ChrisNTR

Twitter reference: http://twitter.com/chrisntr/status/1158701480

We finally got a site up on the tubes for Great Fridays - go check it out!

Twitter reference: http://twitter.com/chrisntr/status/1162024673 & http://twitter.com/chrisntr/status/1162055645

*chirp is a WPF Twitter app which has seem to be getting quite a bit of good press from people I follow on Twitter. However; as nice as some of the features are - it’s sadly not polished enough in terms of functionality (or doesn’t do things as well as other clients) to be able to use it as a main twitter client.

First off is the anti-ailising problem with the font. This seems to be a problem that almost all WPF/Silverlight apps suffer from. There’s a post here on how you can get back the clear-type font we’re all used to with either Air apps or Windows desktop apps but it seems that you’ll need to cut back on the features that make the app look nice such as shadows and animations.

Another is when the program is minimised - it doesn’t hide away in the System tray - it just stays in the taskbar. This is quite annoying as I have plenty of things that need to be in the taskbar and a twitter client is not one of them.

Favourites is a nice idea - similar to Groups on Tweetdeck except it will only show the latest tweet for that person. It’s not really handy for following twitter conversations or really following the people you really want to follow.

I could go on about the things on the app which I don’t like - I’m hoping it’ll will be continuously updated with little things sorted (like adding in toast for new tweets) and some extra needed functionality. If it isn’t going to be worked on any further then open the code up, put it on Codeplex or Google Code and let the community build it up.

The click-once install works really nicely although I am still confused why there’s a normal version and a .net 3.5 SP1 version - this isn’t explained on the site and both versions seem to be the same. The animations are also great which is nice to see and don’t take away from the main application too much.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes of the app if anything…

Twitter reference…

After being in Beta for a month or two, the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate 1 is out and ready to download. Scott Guthrie put together a gigantic post on the features of this release - which heavily focuses on tooling support and bug fixes. You can read that here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/01/27/asp-net-mvc-1-0-release-candidate-now-available.aspx.

After a day of people playing around with the new Release Candidate there appears there could be a slight regression on the RouteUrl/RouteLink helpers as these were changed to be relative links instead of absolute. If you are experiencing problems with this then head over to the forum: http://forums.asp.net/t/1377139.aspx and let the team know you’re experiencing this problem. This goes for any kind of bugs you’re experiencing with the Release Candidate - assuming of course you’ve read through the release documents on how to upgrade to the new release…

Enjoy the bits!

ChrisNTR

Twitter reference…

Last night I finished watching the MVC Storefront videos;

Since April 2008, Rob Conery has been putting together example videos of building a real world ASP.NET MVC app called the MVC Storefront. Through these videos there have been MVC preview updates, different design patterns explored but most importantly a great learning process of creating a MVC application. The 26th and “last” video is now up on Rob’s site here: WekeRoad. There’s an old version of the source up on Codeplex (here) however there looks to be a lot of refactoring done for a final release so it might be worth waiting for that before taking a peek at the source.

If you’re lucky enough to be heading to Mix09 in Las Vegas, Rob will be doing a session so make sure you check it out or catch it on the web after the conference.

ChrisNTR

For the past 9 months I have been working at Lightmaker Manchester. Since last Friday I am now working at Great Fridays (GFGP Limited) with the same great team from Lightmaker Manchester, with the same enthusiasm and skills from Lightmaker Manchester.

Great Fridays, despite putting together great creative and design work, will be using the latest technologies such as ASP.NET MVC to deliver outstanding work - building on our our previous knowledge of using Monorail and Flash.

At the moment we have a holding page for our website - GreatFridays.com but I’m hoping in the next few week that we can put together a little portfolio site of our work. If you want to see some of the work we’ve done so far, send over an e-mail to manchester@greatfridays.com

Chris

The guys over at Channel 9 have created the first blogging engine/content management system (CMS) based on the open source ASP.NET MVC framework. It’s named Oxite and is avaliable to download now (in a Alpha version) on the Codeplex website. The first site that’s built with it? Mix Online. Nice!

Oxite on Mix Online

Out of the box it has everything from RSS, Atom, Trackbacks, Pingbacks and it even has Live Writer support! Can’t wait to play around with the code.

Chris

This weekend I attended DDD7, a free community conference held at the Microsoft Reading Campus. I presented a short Grok talk during the lunch hour on Open Source and Microsoft. Since the event didn’t seem to have a internet connectivity, I used Dom Green’s laptop to allow me to prepare for it. After downloading Firefox on the machine, something was blocking it access to the web so I had to stick with IE8 *shudder*. To make sure all the sites were big and clear on the screens, I made sure I had put up the size of the text on the screen… only to find out that when I plugged it into the display - it automatically resized the screen resolution leaving me with horrible big web pages… for every tab I had open… anyway, enough of the excuses and on with the links.

Here’s a list of the links that I showed:

• Lightmaker: The company I work for… (Lightmaker Manchester).
• Codeplex: Microsoft’s Open Source Project Repository.
• ASP.NET on Codeplex: For out of bound ASP.NET releases (ASP.NET MVC, Dynamic Data, Dynamic Data + MVC etc).
• IronRuby: The main site for the IronRuby project.
• IronRuby Source: IronRuby source on RubyForge.
• jQuery Intellisense Support: There’s a clue in the title.
• jQuery Documentation: A great place to find out how to really utilise the power of jQuery!

I was also going to mention these sites too:

• IronPython: The main Codeplex site for IronPython.
• jQuery Form Validator Plugin: Simple but effective.
• Lightmaker Manchester Blog: Our Manchester Company Blog

It was, if you couldn’t guess, my first time speaking on geeky things at a conference and hadn’t prepared (although grok talks are meant to be unprepared…) as much as I would have liked but I hope that some people took away something from it and realise how they can help out these open source projects by contributing code or by blogging about the projects.

It was great to meet some new faces and some old ones and hope to see you all in the future.

Chris

At the recent developer gathering, Google I/O, Google announced the new Google Earth API. As many of you may be familiar with, Google Earth is a desktop application which allows you to view the Earth (and now Sky) in 3D. The Google Earth API now allows users to view and manipulate Google Earth from within their browsers (currently Windows only).

Within the API, you can place your own 3D model files created with Google’s SketchUp directly onto the Earth and you can also call KML files to use, which is Google’s own XML format, which is heavily used with the desktop version. Google have also put up some examples of what is possible using this API along with all the source code to see here: http://www.google.com/earth/plugin/examples/samples/

One great example of using this API is the “Monster Milkman” example which allows the user to drive through the earth as a milk truck. The 3D Buildings are turned on which allows you drive through places such as New York with a rather realistic view. Go have a fun drive - http://www.google.com/earth/plugin/examples/milktruck/

One problem I have had with it was driving through Everest often caused the milk truck to disappear off screen…

Over on my weblogs.asp.net blog I recently wrote a blog post on a gripe about using the LinkButton control which, when Javascript is not avaliable, will not work at all.

I also post one solution to this even though they may be a better way to handle this,

http://weblogs.asp.net/chrishardy/…./webform-gripe

I finally got round to upgrading Wordpress from whatever version I had installed before (it was pre 2.5) and it’s now on shiny 2.6! One of the main reasons for updating is the new Wordpress iPhone app which only works for blogs 2.5 and above. I’ll do a proper update soon probably mentioning what I’ve been doing since middle of Feburary.

Stay tuned,

Chris