On Tim Sneath's blog he has announced that "WPF/E" or Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere is now called Microsoft Silverlight. This is the typical renaming from a "code name" to a "product name" and not much more but now we know what it will be called. You can read the announcement from Tim at http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/04/15/introducing-microsoft-silverlight.aspx. The official (although not yet really functional site) is at http://www.silverlight.net/ and more information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight and the press release is at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/apr07/04-15WPFEPR.mspx.

I saw David Yack demonstrate this at the Code Camp on Saturday. It looks like it is very easy to embed rich content into web pages and also to code against that object model.

I am really curious what the big announcement that Tim alludes to in his #10 item on his blog post. Now I can hardly wait for MIX. Only 2 weeks and counting.

I really enjoyed today's Code Camp and the opportunity to speak about SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (Sql Server 2005 CE). The slides I used (yes, there were only 3 and 1 was an intro slide and the other was the sponsor slide) and the code for the demo I created from scratch can be downloaded by clicking the link below.

CodeCamp2007SQLCE.zip (501.99 KB)

I hope everyone had as much fun as I did and also had a chance to learn a lot. I would like to thank Pat Wright for arranging the Code Camp and Ben Miller for taking time out of his vacation to give us the keynote.

I just found this announcement in my e-mail. I have not heard Mr. Godin speak nor have I read his blog but it sounds like he might be a very famous person. In any case I thought I would pass this along to help Phil and just in case you know who he is and want to attend. Be sure you are aware of the catch at the bottom that the pledges for attending the dinner should be submitted by Monday (yes, 3 days from now).

He started one of the first internet companies, yoyodyne, which was acquired by Yahoo, he then became a VP at Yahoo.  He more recently started a Web2.0 company, squidoo.  He is always talking about internet marketing – he’s one of the experts on it, and he has one of the most popular blogs on the internet.

If he’s geeky enough for you, we really need to rally our Geek Community and make some small personal efforts because …. We have a HUGE opportunity to get Seth to come speak to us here in Utah!  People have tried to get him to come speak here in the past but to no avail.  Now, it will take the efforts of us all in order to bring him here on May 24^th of this year!

To get him here, we need to get 500 people willing to pay $50.00 to hear him.  Not only will you have an opportunity to hear him speak, you’ll get 5 copies of his new book, The Dip.  We are gathering pledges to pay to hear him to see if we can get 500 people to pledge (instead of gathering money up front).

If you’re interested in hearing Seth speak, there are a few things you need to do. 

·         First, pledge to pay $50.00 at http://www.pledgebank.com/SethGodinUtah

·         Next, blog about it!  We’re trying to create a blog storm about this, even a quick simple post advertising this will help a lot

·         Third, tell everyone at work or who you think will be interested about it!

·         Finally, all the details and updates are being managed at a new site, http://www.wordmob.com keep an eye on the site for details

Here’s Seth’s blog post announcing this opportunity: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/2007/03/the_dip_tour.html

There’s a big catch here, we have to have evidence of a large motivation to do this my Monday (like, in 3 days)!  We have a tentative date from Seth that he’s been kind enough to hold for us, but we have to show we’re going to be able to make it so, please, if you’re interested, stop what you’re doing and go sign up here: http://www.pledgebank.com/SethGodinUtah RIGHT NOW!  Then blog about it asap, encourage other to blog about it and talk about it all day!

This is a pure grass roots effort, it will only work if those who are interested (YOU?) take 5 minutes and actually do something about it – so please help out!

I have been running into the same problem lately with a couple of different programs. The root of the problem to me seems to be programs that are trying to figure out what I want to do and give it to me. Now, I will be one of the first to admit that I think computers should make our lives easier but when the technology starts to do something that I have specifically tried not to do then I have a problem. The specific problem that is bugging me lately is the number of programs that look at my text, see something that looks like a URL or e-mail address, and makes a hyperlink out of it. You can see the behavior by opening up Word and typing in the URL to your favorite site or this blog if you can't think of anything else and you will see it underlined and in blue text. Hovering over the new link will bring up the tool tip to prompt you to click on the link and go to the web site. Also if you type in something with an @ sign in the word (like some passwords) it treats it as an e-mail.

The program that is causing me the most heartburn at this time is Adobe Reader. I have a client that has created many PDF documents with a URL in the text. Before version 7 it treated the text as we created it in the document and it displayed it as text. In an effort to help us Adobe has decided to make the text a hyperlink. The problem is that the URL is long and wraps to a second line. The "automatic" URL doesn't take this into effect and so the "link" is broken. We have had to license a different version of the control and I will need to make the URL into a real hyperlink that included the entire URL so it isn't broken any more.

For the record, I haven't tested every reader out there but the FoxIt Reader from foxitsoftware.com doesn't add in the spurious hyperlink. Also opening the PDF in notepad will show the format of the document without the hyperlink so I am pretty sure that Adobe is the one to blame.