OK this is just a bit of fun as I respect the work that these guys do and the information they put out there for we poor mortals.

I have been traveling around the country over the summer taking videos of my son at his various track meets.  I created a website and decided to add a video gallery using silverlight.  The intention was to provide a similer experience as provided by the BBC iPlayer.  In particular, I wanted viewers to be able to view the videos in Full Screen mode with one click.  I use a Panasonic SDR-S15 Camcorder, Sony Vegas Movie Studio to edit and Expression 3 to Encode at 1Mb/s.

Iam sure that the Vado HD and the Flip Mino HD perform really well in the environments used by both Scott and Daniel, but it really is a matter of horses for courses.

The Panasonic is a great little camera, lightweight, SDHC memory, and most importantly for me 10 x optical zoom.  When editing these videos and encoding them for the web one very quickly realises that if you do not have the desired quality on the original then you are not going to get the desired results on the end product.  If you check the Video Gallery then you will notice that the movies get better over time as I learn more.  Most importantly, use a tripod for these high zoom shots.

My next camera will definitely be HD and I will look to get better than 10 x zoom.  I am afraid that I can envisage an $1100 camera (UK prices really suck by the way) and I am absolutely certain that NBC will be paying a lot more than $1100 for the cameras that they use for Monday Night Football.

My point is, do not let Scott and Daniel talk you out of getting the camera you need.  If you need a Smith & Wesson 45, the most powerful hand camcorder ever made then make your day.

Silverlight Confusion

I was looking for a tool that would allow me to organize links to all the articles that I have read.

I would like to add notes about each of the articles to tell me what important feature or technique is being explained. The notes would also tell me where to find the projects I installed or implemented on my own development systems.

I would also like to be able to index the articles by tags and categories and order the articles, videos, or tutorials in a way that will help me learn the subject in detail without missing anything out. Maybe something like a learning tree.

So for instance in Silverlight, you may have:

Silverlight Tutorial Part 1 (of 8): Creating “Hello World” with Silverlight 2 and VS 2008 by Scott Guthrie, here.

Find on my computer here:
C:\Documents and Settings\Luddite\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\Projects\Silverlight\MSDiggSample_VB

Jesse Liberty has started Project Turing, here.

This project uses RIA Services which is currently in beta, I will want to come back to this when RIA Services has been officially released.

Brad Abrams has a series on BusinessApps for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services (and now Azure), here.

The articles are numerous and varied and some way of keeping things up to date, allowing you to replace articles that have become obsolete, or replace articles which you have found to do a better job.

Can anyone recommend a good product that would help with this.

Scot Hanselman recommends Evernote, not for this, but I was wondering if something like Evernote would fit the bill…

Scott Hanselman’s 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. This was just posted on 2009-09-02 and I heard it on Channel 9 This Week C9. I always like to see Scott Hanselman’s list of tools to hopefully make my life easier. As I was looking through the list I think I use about 70% of the tools listed. They are good applications. So I have included a link to his blog if you need a link to get there.

Link

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2009UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx

Silverlight

When I first started writing web application for .NET, I found a great article on security which told me how to create forms authentication and protect myself from sql injection attacks by using stored procedures and parameters.

Today, with Silverlight, we have some additional challenges.  The Silverlight code is now on the clients machine.  How do we protect access to webforms, passwords, or protect our database control string and stop users from reading or stealing our client code?

Most examples out there today are designed as sales pitches, everything is so easy when error handling and security is completely ignored.

I would love to write an article for you that gave you step by step best practices, but like many of you I am still at the start of this exciting journey, so this is a plea to those who are designing these technologies and evangelising their use. 

WE NEED STEP BY STEP EXAMPLES SHOWING SECURITY BEST PRACTICES FOR SILVERLIGHT.

We need examples that can be used by small development teams (1 to 5 people) who are being told by their management (who have just watched or been to one of the flashy launch events) do me a website like MGM Stargate or NBC sports or Continental Airlines, that will handle customer orders in a way that will blow Amazon away.

Resources which I had in 2002 when I started with .Net were:

Defend Your Code with Top Ten Security Tips Every Developer Must Know by Michael Howard and Keith Brown

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302370.aspx by Timothy Bollefer, Girish Chander, Jesper Johansson, Mike Kass, and Erik Olsen.

A more recent whitepaper for silverlight 2 security is available here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=7cef15a8-8ae6-48eb-9621-ee35c2547773

but it is by no means a step by step guide of all of the thing you need to do to make your applications secure.

So come on Scott Hansleman, Tim Heuer, Phil Haack, Scott Guthrie, Beth Massie, The Silvelight Developer Team, The Visual Basic Developer Team, you have been challenged to provide step by step articles and videos or point us to appropriate references.  The articles should be based around Silverlight 3 and technologies which are current today. And, of course, be available in both VB and C#.

The Startup Success Podcast

In our 10th show, we interview Scott Hanselman – master .NET programmer, noted podcaster, Microsoft Senior Program Manager and now, web startup.

In addition to interviewing Scott, Pat and I kick 2008 to the curb and offer up a few 2009 predictions, I’ve got a set of tips for getting your startup ready for the new shiny year, Pat talks about Facebook and why we decided to use a FB page as our social media hub, and we launch our Facebook Startup Success Podcast page so you can suggest/improve questions for our interviewees, recommend who we should interview and keep in the loop.

Download Show #10 here: StartupSuccess010.mp3 Or if you prefer, Subscribe to the podcast in Apple iTunes.

Please review it on iTunes we want your feedback.

