased to say, encountered none of the 'elitist/bile-filled' sentiment I feel dominates the public discussion group.

The unanimous sentiment expressed at the end of the day was that people felt 're-invigorated' at the end of a day spent with a group of diverse but intelligent and passionate people. I'm very much looking forward to the next conference.

Footnote I recorded video at the initial "What is ALT.NET?" 'Park Bench' session, and also at a lively session around automated Build and Deployment issues. As I'd initially suspected the "Open Space" format really doesn't lend itself to easy one-man video film-making, or even great, watchable video as an end-result, and in the 'Build and Deployment' session I eventually stopped because the 'passing the microphone around to make sure Ian got good sound' antics were slowing down the conversation rather than helping it. The next 10 days are pretty manic with a presentation for NxtGen in Coventry next Monday to finish, all-day filming at the iDesign08 conference on Wednesday, and then REMIX08 in Brighton on Thursday and Friday, all on top of the day job, but there will be video of some sort posted from the event once I've got the immediate priorities out of the way.

Betsy Weber (TechSmith) Geek Dinner on 3rd September

I'm a big fan of TechSmith products, ever since I discovered their screen capture software (although it's really so much more) SnagIt, a couple of years ago.

When I started getting into video earlier this year I bought the same company's screencasting software Camtasia Studio 5, and it wasn't hard to see why this was THE software everybody producing screencasts was using. It's another beautifully written and designed piece of software. Currently it only runs on the PC but a Mac version is on its way!

Betsy Weber is TechSmith's chief evangelist, and is visiting the UK, apparently for the first time in 15 years, next week. Betsy is well known from conferences all around the world and a popular and enthusiastic supporter of community so she's going to be pretty busy throughout her trip, attending community events and conferences in London, Brighton and Scotland during her whirlwind visit.

Before she heads off for a conference in Brighton she has one night in London and so I suggested perhaps having a geek dinner to celebrate her stop-over, not really having a clue as to how I would organise it at the time! Luckily the wonderful folks at London Geek Dinners agreed to advertise what they call a 'mini-geek dinner' and I haven't had to do anything other than liaise a bit with them :)

So we're all set for an informal geek dinner in London on the evening of 3rd September. If you're as much a fan of TechSmith's products as I am I do hope you'll come along. You can find all the details here so please check the venue location and let us know you're coming if you want to meet Betsy.

I hope to see you there!

The "Mojave" Experiment and my own Vista Experience

THE MOHAVE EXPERIMENT

Earlier today I whinged on Twitter that I was fed up of Microsoft shills using a Microsoft marketing exercise called "The Mojave Experiment" to clog up far too many blog RSS feeds with enthusiastic declarations of how this "proves" that Vista is a much better operating system than the media in general are claiming it to be.

The story behind this "experiment" (marketing stunt) is that XP users have been lured into Microsoft to ostensibly be shown the NEXT version of Windows on camera. The pitch is that they are suitably impressed by some whizz-bang features and then find out – surprise! – they’ve been shown NOT the next Windows product after all, but instead plain old Vista – the stale, critically derided mess of an operating system that’s been around for 18 months and still generates a lot of dislike, thus proving all the negativity around the operating system is wrong. Who’d have thought?!

It’s a neat bit of marketing according to some, albeit with an impact that’s somewhat lessened by the fact the participants appear to be more excited about being on camera and the possibility of being shown something not yet released than in the Vista "features" we've been told they were wowed by.

But, coming, as it did, on the back of a newspaper story last week claiming that we are all lemmings who’ve bought into the negative press around Vista when it isn’t born out by fact - and which caused a similar deluge of "hah!" postings clogging up my MSDN RSS feeds from the more "enthusiastic" (read "ambitious and brown-nosing") Microsoft employees - it was the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to tolerance of shills! Especially when so many of these enthusiasts are so vocal about minor shortcomings of the Apple iPhone! (Mr Huge Pot, meet this tiny Kettle. It's black!)

In case anyone’s in any doubt, let me be clear here: my opinions of Vista are based solely on my experience with the O.S. NOT what the media or anybody else for that matter is saying. To keep telling me otherwise, or to state that I’ve been brainwashed by the media, is just plain insulting and smacks of the sort of arrogance that almost killed IBM back in the day.

