July | 2008 | briangorbett.com

presenting at the chicago launch event

it was my pleasure to present yesterday at the chicago launch event. the crowd was energetic (even being after lunch) and the content was what i am most passionate about… building rich internet applications.

for those looking for the presentation i gave, you can find it here or sign in to view the virtual launch and download the powerpoint deck. i will be joining jeff blankenburg at tomorrow’s launch in cleveland. stop by and say hi.

it was funny that a woman in the audience approached me yesterday and asked me if my title really was “developer evangelist”. more on my feelings on that in another post.

preparing for another event tomorrow

i have just whipped up a pretty cool silverlight 2.0 sample that we will be walking through tomorrow at the next event in cleveland, oh. there were things i was really surprised with how easy they were to implement and there were things that were not. more on that tomorrow, but we will really dissect what it means for partners to start using some of the technologies that we released at mix (silverlight 2.0, ie 8, etc.).

in case you have not been paying attention to some of the exciting announcements we made at mix that we will be discussing tomorrow:

silverlight 2.0 beta 1 releases.
silverlight 1.0 for mobile announced
ie 8 beta for developers released
exciting new developments in mvc

for those that have not registered yet, i think the registration site will be up for the remainder of the evening and in the morning so go register and head over to our office.

ie 8 developer tools totally rock

in case you have been living in a box, ie 8 beta has been released and is a must-have for web developers and designers. first, it is totally rocking a standard compliant browser out of the box (or web). that means that some of the sites you may have developed prior to ie 8 may have to be reworked to be standards compliant. you will be surprised to see how many sites are not there yet (including some of our own properties). don’t worry though… ie 8 has a much needed “Emulate IE7″ button that you will find you are turning on for most of your browsing.

besides having all kinds of great new features (activities, webslices, etc.), it includes some crazy cool developer tools that soon became part of my design and development experience.

here is an example. i have been working on a cool new project (this is really what i do in my spare time… nice life… i know) modifying some already cool html, css, and xaml code. however, i wanted to make some real adjustments to not only functionality, but design. it turns out that it can get pretty complicated in design when you are dealing with hundreds of nested css tags.

well, the magic comes in when you launch the ie 8 developer tools and realize just how much power there is in using them on a site. i am not even going to get into the javascript debugging built into the tools (yah… real javascript debugging with an immediate window and all). you can read all about that here.

i was struggling with div positioning and size on the site i am working on and found just how easy it is to find where elements are and what they are set to. so i put the ie 8 developer tools to use. simply click on the developer tools icon in the upper right corner and click the arrow cursor in the developer tools toolbar and select an element in the browser window. see below all the information that is given to me, including what style was affecting the layout i needed to change. sweet!

but it gets even better. you can actually change html values right in the developer tools window and watch your site modify in real-time. that is way cool. say a width attribute in your html is 800px and it is not looking right. right within the developer tools, you can change the value and watch the width change as you make changes to the value. super sweet!

launching briangorbett.com… the dev part

i have long prided myself on being a devigner (typically i would link back to a wikipedia article, but one does not exist… anyone interested in contributing?). this is a term that is starting to come back, but has been used for a long time by others that roll as a developer and designer. my fellow msft friend, adam kinney, talks about it here as well (although the designer force is much stronger with him).

anyway, as i was working on my site, briangorbett.com (yah… no link. you are already here. click the house icon in the upper right), i learned how asp.net 3.5 has made my development much easier and the growing complexities of site design has made my life a living hell.

let me start with the development. actually, there is not much to talk about here. with asp.net 3.5, i have never plumbed a site so fast. my homepage is rotating out the last 5 blog posts i made. in the past, grabbing the rss feed and manipulating the stream was fairly tedious. with asp.net 3.5, i did it in two lines. no, i am not kidding.

heading to the mvp summit

i am pretty excited to hang out with over 1700 microsoft most valuable professionals (mvp) and regional directors (rd) from all over the world in seattle and redmond wa this week at the mvp global summit it is a pretty exciting time because we get to here first hand were we are doing great work and where we can do better. the feedback is heard by the actual product teams as well as microsoft top execs like steve balmer and ray ozzie.

if you are a mvp or rd based in the midwest then give me a holler while i am out there or follow me on twitter (which is really the only time I use twitter… out at conferences and such… i will have to post about my love-hate relationship with twitter sometime).

presenting silverlight at the web dev sig

i will be presenting all that is super cool about silverlight at the web development sig in solon, ohio this saturday. we will be discussing how developers and designers can start to take advantage of what is available in silverlight today and into the future.

the talk will include both discussion, demo, and code.

post mvp summit thoughts

i spent last week in seattle and redmond attending the 2008 mvp global summit and could not believe the quality of folks we have as mvps (pictures i took are on my main page). i spoke with people from all over the world and was excited to witness first hand the kind of excitement they have for microsoft products. i think what is even more exciting is the ability they have to really shape the way that products are being developed.

launching briangorbett.com… the design part

as promised, i wanted to follow-up on my post on developing the new briangorbett.com site with what was even more challenging… the design.

first, i believe in simplistic, clean designs and i wanted to echo this with the site launch. once i had my paper-prototype done, i figured it would be a fairly straight forward exercise. boy, was i wrong.

it turned out that the challenges i faced had to do more with the various different characteristics of the browsers and how they varied in rendering design. what is so challenging is the way the different browsers handled styles. one that challenged me was ie’s inability to use css inheritance (except for the direction and visibility properties).

the challenge was the way i wanted the last 5 feeds posted to fade in and out below my flickr slideshow. in order to achieve the fade effect and be a link, the link property has to inherit the color of the text property so that when the javascript fades the text, the link fades too. well in ie, that is not going to happen. so what i ended having to do is detect if the browser is ie (except 8) and use a standard onclick event on the entire div that redirects to the post. you can see this by browsing to the main page with firefox and hovering over the text. this is using a standard link whereas in ie, you can hover over the entire div box and not just the text.

another little trick i am using (although probably not recommended) is using the deprecated “hand” value for the cursor property in the div. the nice thing about this is that firefox and safari does not recognize this so still uses the default arrow cursor. however, ie changes the cursor to the hand (the correct cross-browser value to change the cursor to the pointer hand).

another handy trick is to use a conditional in your html to assign a custom stylesheet for a specific browser (if only this was not necessary). for instance, i am using this in the head:

boot camp update busted

i have been trying for two days to get my macbook air boot camp updated with no success. apple released the boot camp update 2.1 for windows xp and vista users (xp users need to install the boot camp update before updating to service pack 3). the problem is that the update fails miserably on my machine (and others that are feeling just as frustrated as i am trying to get this thing installed).

i have tried all ways to get this thing installed from apple’s software update that throws an error as well as downloading the vista 32-bit update directly. nothing.

if anyone knows the magic way of getting the update installed, then please enlighten me!

milwaukee heroes wanted!

next friday is the launch event for windows server 2008, sql server 2008, and visual studio 2008 in milwaukee, wi. i will be presenting the reach end-users with next generation web applications session in the developer track. i am a little more excited about this launch event then the ones that i have spoken at in chicago and cleveland since it will be my first visit to the great town of milwaukee.