We’re now storing the podcasts on Amazon S3 – that should reduce issues and decrease download time. Let us know what you think and how it sounds.

Bob Walsh is on twitter at http://twitter.com/bobwalsh or you can email him at bob.walsh@47hats.com.
Patrick Foley is on twitter at http://twitter.com/patrickfoley or you can email him at patrick.foley@microsoft.com

Show Notes:

URLs mentioned in this episode of the Startup Success Podcast.

• Scott Hanselman’s ComputerZen.com.
• Scott Hanselman’s Microsoft identity.
• Scott’s Baby Smash!.
• Scott’s Hanselminutes.
• David Allen’s long awaited new book is “Making It All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and Business of Life”.
• Our new Facebook page is up: come join the show!
• Microsoft WPF and .NET Forms site.

Scott Hanselman, un importante directivo de Microsoft, aseguró en su blog que durante el desarrollo de Chrome, Google usó parte de el código fuente de IE.

Según Hanselman Google usó una librería llamada Windows Template Library (WTL), que fué liberada por Microsoft como código abierto en el año de 2004.

Sin embargo, la polémica crece, pues Google afirma que en el desarrollo de Chrome Beta, se empezó desde cero, sin suplantar ni usar ningún código fuente ajeno al de ellos.

En todo caso, qué opinas tú, de verdad crees que Google halla hecho ésto? y si lo hubiese hecho, cambia la imagen que la compañía tiene ante tí como usuario?

If something Twitter like is ever going to make it’s way into the world’s schools in any big way, the core architecture or protocol of microblogging which today we see as Twitter, needs to be made decentralized and into an open standard.  This process would allow Twitter to move from a consumer space to an enterprise solution.   

There are many high scale school social mapping based applications that potentially will only evolve if an enterprise class microblogging standardized architecture exists.  This would create high and reliable scalibility - the potential to scale beyond just one school … a whole district at the very least and the ability to scale higher – all in realtime –  applications such as: all call announcement system, all call emergency system and many others based around staff to staff, administration to staff, admin to parent, parent to staff, student to student, student to staff etc. communications systems.

Dave Winer wrote a post yesterday about decentralization microblogging that he says was driven by Scott Hanselman post, Why is Microblogging centralized?  If you have been following Dave’s blog of late you have been reading his posts about the problems with Twitter scaling and how they are related around the centralized design of the system.  Dave’s solutions to the problem always seem to be based around RSS at the core, technology that he has mastered and been the core developer of.

I left a comment at Dave’s post that has really nothing to do with what Dave is proposing which is backing up my Twitterstream as RSS on another server somewhere or allowing my Twitter client to poll RSS feeds when Twitter is down.  The comments I left is more in context with Scott’s original post and proposal to distribute Twitter into a generalized spec for microblogging. 

Don’t get me wrong, I respect Dave and all the work his has done in RSS and I understand what he states in is post is not a full solution.  I just wish he would start thinking and pointing people beyond his RSS forest.  Yes RSS or something XML will be woven into this solution on the backend as transport language but the solution at the core is bigger then RSS alone.   

What the social tech industry needs to do right now is get past it’s amazement of Twitter and any thoughts of bolting band-aids to the present scaling non-distributed mircoblogging architecture of Twitter and to start building something open and scaliable for the opportunities that are up ahead.  

Dave went for a walk and came back with this thought “If Twitter were to go down, then the desktop client would fall back to polling the feeds. It would probably be slower, but it would work.”

Sorry Dave I don’t want Twirl probing 100+ feeds when Twitter goes down.  This is not a solution or option for me and is the reason static RSS pages sitting behind RSS  never became the achitecture and won’t be the future realtime microblogging solution.  The fact is the Twitter architecture, with all it’s problems scales by orders of magnitude over static RSS files sitting behind http servers.  The answer up ahead is to move the microblogging load off of the Twitter sphere and off of the main Twitter servers and onto a decentralized ”microblogging cloud” architecture that is deployed around the world and most importantly “owned by no one”.  That is the proposal and conversation you want to have with the young microblogging developer community.  

The present conversation really needs to go straight to the development of the Microblogging architecture.  Wasn’t that the answer with the web? ie. http, html, dns.  If the Web was designed around a Twitter like architecture we all would be serving our web pages and blogs served off Tim Berners-Lee’s server farm at CERN right now.

Someone or some group needs to start standardizing a microblogging protocol that would be supported by all present and future micro blogging clients/catchers/applications.  The investment into the future of microblogging by education is dependent on it.

I've been attending Dallas .NET User Group (DDNUG) since the beginning of the year. It's been great to be around folks with similar (mostly) interests/goals plus it's pizza and giveaways. (The "luck of the Irish" seems to be favoring me as I've come home with a book, software (VS2005 Pro w/SQL 2005 standard), or a gift card pretty much every meeting. Can't beat that!) In general, the presentations have been good, with few exceptions, and usually quite timely – thank you Chris Menegay. However, last night's talk was a absolute stand-out.

I've been keeping up with Scott Hanselman via his blog for quite some time now. He's a great writer and has a real passion for what he does. On top of which, he's always got the latest/greatest in tools and isn't afraid to tell you what he REALLY thinks about something. Since he began his podcasts, Hanselminutes, I've been able to "see" a little more of his personality and am glad to report that he's every bit as cool and fun(ny) as he appears. Unfortunately, he had to catch a plane RIGHT after the meeting so I was unable to chat with him but, hopefully, they'll have him back at some point in the future.