So here, by way of counter-experience, is what I can recall of my Vista experience to date. To misquote Bette Davis: "Fasten your seat belts. We're in for a (long and) bumpy ride"

MICROSOFT'S LACK OF JOINED-UP THINKING

I think Vista is a mess of an operating system. It reeks of something that's been rushed-to-market far too early, presumably so that Jim Allchin could retire as quickly as possible before the proverbial stuff hit the fan. Actually given the number of years spent de-scoping everything that had been initially promised maybe "rushed" is a rather ridiculous word to use! To me it's a Frankenstein’s monster of an operating system that had promised so much, only to deliver so little, and one which has invariably and consistently turned previously reliable hardware into a malfunctioning mess of non-working peripherals or dreaded blue screens of death.

It's an operating system with an inconsistent and incoherent look and feel, a user interface that just hasn’t been thought through when it comes to presenting the user with any kind of intuitive consistency, and an operating system with some serious performance issues to boot.

To me, it demonstrates the complete "lack of joined up thinking" that seems, alas, to be the norm at Microsoft these days, whether we’re talking developer/designer vision tools for the enterprise that don’t include any kind of source control support and require endless XAML hacking to do anything real world, ridiculous claims about Silverlight vs Flash (sorry Jessie Liberty, I love what you're doing for Silverlight but the ONLY argument that matters right now is that Flash is on 98% of target devices and the Silverlight beta isn’t!) or it seems, pretty much anything else that’s coming out of Redmond these days (Don't even get me started on the whole Microsoft 'let's spoil Apple's launch' Mesh nonsense - reminds me of the WPF/E announcement at PDC 2005 when it quickly became clear that there was maybe one person working on it after somebody had the idea the week before :-P)

And all this despite the lessons that should have been learnt from the whole Trust Computing initiative that finally gave us a very solid and reliable OS in the form of XP SP2.

EARLY WARNING SIGNS - THE VISTA BETA'S

My early hate affair with Vista started during the beta. Over on Channel 9 seemingly rabid fan boys gushed about an operating system that was clearly broken, despite the fact that three completely different PCs of mine all had different problems in getting even the basic functionality they had under XP to work. This, apparently, was because "It’s a beta, stupid!" or "Those PCs don’t have enough horse-power even if they fly under XP" or "Of course it doesn’t support third party hardware out of the box. That’s not Microsoft’s problem". I was a lone voice expressing alarm that very close to RTM the operating system looked like a train wreck compared with previous operating systems.

So after being told it was just me, that I was being too negative, that everybody loved Vista, I waited. And when Vista finally went RTM I ignored that "old under-powered" hardware and bought a top-of-the-range Dell laptop with Vista Ultimate pre-installed. This was not a cheap laptop, costing close to 4 grand all-in-all.

Vista Ultimate, by the way, is the version of Vista that cost more than other versions of the operating system because it was going to get a lot of extra goodies that weren’t there in the other versions, albeit goodies that would be shipped out over time rather than available at original purchase. I’m still waiting for those goodies 18 months on, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves and accuse Microsoft of "complete lack of truth in advertising" when it comes to Vista marketing!

GROUNDHOG DAY WITH UPDATES!

The real problems started just a week or so after receiving my new laptop. A package of Vista "automatic updates" was shipped down to my PC. But one of the updates "failed" with little other than one of those obscure HREF errors to go on as the likely cause. Vista's new "more robust" error diagnosis and reporting system did show me two or three possible solutions: these were for completely different HREF errors which appeared to have no bearing at all on the problem at hand.

The trouble was every time I rebooted the laptop it tried to apply the patch again. And failed again! And again! And again! And… well you get the drift. It got to the point where I just avoided ever rebooting the wretched laptop just to avoid the wasted retries and error failures.

Jeff Sandquist on Channel 9 kindly offered to try and get support for the issue. I don’t know whether he forgot or just couldn’t find anyone interested, but the problem stayed with me for a year until Vista Service Pack 1 finally came out and, thankfully, sorted the problem out for me. Hoorah! Maybe Vista Service Pack 1, a year in the making, was going to be the saviour of Vista after all. If only!

NEVER-ENDING BLUE SCREENS OF DEATH

About a week after using my laptop I got my first blue screen of death, with several others quickly following it. These came as a bit of a shock as I'd seen them occasionally in my NT4 days, but never once on any of my other PCs running Windows XP or Windows 2000 or Windows 2003. In a good month I get just one or two blue screens a month on Vista, other times 2 or 3 a week, and on some rare, but invariabley important, occasions 2 or 3 in a day!

80% of the time Vista would diagnose the problem for me: "It’s your keyboard driver. You need to purchase a new driver from BITS" it would say. So I’d click on the link it would give me and find myself at a site selling their own brand of "BITS keyboards" (no sign of drivers for purchase, as promised). The trouble is my keyboard is a Microsoft Natural keyboard, connected to the Dell through a simple Belkin KVM switch. There's no sign of any of the hardware displayed for sale on the link Vista has sent me scurrying off to for a fix.

Maybe the KVM switch is the cause of the problem, but the last time I looked it didn’t have a driver,and certainly didn’t come from a company called BITS.

18 months on I’m still getting regular blue screens. Sod's Law says it will happen about 7 hours into a long 8 hour HD video render (where I’ve deliberately just left the machine alone to avoid triggering any kind of problem), or when I’ve just typed a long reply into blogspot.com, only to find the whole lot gets lost because I didn’t save it elsewhere first. It's much safer to use one of my much cheaper PCs with XP for anything crucial.

AH - THE OLD GRAPHICS DRIVER EXCUSE

The other 20% of the time the blue screen of deaths occur the finger points at the driver for the on-board Nvidea graphics card. I’ve updated this when prompted that there's a newer version available, but to no real benefit. I can’t blame Vista for that though can I? After all there are what – TWO major graphics card makers in the world - and expecting an O.S. to just work reliably with one of their products some 18 months on is kind of unrealistic isn’t it?

THE TRASH CAN - IT'S ..ERM.. TRASH!

OK, let’s move away from possible hardware/driver issues and look at the software, starting with something really basic: the Vista trash can.

When it’s empty it says it’s full. When it has files in it says it’s empty. Sure I can click on the desktop and press F5 to force it to "tell me the truth" but why should I have to do that every time I want to find out what the real state of affairs is?

According to a Google search this problem is caused because the stupid right-mouse context menu allows you to delete the trash can and once you've done that you're screwed. I confess I did this - accidentally at one point because the machine response was so sluggish the “delete” option got actioned when the “empty” option was the one I had visually selected with the mouse. It was relatively easy to get the "deleted" trash can back with a tray command but since it was restored it's been worse than useless. Quality!

SNAILS IMPLEMENT FILE COPY FUNCTIONALITY

The problems with Vista's 'File Copy' functionality (taking hours to do what should take minutes) have been fully documented on numerous occasions elsewhere. Suffice to say that even though Service Pack 1 is supposed to have fixed this pretty major problem file copying on my highly specced Vista system is still slower than my much lower-specced XP PC's. File copying is slow on Vista.

WHY HAVE YOU STOPPED RESPONDING?

Then there’s Windows Explorer - a pretty intrinsic part of the operating system I hope you’ll agree. If I had a penny for every time I saw the dialog "Windows Explorer has stopped responding" for no good reason I’d be a rich man by now! Fair enough it seems to auto-restart itself with no apparent ill-effects fairly quickly but what the heck causes it to "stop responding" to the extent it decides to shut down? Don't take my word for it - google it and find how many others are suffering with this wretched problem.

How about Internet Explorer? I open it with six tabs pre-populated via the Home URL option. More often than not if I'm stupid enough to close down Internet Explorer with all the tabs open it displays an error that tells me it is restarting and then slowly shuts itself down, restarts and slowly reloads all the wretched tabs again. If I just close a couple of the tabs first it will close down without mishap, but why should I have to? XP has no problems with this. Maybe it’s a memory issue because after all I’ve only got 4GB memory on my laptop!

SECURITY - WHAT SECURITY?

Then there’s Security Centre and Windows Defender with LiveCare as my virus protection software (I’ve learnt my lesson with Norton – the spawn of the devil!). Once in a while the task bar will show a red alert after a reboot. Often I've opened email or started surfing before I've noticed that I'm open and vulnerable to attack for no good reason. Windows Security console will tell me it's because I’ve "turned off Windows update" (no, I haven't. I really haven't) or I "don’t have virus protection turned on" Errm yes I do. Or rather did before I did a restart.

I use Windows LiveCare and if I get the red warning I turn it and Defender and updates back on if I’m lucky. But a few days and reboots later they'll suddenly have decided to turn themselves off again. How many times do you need to turn something on?

Worse, on a couple of occasions I’ve found I CAN’T turn anything on. LiveCare tells me via the Windows panel that my subscription runs out in 2009 but clicking on the "turn on virus protection" button does absolutely nothing no matter how many times it’s clicked. Not so much as an "Can't do that because..." by way of explanation. Until I do a reboot when it will (so far, touch wood!) magically turn itself back on again – at least for a few more reboots before getting back into the same "No I’m not doing that" pattern.

I WANNA CAPTURE AUDIO GODDAMIT

How about Camtasia Studio? It's the Ford Motor Car of screencasting software. Under XP I can reliably record audio direct from the sound chip on my PC’s mother board. Under Vista? Nada. This is explained in Camtasia Studio in Depth as a problem down to Vista and poor driver support. Oh well, I guess I could plug a microphone near my PC speaker outlet instead – that’s a real quality multimedia experience!

What about the Media Centre? Ah yes. I turn on my Xbox and Vista helpfully tells me it’s found a media extender and do I want to hook it up? Sure! 'Just get the meaningless random number that will appear on your Xbox display screen in another room and we’ll play' it says. So I traipse through to the lounge, dutifully transcribe a meaningless set of numbers, return to Vista where it says 'Ah I can’t find that guy'. Excuuuse me? If you can’t find it why did you tell me it was there!

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE PRETTY

Vista's user interface: Can we talk about the UI? The great Vista innovation where so many other promised features got axed? I've got a big hi-res screen. I want nice big res-free icons. What I get instead is a mess of inconsistencies in size and look and feel all over my desktop. Would Apple ever launch something like this? Of course not. Microsoft will, of course, respond that they can’t be responsible for what application vendors do. But Microsoft itself is more often than not the main culprit when it comes to application icons that can't be made to appear as more than a miniscule set of imperceptible dots. There’s that complete lack of "joined up thinking" I was talking about earlier. Try leading by example once in a while Microsoft and then maybe others might follow?! If Microsoft can’t be bothered to prep mainsteam apps like Virtual PC with the right resizable icons why should anyone else?

DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT

Enough of my problems. There's a lot more to say, but this entry is already too long. Maybe I’ve just been unlucky with my hardware/software choices, or maybe I’m just a miserable old grump who’d never be satisified? Yeah, right!

XP is hard to buy pre-installed with many vendors and Vista has been on the market for 18 months. I want a reliable machine to edit video on. Is this too much to ask for? The “nearly 4 grand laptop” I bought just over a year ago isn’t up to the job – mainly because of all those Vista crashes.

Luckily I have big fat, expensive, colour catalogues full of turnkey solutions costing several thousand pounds from big vendors like Planet PC, CVC and Mittcorp.

But here’s the odd thing: not one of them offers a Vista solution 18 months after the operating system shipped. The ONLY PC solutions available are XP-based, despite the fact the main software packages that are being sold here (Adobe Premiere CS3, Avid etc) have been selling as "Vista compatible" versions for some time now. I wonder why that might be, given that it’s apparently only me and some negative media types apparently having problems with Vista?!!

DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT - HERE'S THE CEO OF SANDISK!

Assuming, just for one second, we pretend video editing really is a niche application where Microsoft are concerned (and if it is, why didn't someone tell the Vista marketing folks who are constantly selling the multimedia and video advantages of Vista over XP), what about disk drives? And in particular solid state drives which have been edging into the market recently with the potential for big improvements in battery life, performance and reliability?

The CEO of SanDisk – hardly an insignificant player in the PC market - unequivocally blames Vista, and Vista alone, for the fact his company can’t get their SSD products to perform. You can read about that here

But heh, that’s just negativity caused by the media, right? Vista rocks. It’s been given an unfair ride! Or so Microsoft keep trying to tell us.

At a time when Microsoft should just "come clean" about the mess that is Vista it’s going in completely the wrong direction. Any problems are all imagined apparently, and the results of the media brainwashing us.

Given my experiences above, I hope you'll understand why my reaction whenever this theory is put forward is to point out that 'No. The emperor - or Vista this time around - really has got no clothes on'.

July Update: Upcoming Events and Video Links

I really do need to update this blog more frequently! Alas, my lifestyle is such that currently Twitter is serving as my main work-related blog (as well as a more limited personal one) albeit with each entry limited to 140 characters maximum length. Actually, being limited word-wise is probably a VERY GOOD thing in my case ;-)).

Anyway, here's a few diary updates...

ALT.NET CONFERENCE ON SEPTEMBER 12TH AND 13TH

I missed the first ALT.NET conference (which I was supposed to be videoing - doh!) but managed to get onto the second one which 'sold out' (it's free!) pretty quickly. I haven't totally bought into ALT.NET yet - I think there are too many scenario's where the traditional ALT.NET tools and approaches are just too complicated and 'abstract' for the average developer. And at times too many of its advocates seem obsessed with the latest fad regardless of any kind of cost/benefit analysis that favours the traditional 'MSDN.NET' approach :-P So it'll be interesting to see if I'm 'converted' after the conference. Don't get me wrong about development - I love Agile, especially when it's done right. But (maybe I've been unlucky) too often it's NOT done right, and often used as an excuse to avoid doing things that should be done. So I'm very much looking forward to this, even with the completely ad-hoc agenda, which is making me nervous about how the hell I get good video from such an ad-hoc format. Filmed user group presentations without the original slide decks can make for very dull video (a bit like filming theatre). Impromptu discussions and white board debates could be even worse (and sound recording is a nightmare as the video of audience questions at the first Silverlight User Group proved). I'll find out soon!

MICROSOFT UK REMIX EVENT ON SEPTEMBER 18TH AND 19TH

In September I'm also going to be attending the Microsoft's Remix 08 event in Brighton just a few days before the NxtGen talk. There's a vague possibility I'll be doing video at the event - not sure yet, and rather apprehensive about even offering given the nightmare experience at MIX08 in Las Vegas earlier this year!

NXTGEN TALK ON SEPTEMBER 22ND

I'm giving a talk of the session I'd offered for the next Developer! Developer! Developer! Day event, "Internet Killed the Video Star" at the NxtGen user group meeting in Coventry on Monday, 22nd September. I suspect the developer day talk won't happen as there's a lot of good stuff on offer and my suggested session has little to do with development per se, being all about video and prepping material for the web with the only real technical content being about codecs, transcoding and the like. So it's good to have the chance, at NxtGen, to summarise the vast amount of information I seem to have accumulated rather painfully over the last 7 months, and hopefully we'll have a bit of fun at the same time (just to be clear: this is NOT going to be a session where I whizz around Visual Studio while everyone squints at the back wondering what I'm doing, although I will be having quick dips into Sorenson Squeeze, Microsoft Expression Encoder and TechSmith's Camtasia Studio during the talk).

VISTA SQUAD VIDEO AND HOSTING SUPPORT ISSUES

I've been filming the talks at the Vista Squad user group. I guess this is kind of ironic given how terrible I think Vista is (There's a reason why not one professional Windows video turnkey provider will offer Vista as an option more than a year after its launch, and as an aside Vista just blue-screened again on this Vista pre-installed top-of-the-range laptop from Dell half way through this blog entry) But the folks behind Vista Squad are really friendly and there have been some excellent developer talks, which really relate to .NET development in general and also Microsoft Server I.T. rather than just Vista, contradictory to what the name might imply.

I'm not convinced these user group video's work as web-based video per se (lots more on this - and what DOES work - in my NxtGen talk), but they're a conveniant record of the event for those who want to recall forgotten bits or just missed a meeting they were interested in.

I've had a LOT of problems with Vimeo who seem to change their methods of encoding/transcoding HD video on an almost daily (if not hourly) basis. Video's frequently fail to upload/transcode then magically work a few days later. Or they appear for a few days then mysteriously disappear. Support is lacklustre to say the least, which is in complete contrast to ExposureRoom who will be my hosting company/community of choice when I launch the couple of projects I seem to have been 'prepping' forever finally launch later this year.

MIKE TAULTY ON LINQ TO XML

Those waiting to see the recent excellent Vista Squad talk by Mike Taulty on LINQ to XML should hopefully see it appear on the main Vista Squad site soon, although there were problems uploading the source that Vista Squad repost so there may be a delay. In the meantime, if you don't want to wait, you can view it here. Apologies (especially to Mike) for the dreadful thumbnail (ExposureRoom's 'Change Thumbnail' option seems to be broken - I'm chasing it up with them) and the poor focus/white balance for the first few minutes of Mike's talk. Things improve later and Mike manages to condense a really useful primer about LINQ to XML in the hour that the video runs for.

SILVERLIGHT UK USER GROUP

The second meeting of the Silverlight User Group UK will be taking place on the 14th August, and I'll be attempting to video the talks at that event too. The first meeting of the user group was excellent, with really good talks throughout (I think it helps a lot to have input from a large number of former Flash developers in the audience and helps newbies like myself get to hear about the negative stuff that Microsoft seem to forget to tell you about). You can see the video's from the last user group meeting on the organiser's blog here.

VIDEO HOSTING (HD AND IPHONE)

Alas, all the video hosters seem to be struggling at the bleeding edge of trying to catch community early when the technology (especially for anything which runs for more than a minute or two, or which is in an HD format) is still extremely flakey. Support for my beloved iPhone (which supports H.264 but not Flash) is almost non-existent, unless you count YouTube who have severe limits on format, length and size of compressed files that make it impractical for user group recordings (quite aside from the fact that on the iPhone you're watching video that has first been compressed/transcoded to the Flash format and then re-transcoded to H.264!) Apparently Vimeo are 'working on it' when it comes to iPhone video hosting but I've been told not to expect anything 'soon', which is just as well as the turnaround time on failures for the current offerings on sites like Vimeo seems to be in the order of weeks rather than the hours it should be. It's painful being on the bleeding edge!